Not 25 miles south of where I’m sitting, this nonsense happened:
Texas Governor Greg Abbott is sending state police resources to the City of Dallas in response to a spike in violent crime. The governor responded to a request for assistance from the Dallas Police Department after city leaders cut the police overtime budget by $7 million.
So the “city leaders” cut the police budget and then discovered that the resulting resources were inadequate for the task (Bullshit Item #1, like they couldn’t have seen that coming), and then (Bullshit Item #2) the TexGov bails them out of their stupidity instead of letting them stew in the soup of their own making?
I should point out, by the way, that like Houston, Austin and San Antonio, the “city leaders” of Dallas are irredeemably Democrat, ergo in thrall to the BLM pustule that has infected big cities anywhere.
Abbott should have told them to go pound sand, and sent in the Texas State Guard when the thing got really nasty.
Living way closer to ground zero than you, I welcome this. He’ll send in the guard soon enough. I give him props for not letting things get out of hand and spiral downward.
Dallas is a bit different. In this case the mayor was against this cut. I heard him on the radio prior to this and he sounded like he had his priorities right. He sounded remarkably lucid for a Democrat.
That 7m, from what I gather, was overtime budget, which he said they needed because they are short manpower. Like other cities, they have a huge unfunded police retirement issue. And like other cities, they appear to have a useless woman as police chief. They can’t fill the open slots they’ve had since way before this silliness.
Their biggest problem would be the well funded, well run departments surrounding the city. So they have a recruitment issue. Why deal with dindus and goblins when you can make more money in a better environment close by?
I chatted with a few DPD cops at a “back the blue” event. Seemed like great people. I had a few comments about broken windows policing which they replied it would be good to do these things if they had The manpower.
Watched them at a SWAT competition a few years ago. If I ever get taken hostage, those are the guys, I want rescuing me. I do hope that they weren’t a victim of the budget cuts.
And I, on the other hand, hope they and all SWAT teams lost their budgets as well as their 1033 programs.
What Bill sez.
I’m sure the Gov is looking at a possible re-election run, and it would do no good if he denied Big-D assistance. However, I seem to recall (but being 79 now I may have been hallucinating – and corrections are always in order) that your Gov. threatened to fund such requests out of other funds ear-marked for the affected cities. That would be a reasonable manner in which to attempt to impose some financial responsibility on mayors and councils that can’t think beyond the tip of their noses.