The billboard demonstrates how dishonest and dirty the police unions are along with their Fascist/GOP allies. Firstly, Austin cut APD’s budget slightly; many felt it wasn’t even a drop in the bucket. Secondly, Austin was the only city that successfully did this without the cops having the means to push things back their way. My adopted home needs affordable housing and social services like every other metro area and police forces are just sucking us all dry for military-level crap they don’t need. Lastly, compared to other cities of Austin’s size, our crime level is pretty tame. I lived in Milwaukee back in the late Eighties until 1991, it was around the same size and there was a murder every 36 hours ± Jeffrey Dahmer. In Milwaukee’s defense, 90 percent of them were in a section plagued by poverty, poor infrastructure and underfunded schools. Guess who lived there? Certainly not MAGAts (pronounced maggots) but those voters screamed and bitched about how their tax money was wasted on those urban people who just arrived from Chicago; code for Black people.
Meanwhile, our shitbag governor is demanding the state legislature to pass a tailored law putting APD under Public Safety’s jurisdiction (what Texas calls the State Troopers), hence more directly under his control. It’s pretty sad too. Lincoln and his forces won the Civil War only to lose the long-term fight to Neo-Confederate traitors who think corporate feudalism is the future with a racist police force to protect their shit. Then again, these infuriating, outright lies on billboards in Texas are nothing new. For eight years, there were a couple up in North Reaganstan (it’s the stretch of Texas between Austin and Dallas) with pictures of Obama saying…Where’s the birth certificate? and $16 Trillion isn’t so sweet. Demonstrations of the Deep South’s entrenched racism stubbornly holding on.
Let us hope 2020 is the year America turns the corner at last.
