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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   31951 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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The TDLR is that Austin political leadership went through a phase of attempting to imitate San Francisco, Portland, etc with the whole ‘crime is now legal’ thing, but their police department revolted and got the state government on their side, so now Austin PD is no longer under direct civilian control(of course there’s a more diplomatic phrasing) even as the Austin city council is required to continue funding them, and state police have a heavy presence in the city partly as reinforcements and partly to remind the city council that this arrangement is there to stay, regardless of local political trends.

It does sound a little authoritarian, but then again if the city isn't arresting people committing actual crimes, then something has to be done. I don't think "cut the city government out of the loop" is a good precedent, but if they're useless, I can see why it happened.

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Austin PD answers to Texas DPS, and the more typical political oversight on a local police department has been bypassed. To the extent that it’s anti democratic it’s a scene from Hungary, not Thailand- there’s very definitely a central government calling the shots, it just doesn’t happen to be the one which actually employs and commissions this police department.

Nevertheless you have to go far, far higher up to find a civilian above the APD than you would in other Texas cities. There aren’t tanks on the streets but the city council is cut out of the loop on arrest policies.

I don’t see even then why such a thing would be controversial. If you won’t arrest people committing crimes, it seems really strange to object that other people are.

To the extent that it’s anti democratic it’s a scene from Hungary

Or Canada -- relatively few cities here have their own police department; it's mostly managed either federally or provincially, but with the weird caveat that provinces and cities using the RCMP have to pay out of their own budget; same goes for cities that rely on the OPP (no, not that OPP) AFAIK.

I think the sticking point is more the arbitrary and selective nature of it. If Texas were to just abolish municipal police, hand all LE over to DPS and bill localities based on staffing and facilities levels, it might not be very popular but it wouldn't look like selectively overriding the customary autonomy of an opposition enclave.

Except that’s the normal way of doing business there and not a state of exception imposed due to either incompetence or state disagreement with their agenda, but yes, it’s definitely a precedented arrangement in the rest of the developed world.

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