A woman in Austin, Texas, told Fox News that she was left stranded after a February, 2022 car accident despite her children being "visibly injured" and the car "totaled." "I called 911. I was routed to 311… they threw me back to 911, and I was just kind of in a roundabout circle of going back and forth, back and forth for about an hour," she told the network.
After police budgets were slashed around the country following the killing of 46-year-old George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer in Minneapolis and the subsequent "Black Lives Matter" protests, Austin went from being one of the top cities to live in in the US to one of the worst and least safest.
According to Fox, the year after its police department was defunded by $150 million, they had their highest murder rate in recorded history, aggravated assaults were up 18%, car thefts were up 77%, and their response times to emergencies up to 10 minutes.
Some local politicians predicted that cutting police budgets would end up hurting the state. Gov. Greg Abbott, for one, said it would put Austin law enforcement and their families at a higher risk, while others celebrated the ruling.
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar, D-Texas tweeted "We did it!" and claimed that thousands of people supported the budget cut. Now, Austin is on the receiving end of repercussions from that order.
The Fox report quoted Joe Gamaldi, vice president of the National Fraternal Order of Police, as saying that, "Austin lawmakers' 'defund the police' movement has been an 'unmitigated disaster.'" Gamaldi pointed out that it's not Austin isn't the only place in America that's failed to come up with an adequate response to the police cuts and that applications for the police department in New Jersey are down 90%, while Illinois has seen a 80% reduction.
"You know where they're not having recruiting problems? Where you have communities that actually support police officers that don't treat their officers like crap, who actually treat them fairly," he said.
