Something is. Police Chief Art Acevedo is having to make statements a lot lately. He's firing folks and disciplining people and coming up with new ways that the citizenry can complain about how they were treated by an officer. Which is great, if that's what we need to do to clean some stuff up, but I think they should let us know what all they think is wrong over there.
In the past few months we've had a police officer in trouble for picking up a hooker, one fired for shooting a suspect. In the back. Twice. Today I read some officer is fired for some sort of vague lesbian comment.
I want to see crime statistics for the past six months. Up or down? The incidence of the S.W.A.T. being deployed in this town is certainly up over last year.
I'm beginning to wonder if the job is too much for Acevedo or is the Austin Police Department just in that big a mess that we are only just now finding out about it?
I think it's the latter. I mean, the APD got (or is still getting?) investigated by the DOJ upon the request of the NAACP after all of those potentially racially-motivated incidents by APD cops. Apparently it's very hard to request and successfully get the DOJ to investigate a police dept, so clearly some bad stuff was going down for the DOJ to take it seriously.
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I think he's still cleaning up from the Stan Knee years. Think about all the officer-involved shootings in the last few years, the pepper spraying the entire crowd at Mardi Gras the instant the bars closed for not leaving fast enough... It got to where I knew neighbors who wouldn't call the police when crimes were happening for fear of winding up injured or dead. (I live east of I-35, but it's hardly the ghetto. Nor is it getting gentrified. Yet.)