Major US City Votes To Defund Police Department, Use the Funds for Increased Abortion Access
Efforts to defund the police have reached a new low as the city of Austin, Texas, has decided to cut $150 million from its police department’s budget.
As if that decision weren’t foolish enough, part of that money will end up going to “abortion access programs” instead, according to The Texas Tribune.
For starters, the decision to defund the police makes no sense as Texas’ capital city, like many other major cities, is in the midst of a crime wave. In Austin, homicides are up 64 percent compared with 2019.
Greg Abbott, Texas’ Republican governor, issued a statement condemning the Austin City Council’s insane decision.
“Some cities are more focused on political agendas than public safety,” he said. “Public safety is job one, and Austin has abandoned that duty.”
Abbott promised that “the Texas Department of Public Safety will stand in the gap to protect our city.”
Defunding law enforcement is not the answer. pic.twitter.com/nwxtUTmpF8
— Greg Abbott (@GregAbbott_TX) August 14, 2020
Nothing reinforces Abbott’s point that Austin is “more focused on political agendas than public safety” than the city council’s decision to redirect funding from three planned police cadet classes to “abortion access programs.”
By itself, the move to defund police will cost numerous lives. Now, the city council has made it clear that it is willing to bankroll the taking of even more innocent lives.
The drive to defund the police was conceived amid a movement in which some Americans said it was time to stress that minority lives matter. Yet the decision to combine the defunding of the police with increased funding for abortion access proves that the city of Austin cares very little about minority lives.
After all, as Dr. Alveda King, the niece of civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., explained in 2018: “More African-Americans have died from abortion than from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease — combined. In America today, a black child is three times more likely to be killed in the womb than a white child.”
The Austin City Council is far from the only group of liberals to demonstrate a disturbing degree of tone-deafness in an attempt to virtue-signal about the value of minority lives.
Earlier this year, the abortion giant Planned Parenthood said that it was “outraged by violence against black lives,” showing an obvious lack of self-awareness.
As King wrote, “Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by more than 25 percent.”
If Planned Parenthood really cared about stopping the “violence against black lives,” it would be disturbed by the fact that 79 percent of its abortion facilities are within walking distance of minority communities.
The Austin City Council’s move to defund the police comes in the middle of a global pandemic.
Mary Beth Castle, the policy adviser for the socially conservative group Texas Values, argued the rush to use taxpayer dollars to bankroll the abortion industry raises questions about the city’s sincerity regarding saving lives during the pandemic.
“While the Austin City Council has taken drastic measures in order to allegedly save lives during the pandemic, Austin City Council has made sure that even more lives will be taken with their significant increase in abortion funding,” Castle told The Texas Tribune.
The embrace of increased taxpayer funding for abortions is not the only example of degeneracy to come out of Austin.
Last year, a school district there implemented a radical sex education program. The curriculum begins for students in third grade.
If Austin really wants to demonstrate support for minority lives, it should follow the lead of East Mountain, Texas, which has declared itself a “sanctuary city for the unborn.”
Considering the fact that nearly two-thirds of the residents of Travis County, which contains Austin, voted in favor of pro-abortion presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in 2016, it seems unlikely that city leadership will feel any pressure to make such a move.
A strong rebuke at the ballot box may be the only way the governments of Austin and other liberal major cities will get the message that average Americans do not want to defund the police.
At the next available opportunity, Americans of all political persuasions must throw the politicians who refuse to keep them safe out of office and replace them with people who will.
People ultimately get the government they deserve.
Unless the residents of major cities send a strong message that enough is enough, expect many more liberal cities to follow Austin’s lead by defunding the police while increasing funding for abortion access.
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