For those of you not familiar with Texas’ weird naming conventions, DPS is Department of Public Safety and what they call the State Troopers. It’s a rather weird choice. Sounds like something from the French Revolution under the Jacobins but given their racism and love of force on non-Whites, it’s really Orwellian.
Hence, we in the area aren’t thrilled over shitty Mayor Kirk Watson (who wasn’t very great in the Nineties) asking DPS to help patrol and cover patches due to APD’s low staffing. It’s not really necessary because violent crime is down six percent for the city. It’s probably happening due to stupid NeoLiberal reasons; my guess. Either Watson is using this as a tactic to bring the Cop Union back to the negotiations over their next bloated contract or he wants to continue the idiotic sense of compromise with our shitty governor and lt. governor. The Republicans have a hardon as this will play into their fiction of Austin as a lawless, failed city on par with Beirut in the Eighties.
Watson is willfully ignorant on how badly it went when Dallas employed DPS to fill the void on its south side. In short, DPS thought stop n’ frisk was their mandate and how to earn the community’s hearts and minds, especially when they shot a person 16 times over a routine traffic stop.
Wish us luck and may it not turn into something you’ll be seeing on the news.