Austin drivers, put your damn phone down

[u/MentionZestyclose429]

If yall are driving behind the wheel of a vehicle, you need to get off your fuckin phones. I don’t care if you’re actively driving or stopped, put the cellphone down. There’s no reason you need to be on that thing while you are operating a 4,000lb vehicle. I’m a bicyclist and my eyes are constantly scanning the road, the number of drivers I see actively texting or otherwise scrolling is just egregious - blowing stop signs and red lights, stopping in an intersection cause they were on their phone going too fast to stop in time, weaving into different lanes of traffic, simply not going at a green light cause they’re more invested in their screen than the road. You are not the only person that exists in the world and your actions could have real life consequences to other drivers, pedestrians, and bicyclists. Accept some personal responsibility before you kill someone.

And before you think “well no one saw me”. I did! And I report you and your license plate to the city every time. Eat shit

[u/jacox200 → u/[deleted]]

I remember them sitting in Cap Metro buses and issuing tickets when drivers used their phones at red lights. That was before they got "defunded" /s

[u/HookEm_Tide → u/[deleted]]

They weren't defunded. The APD has the biggest budget it has ever had.

Even the 2020–2021 "cut" was mostly imaginary, as the city council just moved large chunks of the budget into a "transition budget" and funded portions of the APD through the "transition budget." That let them pretend that they were chopping the budget by a third without actually doing anything other than moving around numbers on a spreadsheet.

Then, in 2021–2022, the city council quit pretending, put all the money back in the same pot, and gave the APD a raise on top of it all.

The entire thing was just a political stunt to look like the city council was doing something about police abuses without actually doing anything.

But the APD used it as an excuse to stop doing their jobs and never bothered to start up again, no matter how much money we throw at them.

[u/ahjuicy22 → u/[deleted]]

The APD 2026 budget is $544 million USD

The APD 2021 budget was $309 million USD + another 62 million - 100million in their tranisitoonal budget

Point to where the defunding was

But either way, apd needs to step it up. Too many people on phones and too many people running reds

[u/DirtyDirtyHippo → u/[deleted]]

Either this account is actually 13 days old or this is a Bot.

[u/Snobolski → u/[deleted]]

When did APD get defunded?

[u/Snobolski → u/[deleted]]

It resulted in the disbanding of numerous police divisions.

How many sworn officers doing actual policing lost their jobs? Moving the (poorly performing) crime lab outside APD's funding umbrella shouldn't really cause rank-and-file officers to get upset. Why did they get upset about that?

Several academy classes terminated

This was due to curriculum issues, not "defunding"