Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Tuesday on Fox News that cities that defund the police will face financial consequences.
Fox News host Harris Faulkner mentioned that Democrat-run Austin, Texas, had dramatically reduced police funding in August 2020. Police took 16 minutes to respond to a shooting there Sunday morning, and the president of the Austin Police Association said that no units were available to respond to the call until 12 minutes after it was made.
Abbott responded by pointing to a rise in crime and violence in cities that have cut their police budgets, like Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, Chicago and New York. (RELATED: Texas Passes Legislation To Punish Protesters Who Block Roads, Shine Lasers At Cops)
“I’m about to sign a law that will ensure that cities in the state of Texas will not be able to defund the police,” he said. “First, the context: and that is that you pointed out, what’s going on in Minneapolis, where it is both a tragedy and a disaster. What’s going on for the residents of Minneapolis because of the defunded police and you’ve seen the same thing in Portland and Seattle and Chicago and New York, etc.”
Abbott said that the same thing that has happened in other cities has happened in Austin, and he wants to make sure no other Texas cities would follow in the same path. (RELATED: Police Departments Say Budget Cuts Are The Reason They’ve Been Unable To Hire New Officers)
“One, we wanted to make sure that there were going to be consequences for the city of Austin,” Abbott continued. “The second is we wanted to make sure that no other city in the state of Texas would defund police.”
In May, the Texas state House of Representatives voted to advance a bill that would punish Texas cities with a population of over 250,000 if they defunded the police. The bill would allow the government to allocate the city’s sales tax money to the Texas Department of Public Safety and ban the cities from increasing property tax rates if they defunded the police.