I've been stuck living in Austin for business reasons for years but I went to Westchester High back when it existed. So my residence in Austin has given me a "heads up" that we Houstonians don't otherwise have about our new Chief of Police, who suddenly left (fled) Austin and unexpectedly showed up in our city (Houston) with a huge pay demand met, with a starting salary much in excess of that any other Houston Chief has had.
It hasn't hit the Houston papers what's going on here in Austin with our fine police department here, the one which the new Houston PD now has as it's Chief, that is, Arturo "Art" Acevedo, the Cuban borne and bred Banana Republic Chief of Police.
Well look it up and you'll see that Sr. Acevedo may not have done such a bang-up job in Austin, and in fact may have departed just before the shit hit the perverbal fan. Fifteen Judges in Travis County have signed a kind of Letter to put themselves on record of their dismay that large numbers of cases have been ruined, stalled, put on hold, or otherwise done in, because of the gross mismanagement by the police department of it's "Crime Lab." I use this term mildly because huge numbers of Rape Kits and other DNA Evidence in the hands of the police department have been sitting un-processed for very long amounts of time. It looks like all these cases will in fact never be conducted. The "Crime Lab" was actually shut down some time ago for reasons still unclear. And for a very long time no one in the city bothered to have anyone else process them.
Just as this grave and most serious malfeasance is finally brought to light the Austin Police Chief, the said Banana Republic Cubano Acevedo suddenly shows up in Houston as the new Chief.
Am I surprised? How could I be?
Acevedo was trained and recruited from the Los Angeles PD, one of the most notoriously corrupt and incompetent forces anywhere. I lived in LA in the late 1980s and the early 1990s and was there when the Rampart scandal happened as well as the 1994 Rodney King riots in which the police withdrew from the streets in fear and abandoned the citizens to the mobs rampaging the city. I and other business owners like myself had to sit on the rooftops of our businesses with rifles to defend our lives and property because the police were held up in their stations out of fear. On that occasion I chose a Weatherby .240 with 60 grain bullets. The muzzle velocity clocks in at a cool 3,900 feet per second. I enjoyed the use of it frankly during the riots.
So let this be a "heads up" as to what Houston has done. Why Houston has done this I will never know. Look up this guy on Youtube and you'll see he spent most of his efforts while in Austin focusing on J-walking enforcement and other strange priorities.
I admit though I am biased. I owned a business in Austin near I-35 and before I sold it my patrons had their cars broken into on average three times a week in our parking lot. I even had cameras and got good pics of the license plates of the cars these south of the border bandits used in this spree. Not one officer would show up to take a report. Not one. No investigations and no fingerprinting of these victim cars although the perpetrators left prints galore. "We only take those reports over the phone" is what my patrons were told as they tearfully sought assistance. That's when I found out that Austin had gained the status as one of the highest property crime cities in America according to the FBI.
The city motto of Austin is "Keep Austin Weird."
Awesome.