The new sex crime dashboard

Austin Police Chief Lisa Davis has announced a new data dashboard on sex crimes. This is part of an ongoing and long overdue effort by APD to be more transparent about all manner of data, including on crime and use of force.

APD has had a very bad decade when it comes to sex crimes. There was the big backlog of rape kits. There was the forensics lab that it was forced to relinquish due to incompetence. And then there were the hundreds of sex crime investigations that were inappropriately "cleared" by the department.

The dashboard is a positive development, but it's really important to keep in mind that the majority of sex crimes aren't reported. The picture presented by the dashboard not only undoubtedly understates the problem, but the demographic profile of victims and suspects may not reflect reality either. If nothing else, it's safe to assume that non-citizen rape victims are particularly unlikely to go to the police in this political environment.

Even among the cases that are reported, the clearance rate is only 23% over the past four years.

This isn't a problem that putting more patrol officers on the street is going to solve. It's an issue that will be addressed by more/better investigators, forensics and victim counselors.

Mackenzie Kelly drops budget truth bombs

Former Council Member Mackenzie Kelly has a Substack! In her most recent post she makes a point about the city budget that I've made ad nauseam for years, often in vain.

If you’ve been following the news lately, you’ve probably seen big numbers tied to the City of Austin: Hundreds of millions. Sometimes billions.

And the natural reaction is simple:

Where is all this money going, and why does it still feel like basic services are stretched thin?

That reaction is valid. But the answer is more complicated than most headlines suggest.

Because when people talk about “the Austin budget,” they are usually combining three very different funding sources and treating them as one pool of money. That misunderstanding is shaping the conversation right now, especially as Council begins discussing a potential 2026 bond election.

THANK YOU MACKENZIE!!

She goes on to explain the distinction between the general fund, the enterprise departments, and general obligation bonds.

The GF, of course, is funded by property tax and sales tax and funds the operations of core city services: police, fire, EMS, parks, libraries, and contracts with social service providers.

The enterprise departments are often functions that in many other cities are either privatized or public entities separate from city government: Austin Energy, Austin Water, the airport, Development Services, Transportation & Public Works, the golf courses, among others. They are funded by user fees, not taxes.

Bonds are voter-approved debt. They are paid back through property taxes but on a separate property tax rate than the much-discussed M&O rate that cannot rise more than 3.5% each year.

This is important because the total size of the city's budget is often portrayed as unusually large compared to other cities, when the difference is that most other city budgets don't include an electric utility, a water utility, an airport etc. The city manager himself is not above trafficking in these apples-to-oranges comparisons.

Anyway, I really appreciate this coming from Mackenzie because it would be very easy for her to embrace the misperceptions of the budget that thrive in Austin's right-wing Twittersphere.

More money from the Dells

Michael & Susan Dell gave $750 million to UT to establish the UT Dell Campus for Advanced Research and the UT Dell Medical Center, which they're calling the "first AI-native hospital" in the world.

It's interesting to see the outpouring of gratitude, particularly the remarks lauding the Dells for their "generosity."

There is nothing particularly generous about someone worth $150 billion giving 0.5% of their wealth to establish a hospital in their name. When you achieve that insane level of wealth, there's really nothing left to spend your money on except on trying to achieve immortality. One way to do this is to invest in technology that you hope will literally prevent you from dying. This has become a fixation of many of the world's ultra-rich, particularly in Silicon Valley. But the other, more conventional way, is to establish a legacy for yourself through philanthropy. This is why we have things around the country named after the Rockefellers, the Vanderbilts, the Mellons, the Carnegies.

But given that so much of the billionaire energy in America right now is taken up by openly malevolent psychopaths (Trump, Musk, Thiel etc) who bristle at the notion of doing anything that doesn't inflate their already-bloated fortunes, I guess it feels special to see one spare a few nickels for the plebs.

Anyway, the city of Austin has a lot of unmet needs and the Dells have a lot of unspent money. So I totally support every elected official sucking up to them as much as possible. A homeless shelter or two would be nice. And how about the Michael & Susan Dell Urban Trail Network?

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