This is NOT senate-candidate White talking:
Houston’s largest police union, citing the death of six officers during Mayor Bill White’s tenure, called on the mayor and City Council this week to hire more officers, restore $14 million in overtime pay and overturn the long-standing policy of not questioning residents about their immigration status.
In a letter to White, Gary Blankinship, president of the Houston Police Officers Union, called last week’s slaying of veteran officer Henry Canales a “trifeca failure” of federal, state and city government to protect citizens and police officers from criminal illegal immigrants.
White responded with a news conference Thursday to make clear there would be no change in the department’s policy on illegal immigrants.
Adding four new cadet classes as the union wants would cost the city $20 million, requiring an increase in property taxes or a wide-ranging curtailment of city services that also would require laying off 500 civilian employees, White said.
Or, he said, the union could fund the cadet classes by voting to reduce their own pay by $4,000 an officer.
That is Mayor White speaking. First, he says there will be no change to Houston’s sanctuary policy. You’ll recall a few months back, senate-candidate White attempted to talk tough on illegal immigration, laughably saying that he was making it “a cause.” Right. He said he would no longer “tolerate some of the excuses that we’ve heard about lack of resources.” Which is exactly what MayorWhiteChiefHurtt have done for the past several years.
Second, he presents false choices to the HPOU and local Houstonians: the only way to get more staffing is to increase property taxes, curtail city services, or rank and file police officers could take a pay cut to pay for new police officers.
Hogwash. The city just gave $11 million to the Houston Arts Alliance, an agency that has proven it cannot manage the taxpayer dollars it is given. There’s half the money right there. It would probably take our commenters a few nano-seconds to come up with other frivolous budget items that could be cut to fund the cadet classes AND overtime. How about getting METRO to fork over the money it still owes the city of Houston? That would fund the programs, and the city would still have money left over.
As Kevin Whited noted a couple of posts down, dealing with staffing issues will be the next mayor’s problem, when MayorWhiteChiefHurtt are long gone.
