Elon Musk tells Austin to not be a San Francisco ‘copycat’
Tesla will be relocating its headquarters from the Bay Area to Austin, Texas at some point in the near future, and CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter to take another blow at San Francisco on his way out.
In response to a Fox News article about a special Tuesday election in Austin to restore law enforcement funding after it was cut last summer, Musk tweeted, “Austin should be his city, not a copycat in San Francisco.”
Austin should be his city, not an imitator of San Francisco
– Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 31, 2021
Interestingly, after the George Floyd protests last summer, Austin went much further than San Francisco in “police discovery”.
In August 2020, Austin City Council decided to cut $ 150 million from its $ 434 police budget in 2021 – while San Francisco cut $ 80 million over two years. San Francisco has an annual police budget of around $ 700 million, meaning SF saw a 6% annual drop in police funding while Austin saw a whopping 35% drop.
Homicides have increased year over year in both cities, with Austin seeing a much larger increase (71%, according to the Fox News article) than San Francisco (5%, according to the city’s crime dashboard). Because homicides are the least likely to go unreported, some view statistics as the best measure of a city’s rising crime rate.
In response to rising murder rates and a Texas law signed by Governor Greg Abbott punishing cities that cut police budgets, Austin City Council voted in August to bring funding back to pre-summer 2020 levels.
The special elections on Tuesday will take place on a separate voting measure called Proposition A, in which the city would have to employ two police officers per 1,000 residents and provide incentives to hire officials who speak other languages in addition to English.
