TAG
Texans for Accountable Government

TAG, ACLU, and Community Await City Recommendations on Blood Draws

In October of 2009, Texans for Accountable Government brought a resolution before the City Council which would have put a stop to Austin’s “no-refusal” weekends and prevent Austin police officers from ever being trained as phlebotomists.  While we managed to garner the support of the Travis County, Democratic Party, Republican Party, Libertarian Party, Green Party, NAACP, LULAC and many others, we were met with much resistance from the city establishment.

At the 11^th hour our community-supported resolution was nixed and instead the council voted on a substitute resolution which merely called on the City Manager to come up with guidelines on how blood collection should occur on no-refusal weekends.  The guidelines were supposed to be presented to the Public Safety Commission by the 29^th of January however the City Bureaucracy, as usual, is behind schedule.  The findings should be presented before the Commission on Monday March 1^st at City Hall.  We’ll be there!

You can view a KVUE interview on the matter here.

The original TAG community supported resolution can be viewed here.

The resolution introduced by Councilman Spelman can be viewed here.

And the final watered down bureaucracy version can be found  here.

Tags: Acevedo, APD, blood draws, city council

TAG apologizes for Alex Jones

As is now well known, local radio “shock jock” Alex Jones crashed TAG’s protest rally at APD HQ. We have apologized to APD Chiefs Acevedo and Carter for his behavior; you can read the apology here. He did irreparable damage to this particular cause, both with his incredibly sloppy “journalism”, and his totally self serving, immature, and inciteful actions at the rally. I’ll be commenting further in the coming weeks on my own personal blog about my views on people like Alex Jones.

Public Safety Commission Meeting @ Austin City Hall

The Public Safety Commission is set to have their next meeting this coming Monday. APD Chief of Staff David Carter will be giving an update on the Fusion Center @ 4:45PM. This is an excellent opportunity to ask questions and get the facts about the Fusion Center.

When: Monday, February 1, 2010 at 4:00 pm

Where: City Hall, Boards and Commissions Room 1101 (301 West 2nd St)

Tags: Action-Item, APD, ARIC, Civil-Liberties, Fusion-Center, Privacy

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