Wild fire awareness hardly matters to homeless people. The homeless man, that caused many others to be homeless, left his campfire to get beer from the nearby convenience store. Do you think he’s concerned about fire awareness week? Who will be patrolling the wooded areas to make sure this doesn’t happen again? Well I hope it’s the people that live near a wooded area like the one in Oak Hill. I doubt if the fire or police dept. are out patrolling the woods looking for illegal campfires. The preparedness guide is good information, but I didn’t read anything about homeless people in the woods that are building fires.

What is the Mayor or City Council doing about this problem? Probably nothing. They’re too busy handing out tax dollars to build racetracks or tax breaks to large computer companies. Holding little meetings and dedicating a week of fire awareness won’t fix the reason this fire happened.

Sorry people. My sympathy for the homeless ends with personal property damage. Like Smokey the Bear said, “It’s up to you to prevent forest fires”, so you’d better start by hiking through the woods with a friend or two just to make sure some drunk homeless person doesn’t burn down your neighborhood. One other thing you can do, is stop giving money to homeless panhandlers at the street corner. This only perpetuates the problem. If you keep feeding them, then they stay where there is food. I did not see that in the fire awareness handbook.

Regards,

Tina Cannon
Candidate – Place 5
Austin City Council

If you as a department are not prepared to accept that things can be learned even from successful incidents then it is a very sad day for the citizens you are sworn to protect and serve.

In this instance I am disappointed at your total disregard for the loss of life and the potential loss of human life in this clearly dangerous situation created by the officers actions. That he acted inappropriately, irrationally and used unnecessary force is clear for anyone to see, but for you not to accept that highlights a serious flaw in the organisational setup.

In this instance I would expect you to have an independent review of the incident conducted by a panel from outside of your department and I would have expected you on viewing that tape to take stop gap measures to ensure that your performance improved immediately, that would include immediately removing the officer from patrol for his own and your citizens safety pending the result of that review.

On the other side of the coin you mention that an officer has recently been killed on active duty. I know nothing of those circumstances but from the dispatch that cost Cisco his life I would be very concerned indeed. Presumably you have access to intelligence, previous occurences at given addresses, criminal databases and open source material that would allow your dispatch to impart further information about the call, caller, descriptions, address, potential occupants of the address and previuos calls to that address, all critical information allowing an officer to make important decisions on how he will approach the situation. Any of this could have been relayed to the officer en route to the address. This did not happen and more worryingly the officer did not request any of it!

On arrival it is blatantly clear that the officer and the dispatch have no idea whatsoever which address is concerned. The rest is very bleak history and a shameful reflection on the whole department at a time when you clearly could do without it.

I believe the problem goes beyond this very public incident and indicates institutional problems that need addressing quickly for officer and citizen safety. You can either face up to these problems transparently as an institution and embrace any criticism and make changes, or try and bury them and wait for another to come along, You will be judged by your employers the tax payers on how well you handle this.

It’s great to see some of the history that is suggested by the names we see on buildings and street signs in Oak Hill captured in a great article like you’ve written here.