Chief: Crime rising in downtown Austin

Violent crime in the last 10 months has risen by 18% in downtown Austin, and property crime by 15%, compared with the same period last year, Austin Police Chief Brian Manley said Tuesday during an Austin City Council work session.

"We have crime around our city and in our downtown, as we've had in years past and as all major cities have," Manley said. "I don't believe the crime has reached a crisis level, but I think we have public order issues."

Manley shared the data while council members were discussing homelessness, but he stressed that he had no information on whether people who are homeless played any role in the change. 

"We're working to pull together the data on actual hard crime — such as aggravated assaults, robberies — that involve members of our homeless community, either as victim or as suspect," Manley told council members Tuesday. "And then (we want) to compare that to a similar period in time last year to look for any changes."

The council largely rescinded the city's camping ban in June, increasing the presence of tent encampments across the city and the visibility of people experiencing homelessness in the streets. Manley said Tuesday that people have told him they feel less safe in downtown Austin, in part because they are seeing and are interacting with people who are homeless more often than they had before.

But Mayor Steve Adler said Tuesday the amendments to the city's camping and obstruction ordinances have had the opposite effect for some in the homeless community. He said about a dozen women who are homeless have approached him and told him that they feel safer in downtown Austin than they did in wooded areas or creeks.

"They have come to me and asked me to thank the city for taking them out of that place and allowing them to be in an area where they're more visible and are more surrounded by people," Adler said.

It was unclear Wednesday when police began noticing the increase in crime in the downtown area. Austin police officials said they did not have a month-by-month breakdown of downtown crime statistics available. 

Several shootings (not involving people who are homeless) happened in downtown Austin over the summer, and Manley decided in July to increase patrols in that district. Reginald Isaiah Thomas, 26, is accused of chasing a group of women July 21 and shooting one of them on Seventh Street, his arrest affidavit says. The woman was hospitalized with injuries that were not life-threatening.

Meanwhile, Austin property crime detectives are working to catch seemingly sophisticated burglars in at least 22burglaries at several high-end downtown and South Austin apartments since July.

Violent crime dipped throughout Austin in 2018, after two years of increases in 2016 and 2017. Austin police officials credited that decrease, in part, to their violent crimes and aggravated assault task forces, which were launched in 2018.