The Austin, Texas Police Department is on the verge of a staffing collapse after 40 officers file retirement papers one week amid a contract dispute with the city council.
Austin Retired Officers Association President Dennis Farris warned the department is in "dire straits" on "Fox & Friends First" Monday as 150 officers reach out to the retirement board.
"It's not only about the money. It's about the respect and the lack of respect they're getting from this city council, less one council member," Farris said.
Austin police officers past and present warned Fox News Digital that the Texas capital's police force is critically depleted as a result of defunding in 2020 and the current breakdown between the city and the police on a new contract. The city council voted a few weeks ago to scrap a four-year contract that the city had previously agreed to in principle and instead pursue a one-year contract that the police union's board has rejected.
That move is believed by many to be due to intense pressure from anti-police activists in the city who look to hold off a long term deal until after voters decide on competing ballot initiatives dealing with "police oversight" that go before voters in May.
"The police department really is in dire straits," Farris warned of the staffing shortage. "There are shifts that are going out every day understaffed, sometimes just one officer and a sergeant, and sometimes just the sergeant showing up. So there are huge sections of the city that are going unpoliced on a regular basis."
Farris added that the city is "emboldening criminals" by refusing to support the police department.
"When your political leaders in the city don't support the police department, the criminals understand that. And they figure, well, if the city is not going to back them, we can do what we want."
According to Farris, 310 officers in the Austin Police Department are eligible to retire and of the officers that have put in their paperwork, six are high-ranking.
"I fear we're going to see a mass exodus of the senior people with longevity to where you're going to have a department where maybe the average service time was in the high teens now and I think it's going to drop into the low teens," Farris told Fox News Digital, explaining that departments without strong senior leadership often experience more problems due to "inexperience."
Farris said that two waves of retirements – officers who have already filed and officers who will file when the contract officially expires at the end of March – could result in as many as 100 vacancies.
"Both sides have to want to go to the table and negotiate, and the Police Association's view on this is they have a contract that needs to be voted on. It was a contract agreed to by the city's negotiators and the bargaining team from the Police Association. It's out there and they either need to vote it up or vote it down before they can go and do anything else," Farris said.
Fox News' Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.
