“If you look across the United States, the public safety threat is not on the border. The public safety threat is on the streets of our cities.”

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US politicians are wasting time and money seeking funding for a border wall that could be better spent assisting law enforcement in big cities, a Texas police chief said Wednesday. Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo spoke to reporters about combating gang and gun violence on Wednesday, following the murder of 7-year-old Jazmine Barnes last week. He challenged state and federal lawmakers to stop the "political theater" about a nonexistent border crisis and instead focus efforts on fighting crime where it is actually happening in the US. The comments put the police chief of America's fourth-largest city in direct opposition to the White House, which on Wednesday released an ominous video insisting that the "crisis on the border is real." "If you look across the United States, the public safety threat is not on the border. The public safety threat is on the streets of our cities," Acevedo said. The chief, who also leads the Major Cities Chiefs Police Association, responded specifically to a tweet by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott calling out Barnes' alleged killing by a gang member. Abbott's tweet called for expanding the Texas Anti-Gang Task Force in Houston "to clean our streets of this trash and restore safety."

Acevedo said he would welcome additional state money to put more officers on the streets. But he also panned Abbott's decision to spend almost a billion dollars of state money on a "border surge" — money that Acevedo claimed has not helped reduce crime in the state. "The evidence and intelligence and data will show us that all the money that’s being spent on the border by the state of Texas, while it’s great for primary politics, it's money that belongs in the big cities so we can combat violent crime," he said. "Had you taken that money and given it to big cities across the state and our partners in rural areas, we would have had a much better result in terms of public safety." Acevedo called on lawmakers to expand gun background checks and create a system to keep firearms from domestic abusers and people whose mental illness could pose a danger to others. "That’s the kind of stuff that’s going to have tremendous impact," he said.

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