AUSTIN, Texas — Monday, June 12, marks two years since a mass shooting in Downtown Austin that killed one person and injured more than a dozen others.
After the shooting, the previous Austin City Council approved a resolution to enact the "Safer Sixth Street" initiative. Council members have since approved adding more cameras and lighting in the area, as well as a staging area for first responders on Sixth Street.
Councilmember Mackenzie Kelly (District 6) said there are still many more improvements that the City can make.
"This is a complex issue related to not just the Sixth Street area. I think it is a larger question of what the police department currently has as far as their ability to put people down there to keep it safe," Kelly said.
She said she's brought forward a couple of resolutions, trying to push for faster change.
"One of the initiatives that I attempted to bring forward was to reinstate a focused downtown entertainment district juvenile curfew," Kelly said. "That did not move forward with any acceptance from my council members. We don't have data from the police department showing that that would help ease some of the crime, but I do know, anecdotally, from some of these incidents that juveniles with guns have been involved in a lot of the activity that's happened down there."
Kelly said diversifying businesses on Sixth Street would also help.
"One of the ideas was to create a Sixth Street where there was more of a mixed use, and it wasn't just places somebody would go to barhop," she said. "We know that with intoxication comes stupid activities, and decreasing the amount of bars on Sixth Street might have the ability to decrease some of the crime down there."
But while the city council works to revamp Sixth Street, Austin-Travis County EMS (ATCEMS) is making sure its medics are prepared if another tragedy strikes.
KVUE caught up with ATCEMS Commander Craig Smith, who remembers the day of the shooting. He said that when over a dozen people were injured, medics struggled to get onto Sixth Street.
When the time came to get the victims help, there were multiple barriers the medics had to overcome, including high foot traffic and car traffic that made it difficult to get ambulances in.
In light of that, every Friday and Saturday night, there is now a rescue task force on Sixth Street. It is staffed by police, fire crews and EMS medics.
"We're already on the inside," Smith said. "We're in the downtown corridor. We're often in on a Polaris. So we have easy access. We can drive on curbs, drive through grass and things like that, where we might not be able to in an ambulance. And so we can access these patients very quickly."
One other thing Smith said ATCEMS is pushing is its "Stop The Bleed" course, which teaches bar owners, workers and business owners how to apply direct pressure and hemorrhage control.
"They're going to be the first ones there [in the event of an emergency]," Smith said. "And the more people we train, the more officers we train to provide that lifesaving intervention and the better just better for everyone else."