I haven’t seen the most recent edition, but I hear Taylor got a mention on last night’s PD Live! It seems every time the show visits Williamson County, Taylor is somehow featured.
It doesn’t show Taylor in its best light — none of the towns that regularly appear in the show are — but it paints an inaccurate picture of how well Williamson County deputies cover East WilCo.
It’s also a bit disingenuous.
The way the teevee show tells it, WilCo patrol deputies are in Taylor every night, chasing drug dealers and car thieves.
They aren’t. Absent a disaster of some sort, or riding in an armored SWAT vehicle in support of a drug bust, they’re only here when the cameras roll.
And, when they roll, Taylor looks bad.
Look, Taylor doesn’t need help to look crime-ridden. In just this last year, we’ve made the news because stupid people trafficked in XTC-laced kids meals and stupid teenagers plotted terror in the school cafeteria.
But this seems like piling on.
Taylor has come a long way from its history of poor schools and racial strife. Yes, a great deal of work remains but this town is popping and we don’t need our momentum dogged by exaggerated depictions of low-level crime.
What you see on PD Live is not reflective of Taylor. It’s not really representative of Williamson County.
I get it. Low-level crime has entertainment value. Truth is, stupid criminals make good copy, a fact newspapers have exploited for as long as newspapers have been printed. Reporters in every newsroom I’ve ever run have chortled over the antics of local low-lifes, and we tell those stories in gleeful detail.
It’s little wonder there’s a cable television show devoted to the topic, and that it has decent enough ratings to stay afloat. After all, the same network that airs PD Live! devotes hours of programing to people fighting over the contents of abandoned storage units.
The truth is, I understand why sheriff’s deputies don’t patrol East WilCo more frequently. Williamson County covers 1,100 square miles and the part of it west of SH 130 is much more heavily populated than we are. They just don’t have the resources to give us much more than a lick and a promise.
That said, it’d be one thing if we saw WilCo patrol cruisers on our county roads every day … but why — oh, why — do deputies race to Taylor when the cameras come out? The population centers of the county are in Round Rock, Georgetown, Leander, Cedar Park and Liberty Hill. Hell, judging by social media, Hutto is a target rich environment worthy of several episodes.
You’d think supporting those police departments would keep them busy but, evidently not, not when PD Live is in town.
Frankly, that show is a venue for show boating, publicity-hungry law enforcement agencies. It ekes out every drop of entertainment value there is in a call for service report. It caters to a certain type of agency which, by every other metric, could very well be doing a great job but, exposes dark and unseemly aspects by the very notoriety it seeks.
Our sheriff ought to think about the damage this show does to our communities and re-consider this project. It’s not a good look — for him or for us.
The Ragged Edge 
I completely agree with your perspective about Williamson County sheriffs participating with the television show “PD live.” I’m not sure why the Taylor Police Department doesn’t try to discourage that behavior. It seems like Williamson County sheriffs are exhibiting very unprofessional behavior when they take advantage of drivers who have no choice but to participate. I wonder who watches that nonsense, anyway?
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I would find it hard to believe that our local PD is happy with this. Talk to @russboles, your county commissioner. That’s where the authority for this lies.
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Just remember this when elections come around.
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I completely agree with you take on this exploitation of Taylor & its’ residents. I further assert that there appears to be a particular racial group that seems to be the target of the stops…this absolutely bothers me to my core. If my light for my back license plate was out & I had passengers in my vehicle, I seriously doubt that IF I was pulled over that all of the passengers in my car would have to show ID as well. I think the entire thing in a shameful ego trip.
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