Broken at every level: CCA needs new leadership

"The criminal justice system in Texas is broken at almost every level," the Houston Chronicle declared in its endorsement of Tom Price in his bid to unseat Texas Court of Criminal Appeals Chief Justice Sharon Keller in next week's GOP primary. Opined the Chronicle:

The incumbent, Presiding Judge Sharon Keller, has belatedly recognized that many indigent defendants in Texas don't get a fair shake. However, for years she has maintained that it is not the job of the courts to free innocent defendants from prison. The opinions she has written and joined have overlooked sleeping lawyers, constitutional ineligibility for the death penalty, police misconduct and evidence of innocence in order to keep defendants in prison.

That's not only all true, it actually understates how bad the CCA has been under Keller's reign. That's why Texas Monthly rightly named the CCA "Texas' worst court." (The Chronicle also endorsed state Rep. Terry Keel, R-Austin, in his bid for a seat on Texas' highest criminal tribunal.)

See the Austin Statesman's coverage of the race for more.

Students voting to make UT-Austin SAFER

UPDATE: Congrats to SAFER Texas on their election victory.

UT-Austin students today get a chance to vote in a plebiscite initiated by SAFER-Texas asking them to answer the following yes/no question:

“Should the university-imposed penalties for the use and possession of marijuana be no greater than the penalties currently imposed for the use and possession of alcohol on campus?”

The referendum is non-binding, but has already received much attention, including front page coverage in the Dallas Morning News. Lindsay at Majikthise wrote yesterday the drug policy reform movement should start small, aiming efforts and school boards and other local jurisdictions.This campaign fits that bill precisely. According to SAFER-Texas' press release issued this morning:

Students who support the referendum are encouraging the university to reduce sanctions for the use of marijuana so that students are not driven to drink. In December, the life of UT freshman Phanta "Jack" Phoummarath was lost to alcohol poisoning. Earlier this month in mid-morning, a UT student was found unconscious on campus and Austin-Travis County Emergency Medical Services had to transport the student to the emergency room for treatment for alcohol poisoning.

"How many alcohol-related tragedies must occur on this campus before our university acknowledges that marijuana is less harmful than alcohol?,” asked Judie Niskala, UT Campus Coordinator for SAFER Texas. “We have received very positive feedback about our efforts from students on campus. These students understand the obvious truth – marijuana is simply less harmful than alcohol. They believe, as we do, that it is irrational to punish people more harshly for choosing to use a less harmful substance."

"We are optimistic that a strong majority of students will urge the administration to reduce university penalties for marijuana use and possession," continued Ms. Niskala. "Once they do, we hope university officials will demonstrate courage and commonsense and reform UT’s marijuana policies."

UT treats students who use marijuana more harshly than it treats students who use alcohol, even though marijuana is less harmful. UT is more likely to suspend a student for marijuana than alcohol, and punishes students for adult marijuana use at home unlike alcohol.

The UT Austin effort is part of a national public education effort initiated by a group called Safer Alternative for Enjoyable Recreation (SAFER). The SAFER campaign was originally launched January 2005 on the campuses of University of Colorado - Boulder and Colorado State University. Just four months earlier, two students -- Colorado State University sophomore Samantha Spady and University of Colorado freshman Lynn Bailey -- had died on these campuses from alcohol poisoning. SAFER argued that students should not be punished more harshly for using marijuana -- a drug that has never caused an overdose death - than for using a more dangerous drug, alcohol.

I think Lindsay's right that this is a good approach. Since it's non-binding, it's more public ed than substantive change, but the SAFER-Texas referendum makes an important statement about the real dangers from substance abuse, while building base among youth and opinion leaders who might support future reforms. If you're a UT Austin student, vote today for the SAFER-Texas initiative.

'Byrne Grant Substitute' task force from DEA makes Lubbock busts

A Grits commenter who's a retired DEA agent pointed out that a DEA task force in Lubbock has picked up where the now-defunct Byrne-grant funded one left off - indictments for 33 alleged members of a crack distribution ring were executed this week and most of the defendants rounded up. The commenter called the DEA task force a "Byrne Grant Substitute" and predicted other TX jurisdictions may team up with the feds after the Byrne money stops flowing next month.

Most of the pictures from the sting, as in Tulia, are of unkempt black people in their bedclothes being paraded before various local media like the subjects of a Communist show trial. That's ironic since the big news in Lubbock recently was an uptick in violent crime due to white supremacist gangs - they're allegedly involved in drugs, too, but as happened up the road in Tulia, the DEA task force obviously targeted a different part of town. According to a press release from the US Attorney, most of the defendants in the DEA sting could face life sentences.

Apparently these task forces are DEA-led but have local staffing, much like Byrne task forces that had DPS-affiliated commanders. I have to wonder which agencies participated - if mulitiple counties were involved, under state law I thought those officers are supposed to be under the command and control of the Texas Department of Public Safety, not DEA.

From what I understand, such DEA task forces have the same problems as the Tulia-style task forces that are nearly defunct in Texas, including a lack of accountability (from too many agencies with conflicting chains of command) and a focus on low-level street dealers instead of bigger fish. That's because local agencies who contribute staffing to DEA task forces pressure the feds to focus on small-time dealers locally instead of the big guys you usually think of DEA going after. That pressure will likely increase as Byrne grant money for drug task forces dries up. This'll be an important development to watch.

Cut and paste appeals for death row defendants

Chuck Lindell at the Austin Statesman reports ("Death row inmates share identical appeals," Feb. 26) on another black-eye incident for Texas' defense counsel and our system of indigent representation - one I think looks about as bad as the notorious "sleeping lawyer" case. Two death row inmates had nearly identical (and quite minimalist) appellate briefs filed on their behalf 1-1/2 years apart by a Houston lawyer, Leslie Ribnik, who also missed routine filing deadlines that will speed up one client's execution date. Ribnik's briefs were "word-for-word identical, right down to a capitalization error on page 17," Lindell reported, and avoided common death penalty appellate arguments to focus on one narrow claim.

For my attorney friends, how common is this? Are we living in the era of cut and paste lawyering?

Answering Harold Hurtt

Houston Police Chief Harold Hurtt asked, if you aren't doing anything wrong, why worry about cameras surveilling you in your apartment or home? Security and privacy expert Bruce Schneier put the question to his readers and was rewarded with many thoughtful and clever suggestions. And there's been lots more discussion throughout the blogosphere.

The answer from my original post on Chief Hurtt's outlandish proposal was quoted this week by Mike Snyder in the Houston Chronicle: "Uh, because you respect the Constitution and personal liberty, maybe? The KGB used that same line in Communist Russia, one recalls, on their way to filling up a system of gulags."

Drug War Notes from Underground

In Central Turkey on the southen end of Cappadocia, Kathy and I visited several years ago a region where people once lived in amazing underground cities - the one we toured went seven stories deep, complete with fireplaces and ventilation shafts. The people mostly lived above ground but could flee below indefinitely in case of attack. That appears to be the strategy of a pot grower in Tennesee (see more photos) who constructed this underground growing facility in a cave adjacent to his house, complete with outdoor escape hatch. When you see this and think of the impressive cross-border drug tunnel discovered recently near Tijuana, it makes you wonder how much of America's drug trade has been driven literally underground. Via CrimProf Blog, which declares the technology in the pictured facility to have a "batman-villain" quality.

Austin has highest paid cops in nation

Via Officer.com, Austin, Texas has the highest paid police force in the country when compared to the cost of living, according to PolicePay.net. Plano, Lubbock, Corpus Christi and Dallas also made the top twenty. (Wanna bet that makes them the highest paid cops in the world?) Here are the wage scales for police in various Texas cities:

Abilene
Amarillo
Arlington
Austin
Beaumont
Brownsville
Corpus Christi
Dallas
El Paso
Fort Worth
Garland
Grand Prairie
Houston
Irving
Laredo
Lubbock
Mesquite
Pasadena
Plano
San Antonio
Waco

US Border Enforcement: From Horseback to High Tech

Deborah Meyers of the Migration Policy Institute has published a fine little essay on the history of the US Border Patrol, whose growth has skyrocketed over the last 30 years. Her historical perspective affords a refreshing alternative to the usual heated rhetoric on the topic. For example, I think it's easy to forget that there was no formal immigration enforcement on the Mexican border before 1904, and that:

Mexicans were able to enter the United States without quantitative limit prior to the 1965 amendments to the Immigration and Nationality Act (implemented in 1968). And it was not until 1976 that Congress extended the strict, 20,000 per-country limit and preference system to countries in the Western Hemisphere, including Mexico.

By the late 1970s, migration pressures mounted in Mexico due to the new numerical restrictions. Apprehensions and deportations increased dramatically from earlier in the decade to more than one million annually. President Carter introduced a plan in 1977 to address illegal immigration that included enhanced enforcement efforts at the US-Mexico border.

By 1978, Congress had appropriated funds for 2,580 new Border Patrol staff, accounting for one-quarter of total Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) staff at that time.

So the frenzy about closing the southern border is pretty recent stuff - there was never a time when that border was closed, no golden era to hearken back to. It's just that 40 years ago, the same people crossing could have done so legally. It's also easy to forget how expensive this new approach has been, and how recently, in the scheme of things, policymakers have chosen to undertake that burden. The Border Patrol's budget, she reports, has grown more than 500% just in the past two decades.

Indeed, according to Meyers' data, when President Jimmy Carter launched the recent era of growth in 1977, perhaps fewer than 1,000 agents covered both northern and southern US borders. That figure quadrupled by the late '80s, then tripled again following passage of the Immigraton Reform and Control Act. By 2002, the article reports, the number of agents had risen to more than 11,600, plus another 6,000+ inspectors staffing various entry points.

I'm pretty sure that makes the Border Patrol the nation's largest law enforcement agency. One third of federal court cases now involve enforcing immigration status. I should mention that this big picture look makes it clear why President Bush's proposal for 1,500 more agents is on it's face insufficient if strict border enforcement is to be the sole response to illegal immigration - a symbolic gesture unlikely to resolve the issue to anyone's satisfaction.

Read the rest if you're interested in the topic. It's an informative, even-handed look at border enforcement containing a lot of history and data I didn't know.

Even more hyped border threats

Stories of an alleged military incursion on the Texas-Mexico border in January turn out to be just as baseless as allegations of Al Quaeda crossing the border -- another example of law enforcement exaggerating threats hoping to draw down homeland security money. I'd missed the Dallas News story saying so ("US, Mexico dispute Texas officers version of drug bust," Feb. 18), but at least the press is starting to run such recantations closer to the original misinformation in their news coverage:

[L]ocal officers say the incident involved heavily armed members of the Mexican military, adding yet more firepower to the violent and dangerous drug cartels trying to protect smuggling routes into the U.S.

U.S. and Mexican government officials say that the Mexican military was not involved and that the local officers exaggerated their account, playing up public fears in a bid to win support for increased funding for border security.

Texas sheriffs are lobbying for $34 million of $100 million in federal money earmarked for border security, money that would pay for additional sheriff deputies to act as a second line of defense behind Border Patrol agents.

"The sheriffs have found a way to get attention and hopefully increased resources for their poor counties, where law enforcement jobs represent the bread and butter of their economy," said Dennis Bixler-Marquez, a political science professor at the University of Texas at El Paso. "But at what expense and at whose expense?"

That's exactly right - they're hyping nonexistent threats at the expense of ignoring the real ones. I'm glad somebody's calling these guys on their BS, but doing so is a dangerous game -- try it, and the sheriffs might slur you, too. Congressman Sylvestre Reyes from El Paso questioned these most recent undocumented allegations and got smeared outrageously as a result: "I hear Reyes' doubts, and it only makes me question his loyalty to the United States of America," [Hudspeth County] Sheriff [Arvin] West said. "Why is he so cozy in bed with Mexico?"

A better question might be, why isn't Sheriff West cozier with the US homeland security apparatus? It turns out he didn't even report the alleged Mexican military incursion to the authorities, said the News:

Even so, as of Feb. 13, the threat had not been reported to the FBI or any other federal agency. Sheriff West explained: "What can the FBI do about it? I'd rather tell the media because at least the media will write about it."

Uh huh, why report a military incursion onto US soil to the federal government? Especially when the media will spread your misinformation so willingly? Plus, when you call the feds they keep focusing on all those annoying facts that don't seem to fit your story.

No border-based need to expand wiretapping

Here's a non-solution searching for a problem: Currently wiretapping in Texas is limited to prosecuting drug trafficking and murder, so Texas Governor Rick Perry announced he wants to expand eavesdropping authority to combat border violence. But that makes no sense - aren't drug running and murder exactly the crimes we're trying to stop on the border? How much more authority could they possibly need to use wiretaps to combat smuggling rings? The whole thing seems like an odd non-sequitur - another idea promoted for show that doesn't make anyone safer.

A preponderance of misunderstanding

The US Supreme Court says that a preponderance of the evidence must point to the voluntariness of consent when officers perform so-called "consent searches" at traffic stops. The Texas Constitution, though, requires that "clear and convincing" evidence be presented that consent was granted voluntarily. So what's the difference?

Not much, apparently, if you're a juror who never understood the legal jargon in the first place. From Legalwriting.net:

The Texas Pattern Jury Charges Plain-Language Task Force ran its first test of the original admonitory instructions last week. Here is one tidbit.

When asked to give a percentage for how sure you must be to conclude that something was proved by a "preponderance of the evidence," the 25 test jurors gave the following percentages:

51%--2
70%--4
75%--5
80%--5
85%--3
90%--4
95%--1
99%--1

Wow.

Of course, the correct answer is 51% or "more likely than not," which is the language California used in its new jury instructions in place of "preponderance of the evidence."

That's one of the sorry legacies of logorrheic law profs. Avoiding jurors having to wade through impenetrable legalese is one of the few upsides to the otherwise lamentable modern preponderance of plea bargains over jury trials. More than a preponderance, really - less than 1% of criminal cases in Texas ever make it to a jury anymore. When they do, I wonder how many jurors simply misunderstand what it is they're being asked to decide?

Something for Everyone: Magic Grits and Scalia Bashing

I went this mornng to hear Randy Barnett expound before the UT-Austin Federalist Society on the perhaps-odd subject of whether Antonin Scalia is insufficiently committed to "originalism." Barnett first became known to me as a contributor at the Volokh Conspiracy, then as the losing top litigator on behalf of the plaintiff in Raich v. Ashcroft. That case legitimized federal prosecution of medical marijuana-consuming patients in states where it was otherwise legal - in describing the loss Barnett said that at 6-3 against, his side had "beat the spread."

Anyway, if you're interested in why he thinks Justice Scalia is a big fat sellout, see his paper on the topic. For purposes of this post, though, I'm pleased to report that when I approached Barnett afterward and mentioned this blog, he was immediately ready with a cultural reference to grits I'd not recalled, a scene from the movie My Cousin Vinny where Joe Pesci uses newfound knowledge of southern cooking to confound a witness who he's personally interrogating on the stand:

Vinny Gambini: How could it take you five minutes to cook your grits when it takes the entire grit-eating world 20 minutes?
Mr. Tipton: Um... I'm a fast cook, I guess.
Vinny Gambini: [across beside the jury] What? I'm sorry I was over there. Did you just say you were a fast cook? Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit faster in your kitchen than any place on the face of the earth?
Mr. Tipton: I don't know.
Vinny Gambini: Perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove. Were these magic grits? Did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans?

The "entire grit-eating world." :-) You also don't hear folks talk about "a grit" very often. Outstanding. That was worth the cost of admission. Let me know if you're aware of any other good grits-related stories like that.

Here's a nice surprise: DAs race in Hays County focuses on solutions

Texas' legislation to deal more sensibly with low-level offenders may have been vetoed in 2005, but even if that legislative battle was lost, how Texans talk about such issues in the political arena may be changing.

A case in point: Three people including a commenter (Thanks, David!) excitedly let me know about a TV news story today covering the GOP primary race in Hays County for District Attorney. Hays is a suburban/rural county south of Austin whose county seat is San Marcos. Both Repub candidates distanced themselves from the "merciless" approach of their predecessor to talk about diversion programs for low-level offenders, the best focus for valuable jail space and how to spend criminal justice resources to maximize safety. Reported Channel 8 News:

When it comes to prosecuting criminals, very little separates the priorities of Hays County Republican District Attorney candidates Wesley Mau and Paul Velte IV.

"We need to focus our real efforts in the trials that we do, on the hard core criminals like child molesters, rapists and murders," said Mau.

Velte agreed and said, if elected, he would spend time making room for those criminals.

"I'd get people out of jail that really don't need to be there. What we need to do is conserve jail space for the people that you and I need protection from," Velte said.

Both Velte and Mau said the current district attorney, Michael Wenk, has handled all cases, big and small, with the same merciless approach throughout his two terms. That, in addition to a growing county, has resulted in a backlog in cases both plan to address.

"I think if you manage your cases well and you work your cases early and resolve them before people arrive to court...you can reduce a whole bunch of that backlog," Velte said.

Mau agreed and said he plans to look at different techniques of moving cases through the process.

"We need to look at some of the new research on how to deal with cases and find out what's the best way to handle different kinds of crimes and rehabilitate those you're interested in rehabilitating," Mau said.

Let me tell, you, the DA's association could only benefit from more members in it who respect words like "research" and "rehabilitation" or who look at jail populations wondering who "really needs to be there" - in the past, DAs were the first ones at the Lege to fight the least reforms affecting their fiefdoms. That's how we got in this mess.

Regular readers know I've spent a lot of time gathering examples of different ways Texas counties can combat overincarceration in local jails - a problem exacerbated by overflowing state prisons, wasted beds from entrepeneurial schemes, then Hurricane Rita. At the local level, these problems may have reached a tipping point where they're simply too important to ignore any longer. Maybe that makes them safe to talk about. That both DA candidates in a GOP primary look at it that way (and they come from very different legal backgrounds) says to me there's a growing consensus in Hays County that it's time for a change in appoach.

If the Democrat in the race turns around and runs a bunch of tuff-on-crime ads against the Rs over this I'll be mad as a wet hen.

The Hurtt Prize

Turning the tables, or the cameras, on a terrible idea, Matt Asher has created the Hurtt Prize, a cash award which goes to the first person to capture Houston police chief Harold Hurtt on video committing any violation of the law. Contribute to the award - the bounty is up to $1,465 as of this writing - or grab your digital camera and compete for the prize. I like the idea of the commenter who said the prize should be broken up to give $1 each for amateur pictures of Hurtt engaging in banal activities throughout the day, just to see how the chief likes it. After all, why would you mind if you're not doing anything wrong? Via Jim Skipper.

UPDATE: Kuff has more, discussing this Houston Chronicle article. CK's point about no written guidelines is dead on: Texas doesn't have any.

Roundup: Things I'd blog about if I had time

Here are a few brief items that deserve more bloggerly attention than I have time to give them:

Digging drug courts on the right. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin, says in a well-argued policy brief that drug courts are the "right prescription for Texas" (pdf). The document was authored by Marc Levin, whose recent op ed on overcriminalization I highlighted here.

Finding what works. The Consensus Project has posted what looks to be an interesting report from the Washington State Insititute for Public Policy on "Evidence Based Adult Corrections Programs: What Works and What Does Not?" (pdf). Among the findings: Drug courts demonstrate statistically significant reductions in recidivism. The 20-page document makes recommendations to the Washington State Legislature.

Out in the west Texas town of El Paso ... From Immigration Law Prof, check out Bill Hing's account of his recent visit with a delegation to El Paso to discuss immigration topics with the locals. Good stuff.

Okay, so there's like one guy, and they shot him. Molly Ivins and Clay Robison both say Harry Whittington, the Texas lawyer who Dick Cheney shot in the face last week, is considered a liberal among Republicans on criminal justice matters and an advocate for prisoners' rights. A couple of other long-timers have told me that, too.

Fronting the privateers. Thanks to Catonya for pointing out that the City of Wichita Falls has agreed to finance the $550,000 annual budget of the North Texas Drug Task Force for the next 2-4 years, subsidizing 23 other area jurisdictions. The money will supposedly be paid back, as discussed earlier, with cash from prospective asset forfeiture cases. Reports the Times Record News, "The task force's funding will be run through the City of Wichita Falls. Because of a two to four year lag in seized fund availability, Wichita Falls will front the task force's operational expenses and wait to be paid back."

Reveal secret snitch agreements. The 9th Circuit wants snitch agreements revealed to defendants before trial, says CrimProf blog. That's similar to some Texas legislation that cleared the House Criminal Juriprudence Committee last year but failed to finally pass.

CA tries deincarceration. While on the subject of California, that state will shift 40% of incarcerated women from prisons to group homes to let them be near their families and have better access to education/job training, but OSAPian doesn't like it. Doc Berman wrote about it, too.

Congrats to Alaskablawg on the big win. Apparently the occasion gave him the opportunity to use the phrase "lying sack of snitch" in a public setting.

Fallen Heroes: Texas Monthly's entire March issue is devoted to the Iraq war, including bios of all fallen Texas soldiers so far and excerpts from a Texan soldier/blogger. Thanks to Evan Smith for the media preview link.

Drop-in visits, progressive sanctions examples of stronger probation

I argue frequently that Texas' probation system should be strengthened, that it would make us safer if offenders received greater supervision in the first two to three years after low-level crimes, then had ways to earn their way off probation through good behavior. In terms of on-the-ground supervision, though, what would "stronger probation" look like?

An article from the Corpus Christi Caller Times ("Ding Dong, Probation Calling," Feb 20) offers one example - home visits, in some cases including visits by District Judge Tom Greenwell alongside the probation officer! Violations are punished with short jail stints, at least at first, not automatically revoked probation, so offenders are given a chance to learn from their mistakes and still succeed instead of automatically winding up in prison on the taxpayers' dime.

Right now hardly any Texas probation departments do home visits (much less Texas judges - kudos, Judge Greenwell!), but new funding in the state budget hinges on reducing probation revocations, giving counties incentives to try new things. Though the article doesn't say so, that's likely how this program is paid for - new state budget riders require counties to adopt "progressive sanctions" for probationers like those described in the article to receive extra funds. It's a neat example of what counties can do with the new money if they get creative. Hell, the truth is, home visits aren't even that creative - it just seems like going the extra mile in the context of a broken system. The Nueces County program is called "Aspire":

Aspire began in April, and offenders are required to look for work if they aren't already working and are encouraged to continue their education.

Rios said the program's goals are to get the probationers employed, substance-free and to help them learn positive life skills.

Javed Syed, director of Nueces County Community Supervision & Corrections, said he has been encouraging his officers to be creative in helping probationers and to get out of the office more.

It was with the help of Greenwell, a Republican who is running for re-election against Democrat Robert Zamora in November, that the program got off the ground, he said.

Probation officer supervisor William Shull said the probationers in Aspire are only part of the work that his officers do every day.

"Each officer has about 125 (probationers) on their workload," Shull said. "This is nice because it's a small group of 24."

Officer Monica Villagomez said the program offers something that many of the offenders need.

"A lot of them don't have structure in their lives," she said. "Our goal is not to put them in prison but to help them."

That's the kind of approach needed more broadly across Texas, but Governor Perry vetoed stronger probation statewide. Still, some counties have started new programs to qualify for money from the budget riders, including creating specialized courts to give probationers more attention. I hope we see a lot more no-nonsense programs like Aspire spring up around Texas.

Lock picking, explosives - SWAT cops party in Dallas

If the whole Texas SWAT (CourtTV) or Dallas SWAT (A&E) phenomenon is your idea of good reality television, some of your heroes will likely be at the Texas Tactical Police Officers Association's upcoming conference in Dallas April 1-6. It looks like quite a shindig, if you're into that sort of thing. The 2,000 member (yikes!) association was created to train and promote communication between members of Texas SWAT teams. Can you imagine such a testosterone-filled bunch getting together in Dallas to party? I wonder if anyone will order beer?

Participants in the trade show read like a list of arms dealers. My favorite conference event, I think, is the session training cops in lockpicking skills and supplying them with burglary tools:

Covert Lock Defeating for Law Enforcement
This course will teach students the fundamentals of covert lock defeating, including lock picking and lock by passing. The course will include a starter lock pick set. A comprehensive manual covering all of the techniques in the class will be available for purchase during the class, for $20.00.

Covert Lock Defeating for LE 8 hrs. - Mon or Tues Host Hotel
Covert Lock Defeating for LE 8 hrs. - Mon or Tues Host Hotel

Instructor Biography - Darby Darrow
Darby Darrow has been a police officer for the city of San Diego since 1986 and is currently assigned to the full time SWAT unit. Mark Willhelm has been a police officer for the city of San Diego since 1989 and is also assigned to the full time SWAT unit.

Required Equipment
All needed equipment will be provided in the classroom, with the exception of pen/paper.

There are other interesting topics, too - cops who want to learn to use explosives to blow your front door down can attend a course at Texas Stadium (after all, the Cowboys' spring training hasn't started yet). Learn how to perform "bus assaults." Two cops from Houston will teach a course on "covert or deliberate searches." And it'd be interesting to be a fly on the wall to hear this discussion of Mexican drug cartels and border violence.

The fellow giving the training on how to handle the aftermath of police shootings authored a book in 2004 in which, according to Publisher's Weekly, "He disparages 'antipolice activists and other windbags' and doesn’t seem to have interviewed anyone whose shooting was found to be unjustified." Probably a regular Grits reader, don't you think?

Via Terry Nall

What's the difference between a pirate and a privateer?

Will Bailey: "I was just going to ask you if by any chance the First Lady is a distant relative of a pirate."
CJ Cregg: "He wasn't a pirate, he was a privateer."
Will Bailey: "He was a professional pirate."
CJ Cregg: "Yes, but he worked for us and he was hired by the fathers of the Daughters of the American Revolution."

Fourth season, "The West Wing," Privateers, Broadcast 3-26-03

The North Texas Drug Task Force based in Wichita Falls has declared that, with federal funds dried up, it now intends to finance itself solely off seized assets, mostly interdicted off the highway - sort of like pirates living off the boats they plunder on the high seas. Err, excuse me ... privateers.

UPDATE: See more approving coverage from the Wichita Falls Times Record News (reg. required), including this recent forfeiture account.

MH funds not enough, but better than a sharp stick in the eye

Well it's a start. AP reports that Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst and House Speaker Tom Craddick have agreed to free up $13.4 million of the $41 million needed to fix the backlog of mentally incompetent inmates waiting in county jails for space in the state mental hospital system. The Houston Chronicle quoted a mental health advocate whose views mirror mine on the topic:

"We are pleased to see the state hospitals get an influx of money to take care of people that would otherwise be languishing in jails," said Denise Brady, director of public policy at the Mental Health Association in Texas.

"However, if we had better funded community health systems, people wouldn't get into a crisis in the first place," Brady said.

"At some point, we have to see the bigger picture and stop slapping Band-Aids on it."

UPDATE: Surely the client decribed by Injustice Anywhere should be at the top of the list for new spending, waiting SIX MONTHS in the county jail after being declared incompetent for a state hospital bed to open up!! One of IA's commenters declares, "In Oregon, we sued the state to force the state hospital to take county jail inmates who were awaiting beds at the hospital so they could be evaluted. We won. The Ninth Circuit opinion is entitled Oregon Advocacy Center v. Mink. P"

See prior Grits coverage of this topic:

• Chincy state hospital funding leaves mentally incompetent defendants stranded
• Unfunded mandate: Counties struggle to pay for mentally incompetent inmates' care
• Blog Activism: How it's supposed to work
• Meth use may be boosting criminal commitments to psych hospitals
• More counties grumbling at backlog of incompetent defendants in Texas county jails.
  

Searching for consent at Texas traffic stops

A funny thing happened on the way to interpreting Texas' racial profiling data -- it turned out minorities weren't the only ones being subjected to unnecessary searches at traffic stops.

Thirty percent of searches at Texas traffic stops are so-called "consent searches" performed (ostensibly) with drivers' permission without probable cause, according to a new report (pdf) published by the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition in collaboration with ACLU of Texas, NAACP of Texas and Texas LULAC. (Conflict alert: I'm listed as an editor in the report's acknowledgements and the authors, Molly Totman and Dwight Steward, are friends and colleagues.)

It's certainly the case that minorities were more likely to be searched at about 2/3 of law enforcement agencies surveyed. But TCJC's study reveals that large disparities also exist from department to department that in many cases are larger than disparities by race.

For example, at the Austin PD, 7.3% of searches at traffic stops were "consent searches"; at the Travis County Sheriff the figure was 10.9%. By contrast, just south of here in Hays County, 53.1% of searches performed by Sheriff's deputies at traffic stops were consent searches. At the San Marcos PD, the figure was 55.3%. (Both Austin PD and the Travis County Sheriff require officers to obtain written consent before searching vehicles at traffic stops without probable cause.)

Bottom line: That means the Hays County Sheriff and San Marcos PD are focusing significantly more police resources, comparatively speaking, on searches where officers don't have probable cause to search than their neighbors to the north. Indeed, some departments are spending even more time than that on unproductive consent searches. In my hometown of Tyler, 67.2 percent of searches at traffic stops were consent searches. At the El Paso PD and the El Paso County Sheriff's Department, the figures were 76% and 77%, respectively.

Officers' time is a valuable resource, and spending it on consent searches that mostly discover nothing isn't worth the taxpayers' investment. Reported TCJC, "A police union representative told the Texas legislature in 2005 that in his experience, 'the vast majority of the time we found nothing.'" (The Legislature last year passed SB 1195 which would have required officers to obtain written or recorded consent to search at traffic stops, but Governor Perry vetoed the bill.)

Looking at search figures by race reveals equally interesting patterns. Certainly racial disparities exist that are still troubling and important to address. At the Harris County Sheriff's Department, for example, blacks are 1.5 times more likely to be consent searched than whites, and Latinos are 1.3 times more likely to undergo such searches. In neighboring Fort Bend County, those figures are 1.7 and 1.4 times, respectively -- sounds pretty similar, right?

Digging deeper, though, it turns out drivers of all races are much more likely to be searched by the Fort Bend Sheriff's Department than the Harris County Sheriff. In Harris County, deputies consent search blacks at 4.6% of stops, Latinos at 4.1% of stops, and whites at 3.04%. In Fort Bend County, though, deputies search all races at much higher rates: Blacks were consent searched at 18.42% of stops, Latinos at 15.75%, and whites at 11.11% of traffic stops.

In other words, white drivers stopped by deputies in Fort Bend County are more than twice as likely to be subjected to consent searches than black people stopped by the Harris County Sheriff! The racial disparities are significant, but the Fort Bend Sheriff's Department engages in consent searches much more frequently than its more populous and racially diverse neighbor.

More to come soon on the details and recommendations from this fascinating report. But Texas bloggers (or the MSM, for that matter), who'd like to check out similar stats for their local jurisdictions should download the full report (pdf), or look at these area-specific fact sheets on TCJC's website.

Over the top: Houston chief wants cameras in apartments, private homes

Houston police chief Harol Hurtt has a delusion -- several, actually, but the one I'm referencing at the moment is his notion that installing surveillance cameras will help Houstonians feel safer and reduce crime. Hurtt not only wants to put cameras in public spaces downtown, he also wants to force new malls and apartment complexes to install camera systems with direct feeds to the police department as part of the building permit process, maybe even in private homes.

As for privacy, Hurtt told reporters, "If you're not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?" Uh, because you respect the Constitution and personal liberty, maybe? The KGB used that same line in Communist Russia, one recalls, on their way to filling up a system of gulags.

Beyond privacy concerns there's a bigger problem: empirically cameras simply don't reduce crime. London, England today is the most surveilled city in the world. You supposedly can no longer walk outside in London without your image being captured by police on CCTV, or closed circuit television, as the Brits refer to it. Those cameras were installed in reaction to IRA terrorism, and are as integrated into their day-to-day police practices as any city in the world. Their cops have invested a lot of capital, political and monetary, into promoting them.

Facts are facts, though, and when the British Home Office (that nation's top law enforcement agency) last year released a long-term study on the topic, it revealed that surveillance cameras didn't reduce crime, confirming previous research. Reported the 2-24-05 London Evening Standard:

The findings [came] as a blow to the Home Office, which has trumpeted CCTV as a key crime-fighting weapon for the past 10 years.

The report's author, Professor Martin Gill of the University of Leicester, said: "For supporters these findings are disappointing. For the most part CCTV did not produce reductions in crime and did not make people feel safer."

The only one of the 14 schemes found to be a success was targeted at car parks, where it led to a significant drop in vehicle crime. Other schemes in city centres, residential areas and hospitals produced no clear benefits.

I know Hurtt probably doesn't read the British papers, and to be fair this is a fad among many in US law enforcement, but London's experience shows that, as a crime fighting tool, surveillance cameras are an expensive, fruitless boondoggle outside very narrow, well-defined circumstances. I've discussed before reasons why that might be true. Plus, as I told the Associated Press:

"Cameras can be defeated with very high tech means, like sunglasses and hats and disguises," Henson said, laughing. "So it is very easy to thwart the cameras, but if something happens, officers have to watch hours and hours and hours of video. And while they are doing that, they are not investigating crimes."

That last bit about cops wasting time watching video isn't just me talking. I borrowed the notion from a London cop/blogger who wrote in January that "CCTV viewing occupies a disproportionate amount of police time with very little tangible result. This fact is well known to street criminals." When both cops and the street criminals know they don't actually combat crime, the only reason left to favor cameras is to fool the public into thinking you're doing something as a PR stunt.

While cameras may not make us safer, there's no question they make us more exposed to possible privacy violations. Mayor White needs to shut down this bad idea before it gets off the ground. As I wrote earlier this morning, if Houston thinks they need more enforcement, the city should hire more cops - to quote a past Grits commenter, "There's no replacement for boots on the ground - none."

See also: CCTV coverage from SpyBlog, and BlogHouston's discussion and followup.

UPDATE: Dallas PD wants more cameras, too, says DallasBlog.

Bloggers hyping crime stats should seek real solutions

BlogHouston has been on a kick recently trashing Mayor Bill White for Houston's understaffed police department, but they frequently appear more concerned with attacking a political enemy than fixing problems like police response times. I'm actually not a fan of Bill White, but that doesn't make unfair criticisms justified.

In this post, Kevin quotes Chief Harold Hurtt spuriously comparing Houston to Chicago, declaring that the "number of officers per square mile in Houston is less than eight, while the country's next biggest city — Chicago — has nearly 60. " Well, yeah, and there's a one-word reason for that: "Sprawl." Heard of it? Chicago is an incredibly dense city, while Houston goes on for miles and miles. In terms of officer to population ratios, which is the more important way to look at police staffing, Houston's ratio looked a little worse after Katrina evacuees tacked on 10% to the city's population, but it's still roughly in line with other Texas cities - around 2 officers per thousand residents. Chicago's ratio is higher, but then they also have higher homicide rates than Houston, and again, they're a denser city with different needs -- how many cops in Houston walk a beat?

In this item Kevin complains about declining HPD response times, but seems more interested in blaming Mayor White than finding solutions. Here's an easy fix for that I'll bet we won't see the BlogHouston folks trumpeting: Create a "verified response" policy for commercial and residential alarm systems requiring companies like ADT to confirm a crime has been committed before dispatching police to the scene. Right now false alarm rates hover in the 99% range in cities without verified response, wasting tens of thousands of officer hours each year. Stop that wasteful subsidy and it'd be like adding dozens of new cops on the street each shift.

Not to be outdone, Anne suggests that eliminating bottled water purchases and disallowing city employees from receiving additional training might pay for more police (a notion for which Greg rightly slaps her), but her more serious revenue proposal - linking red light camera revenue to police funding - is an even worse idea. If that were to happen, the moment critics like her and Kevin start bashing the city next time around you'd inevitably see reductions in yellow light times to increase revenue, making everybody less safe at the end of the day. After all, a lot more people get hurt in car accidents than get shot.

It's worth mentioning that according to the Washington Post, despite a hopefully short term spike in homicides, Houston's overall crime rate actually declined by 2% last year. Moreover, while Houston's homicides increased, they're still just over half the number the city experienced in 1991, when there were 608 homicides compared to around 326 last year (the last '05 total I could find.)

If Houston wants to hire hundreds of new officers, they won't pay for it with cuts in bottled water purchases and it'd be foolish to pay for it with red light camera revenues. That's why God created taxes. Raise them, if you want to. But for heaven's sake then don't whine about it.

SA suburbs may install red light cameras

The San Antonio Express News has a story this morning about two SA suburbs installing red light cameras at area intersections. As it happens I was quoted in the story:

"It's just a way to soak the taxpayers, and it doesn't benefit public safety in practice," said Scott Henson, director of the Police Accountability Project for the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

One of the reporters, Patrick Driscoll, also has a good blog post providing lots more resources on the topic, including a link to a Texas Transportation Institute study (pdf) which he said was cut from the article. That analysis found adding one second to yellow light times would reduce red light running by 40%.

I've always wondered why, if cities like Houston, Garland or these SA suburbs are so concerned about traffic safety, they don't try lengthening yellow light times first. The only reason I can think of is that they're doing it to generate new revenue, not really to make the roads safer.

Texas Public Policy Foundation criticizes "overcriminalization"

Marc Levin of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Austin, has posted a fine op ed on their website criticizing "overcriminalization" of minor, offensive behaviors in federal law, pointing the provisions under which Cindy Sheehan and Beverly Young were arrested at the State of the Union for wearing t-shirts with political messages about the war. Other unnecessary laws, he declares, could be used to prosecute anonymous bloggers. While charges against Sheehan and Young were dropped, Levin writes

the rest of us must live knowing there are thousands of similarly vague federal crimes lending themselves to arbitrary enforcement.

For example, annoying someone on the Internet is now a federal crime punishable by up to two years in federal prison. The provision is buried in the Violence Against Women and Department of Justice Reauthorization Act signed into law by President Bush on January 5, 2006. A provision entitled “Preventing Cyberstalking” was added to the bill by Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.).

The provision, which appears in Section 113 of the legislation, states: “Whoever...utilizes any device or software that can be used to originate telecommunications or other types of communications that are transmitted, in whole or in part, by the Internet... without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person...who receives the communications...shall be fined under Title 18 or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.”

This new law could be used to prosecute anonymous blogs that ridicule politicians or even anonymous messages sent through dating websites. What the sender considers to be a romantic greeting could be found annoying by the recipient.

While on some days I can think of a few anonymous bloggers I'd like to see incarcerated, that's purely out of personal spite - it's astonishing that there might be a legal justification to criminalize anonymous blog critics. Levin thinks the "provision almost certainly violates the First Amendment in light of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1995 decision in McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, which struck down state restrictions on anonymous political pamphlets. Surely, constitutionally protected speech in print is also protected online," he writes.

I couldn't agree more. I'm also glad to see Levin's sensible conservative commentary regarding overcriminalization and immigration reform. He declares:

while immigration reform is needed, it also raises the specter of overcriminalization. Legislation passed by the House is pending in the Senate that imposes a three-year mandatory minimum prison sentence on anyone who, with an expectation of financial gain, “assists, encourages, directs, or induces” two or more foreigners to illegally reside in the U.S. While this provision is likely intended to apply to large businesses that employ illegal immigrants, it could also imprison ordinary Americans who unwittingly hire an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper, nanny, or gardener.

He's right - the proposed law amounts to swatting flies with a baseball bat. You might kill some flies, but you're also likely to leave big holes in your walls and bust up the furniture pretty good while you're at it.

As always, I'm glad to see TPPF addressing these subjects head on. Combating overcriminalization isn't a conservative or liberal issue. It's an American issue. Anyone who respects the Constitution and the Bill of Rights should be concerned. As Levin warned:

Ultimately, if the government is empowered to arrest us for annoying messages on t-shirts, all of our freedoms are in danger of being stripped away.

Tough on some crime: Former task force officer's conviction tossed on technicality

Why is it that cops in Texas seem to be the only ones anymore who get criminal cases thrown out because of technicalities?

Here's a case in point: Former Chambers County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Dearl Hardy was convicted in 2004 of pressuring one of his officers to perjure himself to make a false arrest against a man who'd successfully sued the department for racial profiling. But a Houston appeals court overturned the conviction because no witness was presented saying that the pressured deputy signed the arrest affidavit in the presence of a notary.

No one disputes that the affidavit WAS signed in front of a notary, it's just that no witnesses were presented at trial saying so.

Such "technicalities" for other defendants are routinely cast aside by Texas appeals courts as "harmless error," but when a police officer is the defendant, we see an overarching zeal for every i to be dotted. It's fine to say the judges are following the law, but how to explain the double standard? Reported today's Baytown Sun:

Hardy, who held the department’s number two slot during the first two years of Monroe Kreuzer’s tenure as sheriff that ended in 2005, was convicted of pressuring a deputy to file a false probable cause affidavit accusing Anahuac man Vernon Coates of drunk driving in September 2001. ...

Coates, a black man, had had several well-publicized encounters with Chambers County deputies that led to charges of racial profiling. Coates later filed a civil rights violations lawsuit against the county, for which he accepted a $120,000 settlement in December 2003.

Joslin testified that Hardy called him from home and told him he “wanted Joslin to charge Coates with a DWI or else.” Joslin testified he believed he would be fired if he did not charge Coates.

Sounds like a cut and dried case of retaliation, doesn't it? The District Attorney has asked the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reconsider the case, since the decision was based on a 50-year old CCA case that a dissenting judge said was contradicted by facts in the case and other precedent:

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Leslie Brock Yates cites a 1995 appeals court case, Martin V. State, which defined an oath as “a pledge to act in a truthful and faithful manner.”

Yates writes that unlike in the Lowry case cited by the majority, in the Hardy case Joslin admitted he committed perjury because he felt threatened by Hardy. She also notes that other witnesses testified Joslin was visibly upset after the call from Hardy and “complained that he could not believe he ad to file a DWI against Coates.”

Yates cites two more recent appeals court cases, from 1995 and 2003 that suggest “a notarized affidavit may suffice for a legally administered oath.”

“These cases recognize the difficulty of demanding rigid adherence to searing formalities. Similarly, the existence of a technical defect in Joslin’s affidavit should not negate his testimony in which he admitted that he intended to and did commit perjury under (Hardy’) order,” she writes.

It's hard not to get the impression that judges in the majority were just looking for an excuse to clear the former officer, who has since launched an unlikely career as a Christian gospel singer. Hardy was assistant commander of the notorious Chambers County Narcotics Task Force, where according to the Texas Observer he pressured an undercover officer to make drug cases she didn't feel had been proven. The Observer also reported claims by a subordinate that Hardy pressured officers to stop and search vehicles without probable cause to boost the task force's asset forfeiture numbers. Thank heaven, at least, he's now out of law enforcement.

It's often said that Texas is a "tough on crime" state, but that statement deserves a caveat - we're tough unless the alleged crime was committed by a cop.

Accidental truth

A drug task force in Arkansas accidentally spilled some truth in a Pine Bluff newspaper article while complaining about the Bush Administration's drug task force cuts:

“We can go out and arrest somebody and we don’t have any jail space because we’ve got a jail full of people that commit violent crimes so we have to turn around and let them loose,” [task force Sgt. Dick Madsen] said. “It’s like fishing in a bass tournament. You catch a fish and release it and that way you still have a population of bass in the lake . That’s what we’re doing and we’ve never won a tournament.”

Even with a new jail under construction, Madsen said people are needed to “do the fishing.”

“You’re not going to catch the fish to put in the jail,” he said.

I've been saying exactly that - focusing on arrests for drug crimes by definition diverts attention from more serious offenses who actually harm or endanger others. Of course, task force officals try to conflate the two:

“There’s probably less than 10 percent of all crimes in our jurisdiction that are not drug related,” Madsen said. “There’s embezzlement to buy drugs, thievery from hospitals and pharmacies to get drugs, burglaries to get money to buy and drugs and they’re killing each other because of drug disputes.”

If you really think they're all the same people and the jails are full, why not spend more time pursuing embezzlers, burglars and murderers? After all, at most a small fraction of drug users ever commit more serious crimes. For most folks targeted by local drug task forces, their worst offense is purchasing and using drugs, or dealing at a very low level to support their habit.

But if you admit that it's harder to justify huge sums of federal pork coming your way. No wonder the Bush Administration wants to get rid of the Byrne grant program.

Now everybody's a terrorist

As Rep. Pena rightly points out, Texas border security problems are very real, and they're caused by drug runners feuding over lucrative distribution routes. But in pitching for federal money, Gov. Rick Perry and our Texas politicos don't seem to think the truth is enough to spur federal action, and instead insist on playing the terrorism card, an assertion for which there is no factual basis. This weekend the Houston Chronicle quoted the Governor saying:

"The illegal activity along the border is escalating. Well-armed narco-terrorists are becoming increasingly bold," [Perry] said.

The conflation of terrorism with drug running takes full form on Governor Perry's protectingtexasborders.com website where he queries, "What is America doing to keep terrorists from crossing the border?," pitching his border security initiative as directly combating Al Quaeda. I've watched government enough to understand why politicians hype threats when seeking to secure funding. You see it all the time. My problem is this - if you target the wrong threat, the money spent to "solve" the problem won't make anyone safer. Reforms aimed at "terrorists" won't stop the drug cartels. Reforms targeting illegal border crossings by immigrants won't stop the cartels, either.

Going after the drug cartels is difficult enough - they just murdered two police chiefs in the Mexican interior and last week killed a journalist in Nuevo Laredo. For border residents, the public safety problems posed by illegal immigration pale by comparison, much less the chimeric threat of Al Quaeda crossing the border. Linking the fight against drug cartels to anti-terrorism work might draw down short-term dollars, but it will aim them at targets that don't immediately threaten us.

It seems like the only shooting near the border nobody has yet linked to "terrorism" is Dick Cheney shooting Harry Whittington. The week's not over yet, though ...

Of course marijuana is SAFER than alcohol

So why would marijuana be punished more harshly?

That's the question posed by a student-driven referendum from SAFER-Texas at the University of Texas at Austin asking the university to change its rules to make equivalent the punishments for off-campus consumption of alcohol and marijuana. Reported the Dallas Morning News ("UT group fights pot penalty," Feb. 13):

UT students became energized about the effort, organizers said, when 18-year-old Phanta "Jack" Phoummarath of Houston died in December of alcohol poisoning after drinking at his fraternity.

"If you look at the rules about how you can be suspended from school, we believe the university is encouraging drinking," said Ann Del Llano, a civil-liberties lawyer working with SAFER Texas. "We see this as a life-or-death matter. If they had brought [Mr. Phoummarath] an infinite amount of marijuana and forced him to consume it, he'd be alive and breathing today."

That's a hard point to argue - between DWI deaths and alcohol poisoning, there's little question that abusing alcohol is a lot more dangerous than abusing marijuana. Campus officials appear somewhat open to the idea, but expressed skepticism that seemed a little silly if the article accurately portrayed their concerns. The Dallas news coverage continued:

UT health officials said that a year or two ago, the dean of students' office offered to stop kicking students out of the dorms if they were caught smoking pot in their rooms.

But campus housing officials balked, saying the smoke bothered nonsmoking students.

Dr. Chuck Roper, head of substance-abuse programs at UT's health services center, said he sees the logic behind the argument that marijuana isn't going to cause deaths like alcohol poisoning does. But organizers appear to be comparing recreational smoking to binge drinking instead of social drinking, he said.

"I'm not sure you're comparing apples to apples at that point," Dr. Roper said. "I understand the logic behind it but ... I don't think you should be encouraging students to break the law and get in trouble. Just like I don't think students should be encouraging students under the age of 21 to be drinking."

Well, I'm not sure Dr. Roper is comparing apples to apples - both marijuana and alcohol can be abused or consumed responsibly. But when alcohol is abused, often people die. The SAFER campaign is based on the successful effort in Denver by the same name, only the non-binding referendum is aimed at university campus rules instead of changing local or state laws. "Similar movements are afoot in Ohio, Maryland, New York and Florida," the News reports..

Sounds like a really good approach to me.

SF columnist says Byrne grant cuts an indicator of Congress' budget cutting will

Speaking of the Byrne grant program, an item today criticizing the program from San Francisco Chronicle columnist Deb Saunders titled "Your tax dollars on drugs" was terrific.

Some news I didn't know: "The White House Office of Management and Budget studied the Byrne grants and gave the program a 13 percent rating for results and accountability. That's an F-," she wrote.

Citing the Tulia scandal and quoting several conservative critics, Saunders adroitly summed up what all this means in political terms: "If the president can't push Congress to kill a program that is 13 percent effective, then he can't cut anything, because there is no will to spend responsibly in Washington."

No kidding.

The End of Ideology on the War on Drugs, or the Beginning of Consensus?

Regular readers have perhaps long tired of my dissertations on Texas' Tulia-style drug task forces financed by the federal Byrne grant program. (Gov. Rick Perry recently announced shifting money from drug task forces to give block grants to sheriffs in border counties.) But since I don't really track Congress the way I do the Texas Lege, it surprised me to learn how widely Congressional animosity for that program had spread to other drug war policies. According to this press release from the Drug Policy Alliance, many Republicans in Congress (rightly) see the war on drugs as just another batch of pork barrel programs to cut:

As the war on drugs continues to waste taxpayer money, destroy families, and undermine the rule of law, more and more conservatives are speaking out. The Republican Study Committee (RSC), a Congressional caucus composed of more than 100 conservative House Republicans, recently came out for eliminating a number of failed drug war programs, including the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Areas (HIDTA) program, the Safe and Drug-Free School programs, and the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. Last year, the American Conservative Union, Council for Citizens Against Government Waste, and the National Taxpayers Union urged Congress to eliminate six failed drug war programs to save money in the wake of Katrina. Those programs included the three programs RSC targeted for elimination, as well as student drug testing grants, the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, and the Andean Counterdrug Initiative (aka Plan Colombia).

That's an interesting twist, isn't it? I sat on a panel in D.C. last year with representatives from the Heritage Foundation and the National Taxpayers Union who both criticized the Byrne grant program, and you could tell their critique of the drug war went way beyond this one federal program.

The fascinating part about that panel was how those conservative activists, myself representing ACLU of Texas, and Nkechi Taifa of the Open Society Policy Center all came to the same conclusion - Byrne grant funding is counterproductive and has got to go -- from entirely different ideological perspectives. As recounted in this blog post, I actually agreed more with the right wingers' comments than I did with Nkechi!

These fellows were ideologues, not at all like the pork-driven law enforcement bureaucrats who pass off the drug war as "conservatism" at the Texas Legislature: Federalism, not forfeiture animated their views on the drug war. This recommendation by the Republican Study Committee confirms that those positions represent not just activists but a signficant portion of conservatives in Congress.

The signs of this shift toward a new consensus are everywhere. DPA's press release mentioned that "Maryland Republican Governor Robert Erhlich also passed treatment instead of incarceration legislation in 2004," but it could have added that Texas Governor Rick Perry signed "treatment instead of incarceration legislation" in Texas in 2003 (HB 2668). With Texas' prisons bursting at the seams, it's reasonable to expect more such legislaton next year, likely strengthening probation services to handle more drug offenders outside of prison.

I wrote last week how I was struck by Dan Kahan's argument that successful policy goals must be ambiguous to reach consensus - that different people had to be able to tell different stories to explain the outcome, to reach the same conclusion from different perspectives. That's what's happening, to my mind, on the drug war. There are now so many reasons to think our current approach is a bad idea, nearly anybody can join in the fun of criticizing it.

Feds tolerated bank robber snitch for decades

Following the lead of Professor Alexandra Natapoff, I've become fascinated in the last year with the way law enforcement's use of confidential informants often amounts to sanctioning crimes as serious as those snitches supposedly help solve. In New Jersey, after indulging his criminal activity for almost three decades, the feds aggressively prosecuted one of their most storied snitches, Michael Guibilo, who was sentenced last week to 25 years in prison. That likely amounts to a life sentence for the 60 year old defendant who is in poor health, but it comes after the feds tolerated a fairly radical criminal career for a very long time. According to NorthJersey.com:

Guibilo [was] a legendary undercover operative who began taping FBI agents because he didn't trust them -- a move that [his attorney] claimed resulted in trumped up charges against Guibilo.

For more than 25 years, Guibilo worked with the FBI, helping them foil an alleged plot to kill Rudolph Giuliani when he was a federal prosecutor and prevent a Paterson housing police officer's murder. But as he built credibility with the FBI, Guibilo developed an equally long rap sheet.

Nearly a dozen times, the Belleville man received light sentences for such crimes as bank robbery and gun possession, while nearly 20 other charges were dropped.

Despite the charges, and despite a judge ordering federal authorities in 1993 to stop using the informant, Guibilo continued to work for the FBI. [Defense lawyer Frank] Arleo said Guibilo's relationship with the FBI cooled in 2003.

Light sentences for "bank robbery" in exchange for snitching? You have to wonder if Guibilo hadn't begun taping his conversations with FBI agents (imagine: he found them untrustworthy) if they would have prosecuted him for these most recent bank robberies, or if they'd have looked the other way the way they had many times before.

One cheer for CJAC ... okay, maybe half a cheer ... alright, a modest grunt of approval

After my previous two items about the recommendations of Texas Governor Rick Perry's Criminal Justice Advisory Council (CJAC), Charles Kuffner emailed to ask me if there was anything I did like about the group's proposals. I'm sure my kibitzing seems odd to folks like Charles who read the glowing media accounts then wondered why I didn't seem so positive on the subject.

Certainly CJAC proposed a handful of positive reforms, but they were small things that will only make a marginal difference, hardly "Reforming Texas justice" as Doc Berman titled his blog post about the report. The big stuff they said should be "studied" more before taking action, even though the Governor's charge was for CJAC to study them and make recommendations. Study, study, study. For those not schooled in the wimp words of public relations and bureaucratese, to "study" such subjects when the answers are obvious means "do nothing, but make the public think you're addressing the problem," which of course is the reason CJAC was created in the first place.

Still, it would be wrong to portray their report as containing nothing positive.

Certainly providing funds to support Texas' four law-school-based innocence projects is a good thing, for example, and I don't want to downplay it. I just wish more emphasis were placed on stopping innocent people from being convicted in the first place. Ideally, we'd reform the front end, too, and in a few years the innocence projects would work themselves out of a job.

I've already discussed how suggestions regarding Texas crime labs would throw money at the problem without addressing the reasons innocent people are convicted. I hope I didn't imply the money isn't needed -- it is. There's a large backlog of cases plugging up the system that will be expensive to resolve. But that's not the same as enacting reforms that would ensure innocent people aren't convicted in the first place. That's what I hoped we'd see from this group that simply wasn't forthcoming.

Similarly, two recommendations suggest giving judges more "discretion" to order DNA tests and to have the state pay for them. That's a good thing, because "A judge right now does not have the discretion to just order a DNA test in the interest of justice, and a judge ought to be able to do that," says Keith Hampton of the Texas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.

I'm afraid, though, that still won't fix the problem without additional reforms. "In our experience, it's harder to get DNA testing in Texas than in almost any other state in the country with a DNA testing law," said a lawyer with the NYC-based Innocence Project in December. "While it's a well-written law in Texas, many prosecutors fight hard and litigate aggressively, and as a result, little testing happens." Reformers suggested making it more difficult for prosecutors to ask judges to deny DNA tests, which many do as an automatic first step in every case. CJAC did NOT adopt that recommendation, so it's a crap shoot whether giving judges' more discretion will result in more testing. I hope so.

Another recommendation would "Encourage local law enforcement agencies to use in-car audio-video record of all law enforcement contact with citizens at traffic stops and, if possible, fund local jurisdictions which may have insufficient resources for audio-video equipment." That's a positive thought to put out in the world, and I strongly support cameras in police cars both for protection of citizens and officers. But who will pay? Most agencies received funding for such cameras in 2002 as a result of Texas' racial profiling statute (if they have cameras, they don't have to gather the full range of data), but no state funding is available for replacement cameras, upgrades, for for agencies who didnt' get cameras in 2002. Other CJAC recommendations identified funding sources like grants from the Governor's Criminal Justice Division, and that source could fund these cameras, too, but instead the state will simply "encourage" camera use unless, apparently, money for them just falls from the sky.

The recommendation that peace officers receive continuing education on search and seizure laws is an improvement over the status quo - if you can imagine, they currently don't receive such training. But CJAC did not recommend the real reform on the table at the Legislature: requiring officers to obtain written or recorded consent to search at traffic stops when they don't have probable cause. The Governor vetoed that bill but told legislators to study the topic and bring it back in 2007. In that context the proposal for training feels like half a loaf, or really just the crumbs.

Which brings us to the proposals for further "study." These are the most substantive reforms discussed by CJAC, and in the end they didn't advocate implementing any of them but pretended they need to be "studied" more. That's utterly disingenuous, IMO -- in each case the topics have been studied to death and everyone pretty much knows what the best practices should be. In that context, to advocate further study amounts to opposition, not advocacy for the proposals. Proposals receiving this backhanded compliment were the most important ones discussed by CJAC:

1. Providing state funding for a public defenders office .

2. Increasing the compensation of individuals who are wrongfully convicted.

3. Adopting established best practices to reduce eyewitness misidentification.

4. Videotaping the interrogation and confession of suspects in major crimes.

Now THOSE would be important changes to recommend, but CJAC didn't recommend them. (Indeed, CJAC is largely made up of representatives of special interests who opposed those reforms in the past.) By saying we should study them, though, CJAC gets to pretend it's interested in reforms to protect innocent defendants without actually advocating them.

I hope I'm wrong about that. I've been at this a while and maybe I'm too cynical. But it sure seems like I've seen this song and dance routine before.

Improper access to Texas criminal records common, unchecked

Here's a new report (pdf) from the state auditor on the Texas Criminal Justice Information System, and the media summary. Of entities using the system's web interface to access criminal records from the Texas Department of Public Safety, 26 percent had unauthorized users registered, typically employees who no longer worked for the entity but retained their passcodes and access. Also, many improperly shared usernames and passwords among employees. In the management response, DPS declared that:

We have recognized that the ever increasing use of the criminal history data for licensing, employment, volunteerism, and other “non-criminal justice” purposes naturally creates a corresponding responsibility for controls over those entities. Our limited resources have prevented an adequate response to this rising need.

With one out of 20 Texans in prison, on probation or parole, this improper access opens up that information about an awful lot of people. What's more, regular readers know I think Texas restricts way too many jobs based on criminal history. Every time more employers are granted access to these records for purposes of employment screening, we reduce the chance that people who've been in trouble with the law in the past can find good jobs and make a life for themselves. So expanding access to the system harms prospects for employing ex-cons as well as risking the information being used inappropriately. Obviously state law requires DPS to share this information with a lot more folks than the agency can adequately manage.

The probation tracking system at the Texas Department of Crimnal Justice has improved, the report declared. Eleven percent of probationers' records were incorrectly tracked, compared to 46 percent when the system was last checked in 2001. That said, "improvement" is relative. With more than 605,000 probationers' flagged, according to the report, an 11 percent error rate would mean errors exist in records for more than 66,500 people.

Who are Texas' worst judges?

The Texas Observer's Nate Blakeslee tries to sort it out - he's picked some good candidates, but how does no Court of Criminal Appeals justice make it on the list? Texas Monthly in 2004 rightfully, IMO, named the CCA Texas' Worst Court.

CJAC: Pork Not Probity for Texas Crime Labs

Yesterday I said that Governor Rick Perry's Criminal Justice Advisory Council (CJAC) "suggested only pork barrel solutions to the state's problems." (See their press release here and the full report here [Word doc]). Their proposals to increase funding for Texas crime labs provide a good example of throwing money at a problem without solving it. CJAC's Forensics Committee recommended:

• A $10,000 pay increase for 170 scientists "to ensure job stability")
• New replacement crime lab facilities in McAllen, Corpus Christi and Abilene
• Expanded crime lab facilities in El Paso, Lubbock, Tyler and Austin
• An additional $1.4 - $2 million per year for equipment, operating funds and DNA kits and supplies.
• Additional forensic scientists (22 in '08, 14 in '09) to staff the new labs.

So this bunch would add nearly $11 million per biennium to the Texas Department of Public Safety's budget for crime labs by 2009, plus fork over many millions more to build or expand seven different labs around the state -- all that and the "solution" ignores the cause of the problem they're aiming to fix: innocent people convicted by faulty forensic science.

Why throw that much more money at Texas DPS? They're the ones (along with the Houston PD crime lab) whose errant analyses already convicted innocent people or allowed the guilty to escape justice. So why reward them with a bigger budget and more responsibility? The DPS crime lab in McAllen had to be closed down because of grave problems with their DNA testing division, and the one in Lubbock gave faulty evidence that sent Brandon Moon, who was innocent, to prison for 18 years for a rape he didn't commit. There's just no reason to believe giving those same scientists $10,000 raises is going to solve the problem.

DPS crime labs face a significant backlog of cases that's slowing the system down, so there's no doubt more money is needed to process cases faster. But that won't solve the problem of scientists signing off on faulty forensic analysis that convicts innocent people. In fact, none of these budget boosting recommendations confront the reasons why that occurs.

As I've argued before, the real problem causing Texas' forensic foulups stems from the state's failure to pay for defense experts to perform independent analysis on behalf of indigent clients. So when DPS impugns a suspect, even when they've accused an innocent person, there's just no means for indigent defendants to refute the faulty results. Too often, as I wrote last year, accuracy is optional in forensic science because:

Forensic science isn't "objective" science, it's goal oriented. Police scientists tend to find the answers prosecutors want because, as a Dallas scientist testified to the Senate Criminal Justice Committee in Houston, it's prosecutors who tell the scientists what avenues of inquiry are "probative" -- in other words, prosecutors tell the scientists what questions to ask, not defense attorneys. If defense counsel want to ask their own scientific questions - for example, to perform tests that might exclude the defendant as a suspect - the defendant must pay for outside lab testing, or convince a reluctant judge to release the funds.

Forensic science is contextual, not neutral, and outside the classroom it's always employed with a purpose. In court, innocent people get roped in by bad science largely because the purpose of the science is to convict, not to exonerate.

It's not as though authorities aren't fully aware that's the problem. Two years ago the House Research Organization issued a report (pdf) that offered more substantive proposals that might actually help innocent clients falsely accused by DPS forensic scientists. I described some of their recommendations in this Grits post:

the state should spend more money for defendants, many of whom are indigent, to pay for lab work and scientific investigations to refute shoddy state crime lab work. In other words, let the adversarial system flesh out the truth. What a novel concept. Of all the proposals cited by HRO, that's the one most likely to force the system to right itself.

Another proposal: expanding defendants' discovery access to information about crime lab tests, allowing defendants to obtain labs' error rates through discovery and making the information admissible during trial. That might almost finish some of these labs.

Finally HRO noted that crime scene investigators and crime lab workers don't have any particular, special training, and suggested some sort of formal accreditation process for those often-civilian workers.

None of those suggestons made it into CJAC's recommendations - in fact, rather than paying to train crime lab workers, CJAC proposed no new training and fat raises.

Is there any wonder why these problems haven't been solved yet?

Abbott sues broker over disclosing consumers' cell phone records

I know Rep. Pena will be glad to learn that Attorney General Greg Abbott filed suit yesterday against an online broker for selling consumers' private cell phone records. This should set the table nicely for Pena's legislation he's preparing on the subject. According to the AG's website:

The lawsuit alleges that for $125, the company will obtain a person’s phone record history, including the number of calls made and received, the duration of calls, dates and times, and other private information. ...

The Attorney General’s investigation revealed that USA Skiptrace does not follow legal protocols such as subpoenas in obtaining these records, nor do consumers whose information is being requested receive notification of the activity. In fact, [owner John] Strange boasts in his email correspondence that “we never contact the owners of phone numbers searched” and that the “owner has no way of knowing about the search or who ordered it.”

This appears to be a civil suit, not a criminal prosecution.

Via Fergie's Tech Blog.

Attorney for innocent convict gets media props

The Houston Chronicle today published a nice write up of attorney Eric Davis, the lawyer who got a wrongfully convicted defendant named Arthur Mumphrey out of prison last month. (The case was discussed by Grits here.) Congrats to Mr. Davis on the coverage, and on a job well done.

Governor's Advisory Council Ignores Big Problems to Focus on Pork

Upon examining the recommendations to Governor Rick Perry from his Criminal Justice Advisory Council appointed last year, I find I can take credit up front for the following prognostication made in October after attending one of their meetings:

All the parties ... were there with their hands out. The unions wanted money for training, the chiefs wanted grants for in-car cameras, DA [Barry] Macha wanted centralized crime-scene analysis -- so the special interests only could identify problems that could be solved by giving THEM more money. ...

When Governor Perry first appointed this panel, I suggested he was "passing the buck." Now it's clear who he was passing it to: the same special interests who created this mess in the first place.

I couldn't have called the result more precisely. The Governor's criminal justice advisors essentially suggested only pork barrel solutions to the state's problems, and ignored the bigger issues that require fiscal restraint to solve instead of more, more, ever more spending. (But the Governor says he wants new property tax cuts, right?!)

Texas' criminal justice system faces an overincarceration crisis that this group completely ignored, which to be fair is how the Governor has dealt with the problem, too - Texas' prisons are full to the brim, our probation and parole systems are broken and dysfunctional, and the state hasn't budgeted enough to pay for incarcerating those already in the system. Nothing in CJAC's recommendations addressed that central institutional crisis. Why not? You'd have to ask the Council, or the Governor, or maybe Mary Ann Wiley who advises him on these topics. The disconnect, to me, begs explanation.

So who is advising the Governor on the state's most important criminal justice questions? Whoever it is, it's not the Criminal Justice Advisory Council, which appears focused more on pork than process.

Where CJAC's recommendations address real crises, the solutions proposed were to throw money at institutional players represented on the council itself, but in most cases wouldn't resolve the problems even if fully implemented. By my estimate, CJAC proposed somewhere between $25-$30+ milllion in new spending (including major capital expenditure to pay for new or expanded DNA labs) over the next biennial budget cycle, and proposed new life sentences for sex offenders that would cost many millions more in the out years.

By contrast, where CJAC studied substantive questions like the need for a state-funded public defender system or reforms to eyewitness procedures, they recommended, well, more study. How many more innocent people must be convicted before Texas decides to quit "studying" problems we've been studying for years and begins to enact real reforms? This report does not tell us. There's really no way to know. We'll have to study it some more and get back to you.

Next up: Analyzing CJAC's recommendations on crime labs.

From Hearne to Ruby Ridge to international spying, snitches too often accuse innocents

Those interested in the subject of confidential informants or "snitches" will want to read Charley Reese's column entitled "Government Informants," published February 4 on LewRockwell.com. I've written a lot about problems with snitches in everyday criminal law enforcement, particularly in drug cases like the Hearne debacle in Texas, but Reese makes the point that the same problems that show up there plague informant use by intelligence agencies. A taste:

One point many people often don't understand is that CIA officers are not spies. They are "case officers." Their job is to recruit spies (informants) and funnel the information back to the analysts.

Naturally, every country tries to depict its spies as noble people opposed to tyranny rather than people trapped and blackmailed, soreheads and neurotics or simply greedy opportunists. Often, informants working for money in domestic criminal cases will actually entrap some innocent person. That's how the sorry episode of Randy Weaver began, which ended with the deaths of his wife, his son and a deputy U.S. marshal in 1992.

A paid informant badgered Weaver, who was hard up for money to feed his family, into illegally sawing off a shotgun, something any 8-year-old with a hacksaw and a vice can do. The idea was to arrest him, threaten him with a long prison sentence and then coerce him into becoming a federal informant. It was a federal cluster you-know-what from start to finish.

This is a short preface to the current problem of domestic spying. The Bush administration says it only intercepts calls from terrorists. OK, how does the Bush administration know that somebody in Europe or the Middle East is a terrorist? Terrorists don't walk around the street with little name tags identifying them and their organization. They don't call people and say: "Hi, al-Qaida calling. Can I interest you in a bomb-making kit?"

The answer is an informant or some other country's intelligence agency. The first thing you know is that this person is a terrorist suspect. If anyone had proof that he was a real terrorist, he would be arrested. You can get some idea of how unreliable these suspect lists are by the instances of pop stars, U.S. senators, babies and other innocent people winding up on the U.S. terrorist watch list because of bureaucratic goof-ups.

See the rest here. Most people trust law enforcement, just like most people trust our national security apparatus. But do we trust all their snitches? Hardly. Reese's point - that trusting agents and their snitches becomes synonymous, in practice - rarely surfaces in the public debate at the local or international level. It explains a lot of the worst abuses, though, from petty drug cases to Randy Weaver on up.

TX Governor's Criminal Justice Advisory Council Report Released

The biggest news: A recommendation to "study the feasibility of establishing a state funded public defender office."

The press release is here and the full report is here (Word doc). I'll take a closer look and blog about its contents, hopefully, later this week.

UPDATE: See initial coverage from the Houston Chronicle, the Associated Press and the San Antonio Express News.

'Reality of task force's closure beginning to set in for officials'

Reports the Lufkin Daily News:

"Up until this point, we have been trying to salvage our task force operations," Nacogdoches County Sheriff Thomas Kerss said. "We've been lobbying to keep it going, but now it doesn't look like that will be a possibility."

If this news is any indication, by March Texas' Tulia-style drug task forces may all be gone for good. See Grits' prior drug task force coverage.

Via TDCAA.

Screwing prison guards out of overtime short-sighted

One out of four Texas prison guards will quit their jobs this year, and I understand why. Pay sucks, especially compared to street cops, and they work longer hours in a depressing, overcrowded, dangerous environment. It's frankly hard to imagine who would want to be a prison guard in Texas if they could possibly find other work.

Adding insult to inury, now Texas has quit paying most guards overtime according to an item by Mike Ward in the Austin Statesman I meant to post about a couple of weeks ago ("Prison workers overtime held back," Jan. 15). That's unbelievably short-sighted - a recipe for driving away your employees in droves. Reported Ward:

"It's one more reason to find another job, and a lot of people are doing that," explained Arlan Foster, 53, an eight-year veteran correctional officer and union leader at the Plane State Jail outside Dayton, east of Houston. "Making people work overtime and then not paying them is not a good way to keep good people, even if the law allows that." ...

Texas' prison system, the second-largest in the United States, has approximately 23,500 correctional officers. At the end of November, it needed another 2,700 to be fully staffed.

At the prisons, the vacancies mean that guards must cover more than one gate, that convicts don't get to use recreation yards, that two officers are assigned to housing units instead of three, that some "pickets" — guard towers — might temporarily go unstaffed.

"That means people have to do more on their shift, cover more inmates, do more," Foster said. "We used to work eight-hour shifts. Now we're working 12-hour shifts, four days on and four days off. If you've ever worked 12-hour shifts in this environment, you know how tiring that schedule is. All you do is work, go home and sleep (and) come back to work.

"Fatigue definitely becomes a factor."

Between 500 and 600 correctional officers quit each month. That necessitates increased recruiting and training programs that, officials concede, at best just keep pace with turnover, which was 23 percent in 2005. But working in a prison is a high-stress job, they quickly add, and the Texas Youth Commission, the only other agency with correctional staffs, had a turnover rate of 32 percent last year.

"We're doing better (on retention and recruiting) than we were," Johnson said. "We hire every two weeks now. . . . We've added six more recruiters. Staffing over the past four months has improved."

Still, the view among correctional staff members is that the working environment at prisons has gotten progressively worse during the past two years: The number of vacant jobs has increased, wardens have extended shifts to stretch staffing, and guards at some prisons are not allowed to go home after their shifts end because the incoming shift has too many vacant positions.

Blame the Governor, in part, for vetoing legislation that could have reduced prison overcrowding, and the Legislature for not adequately budgeting guards' pay.

But in the big picture the situation had grown untenable well before they made those bad decisions last year. Our prisons are jam packed and there's no money to build more or even adequately staff the ones we've got. Most Texas prisoners committed nonviolent offenses to get there, but sentences are so long that often violent offenders must be released to make room. Texas needs to set priorities, to better distinguish which offenders really need to be incarcerated and which ones could be supervised through stronger probation or other alternatives to incarceration. As retiring state Rep. Ray Allen says, we need to better distinguish between those we're afraid of, and those we're only mad at.

We'd better start soon, while Texas can still find enough people willing to take these crappy jobs. Once we can't, then what will we do?

More on ACLU, guns and 'traveling' in Texas

(Cross-posted from ACLU of Texas' Liberty Blog.)

Roddy Stinson of the San Antonio Express News had a column Sunday ("State's new gun-toting law has surprise backer: ACLU," Feb. 5) remarking on ACLU of Texas' support for a new law presuming drivers are "traveling" and therefore legally carrying a gun in their car if they are (1) in a private motor vehicle, (2) not engaged in criminal activity, (3) not prohibited by law from possessing a firearm, (4) not a member of a "criminal street gang" and (5) not carrying the handgun "in plain view." Wrote Stinson:

Somebody check the weather in Hades. Snowflakes must be falling on Beelzebub's head.

Whether this conservative turn is an ACLU aberration or a step in the right-wing direction won't be known for a while. But news of the organization's loose-gun-control stance will surely cause a few spluttering Sunday morning readers to lose their coffee.

If you say so, Roddy. I should mention up front that the Texas State Rifle Association and the National Rifle Association were the real powers behind this legislation. ACLU of Texas supported the bill, but those groups did all the heavy lifting and deserve the lion's share of credit. That said, I was proud of ACLU of Texas for supporting the legislation -- to me it shows the group is about protecting everybody's rights, not just liberals or conservatives.

Stinson seemed surprised I'd think that legislators wanted people to be able to carry weapons even when they were going short distances, not just on the "open road." But as I also told him, I based that on legislators' comments at the public hearing in the House of Representatives in support of the bill, not just on my own say-so.

Without interpreting the law as including shorter trips, it would be legal to own a gun in your home, legal to possess it at a gun range, but illegal to carry it in your car from your home to the gun range. That's just an irrational conundrum, penalizing law abiding gun owners simply for carrying legal property in their car.

That's what legislators were trying to fix, as far as I could tell, and it's certainly why ACLU of Texas supported this statute. The new law rationalizes gun owners rights while giving law enforcement plenty of tools to arrest someone who legally shouldn't be carrying a gun. I'm glad ACLU of Texas supported it.

Nobody knows how the courts will interpret the new law, but the legislative intent on this bill isn't hard to discover. Here's an account of that hearing I wrote afterward on Grits for Breakfast:

Testifying on behalf of ACLU of Texas at a meeting of the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, I spoke in favor of HB 823 by Keel, which I discussed [earlier], allowing Texas drivers to carry a firearm in their vehicle. The National Rifle Association was there in force behind it. Like Sputnik from the Motorcycle Rights Association, though, I complained about a change in the committee substitute that defined "traveling" as only occurring when a driver "crosses or intends to cross a county line."

Such language would invite drivers to lie to police officers, I told the committee, since the only defense to carrying a gun in one's car would be to say you're preparing to travel to the next county. Rep. Debbie Riddle surprised us both, I'd guess, by agreeing with me, declaring that she lived four minutes from the Harris County line north of her home, but didn't feel the need to carry a firearm traveling into Montgomery County. By contrast, she could travel for two hours south through Houston, depending on traffic, without reaching a county line, and she felt more like she needed personal protection for that trip.

I argued that current law encouraged unnecessary and unproductive vehicle searches because police officers considered even legal guns contraband. If guns were legal to own they should be legal to transport, and gun owners shouldn't be harassed. The current statute is an example of what Michael Quinn Sullivan of the Texas Public Policy Foundation has called the "criminalization of civil life," I told them. Public safety isn't the issue. If I were packing a gun in the committee meeting that evening, I said, the committeemembers wouldn't be one bit less safe because I don't want to shoot anybody. Similarly, police wouldn't be less safe because law abiding gun owners don't pose a risk, and they're already in jeopardy from the bad guys.

Chairman Terry Keel, R-Austin, the bill sponsor, said the definition of "traveling" for the purpose of carrying a firearm in your vehicle had been debated for years but never adequately resolved, and asked how I would solve it. I suggested deleting the county line nonsense, simply defining "traveling" as when someone is in a private motor vehicle, is not "otherwise engaged in criminal activity," and is "otherwise entitled or eligible to possess a firearm" - language that was already in his bill. In essence, that means that if you legally own a gun and don't intend to use it to commit a crime, you could legally transport it wherever you want in your car. After conferring a moment with his colleagues, Keel announced he would accept ACLU's suggestion. I replied that he should take it and run with it.

Here's the link to the video from the hearing (the bill starts at 9:55 p.m.). See for yourself if you think I'm accurately interpreting what legislators intended. I just don't know how else one could view Rep. Riddle's comments declaring she wanted to be able to carry protection driving from the suburbs into Houston.

Texas senators added the part about the gun not being in plain view because they worried about incidents where someone might be in a drive-through at a fast food venue or a bank where the gun could be mistaken as serving some nefarious purpose. I doubt such mundane considerations would have come into play if they meant that guns in vehicles should only be legal on "the open road."

For more on Texas ACLU's efforts to monitor implementation of this law, see this earlier Liberty Blog post.

More on reducing dangerous high-speed police chases

Following up on an earlier Grits post, here's a neat technological idea that would dramatically reduce the number of dangerous and unnecessary high speed chases by police - "an air-propelled miniature dart equipped with a global positioning device. Once fired from a patrol car, it sticks to a fleeing motorist's vehicle and emits a radio signal to police." Via CrimProf Blog and Boing Boing.

I wish the truth would hurry up and tie its shoes

Tell a lie often enough, maybe even get a few hack politicians to repeat the mantra along with you, and the media will report it even when they know it's false. That's the big lesson from the "debate" in Texas over border security. Most recently we find this AP story quoting a deputy sheriff spreading misinformation about the terrorist threat at the border:

A Texas sheriff's deputy warned U.S. legislators drug-traffickers are helping terrorists with possible al-Qaida ties cross the porous Texas-Mexico border into the United States.

Terry Simons, chief deputy in Val Verde County, Texas, offered little evidence publicly of his claims. An FBI special agent in Houston, Shauna Dunlap, said there's "no credible evidence" that supports the warning.

Simons, part of a group that has been pushing state and U.S. officials for more law-enforcement funding on the border, told congressmen meeting in Houston that Texas authorities have learned of newly established camps in Mexico, where so-called "narco-terrorists" are being trained in "escape and evasion, as well as fighting techniques and combat manoeuvring."

Simons also said the FBI has informed the border sheriffs suspects with Islamic backgrounds - and possibly al-Qaida ties - are training with them.

Simons and other members of the Texas Border Sheriffs Coalition outlined the threat in a presentation to U.S. Representative John Culberson, a Republican from Texas, and Representative James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican.

"We need more boots on the ground," Simons said.

"The thing we're facing, it's a war."

Is it really? Or is Deputy Simons just full of crap? Over and over headlines trumpet false claims of Al Qaeda crossing into Texas, while further down in the story (or in future, less well publicized retractions) we're told it's just not true.

I understand why special interests looking to boost their pork barrel funding would spread lies and manufacture threats to justify increased budgets - anybody who's been around government much sees that kind of behavior from bureaucrats at every level. What I don't understand is why the media go ahead and report it after they fact check the story by going to the source - in this case the FBI - and discover it's not true. To me, once the reporter checked with the FBI, which was the deputy's only source, and found out the fellow's claims had no factual basis, the story should have been killed by AP's editors because it's not news. Not real news, anyway.

AP should leave the fake news to Jon Stewart.

Even police officers on the border - at least the ones who don't have their lips firmly attached to the money teat - think the dangers are being overhyped. The San Antonio Express News reported recently on how the $6 million Texas Governor Rick Perry devoted to the much-ballyhooed Operation Linebacker is being spent, and discovered that many cops on the Texas-Mexico border think threats are being overstated:

Although sheriffs embrace the funds, there are back-room rumblings from border police departments and even from within some sheriff's offices that Operation Linebacker is a golden goose for underfunded departments more than it is a border security plan. ...

"The situation isn't as bad as they're saying. They're using the danger in Mexico to their advantage to fund their departments," said one border city police officer, referring to ongoing drug war violence on the border.

"In the process, they're scaring everyone," said the officer, who asked that his name and department not be used to avoid a breakdown in cooperation with the sheriffs.

Jay Johnson, owner of a Del Rio bed-and-breakfast who dedicates himself to border tourism, said the sheriffs did well to receive the funding, but that they overstated the threat from Mexico.

"I know the sheriff and respect the sheriff, but I believe certain comments paint a picture that's quite unfair when it comes to our sister city of Acuña, even if it does bolster his argument for funds," he said.

Scared people will pay for protection, so baselessly hyping fear will probably get border sheriffs the pork barrel funding they're looking for in the short term. But let's not kid ourselves that anybody's safer as a result. The Canadian border is easily a bigger threat for terrorists to enter the country. In that sense, it's hard not to see fabricated claims of terrorists crossing from Mexico as anything but nativist xenophobia - a disgraceful diversion from more significant security concerns that likely makes us less safe.

Earlier I quoted Mark Twain who opined that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can tie its shoes - I wish the truth would hurry and get those suckers laced up!

Logorrheic law profs on punishment law and policy

I attended this morning a symposium on "Punishment Law and Policy" sponsored by the Texas Law Review, specifically a panel on the subject of "Modern Crime Control Mechanisms" featuring Yale academics Dan Kahan and Donald Braman, and Jonathon Simons from UC Berkeley. It was interesting enough, I suppose, but as one audience member leaned over and said to me during Kahan's presentation, "logorrhea" was perhaps the defining characteristic of the event. Smart as they were, none of these fellows knew how to use four words to describe a concept that they could confuse using forty.

Still, the ideas discussed were useful, so I'll try to translate the highlights into more people-friendly prose.

Kahan presented on the subject of shaming sanctions, recanting his advocacy of them over the last decade after enduring withering criticism from liberals in the academy. Kahan first supported shaming sanctions, he said, because he thought the system needed more alternatives to incarceration. He'd considered shaming punishments viable because they convey the public's disapprobation of crime without the high social costs involved with incarceration. Fair enough. He'd backed off that position, he said, because those with "egalitarian" or "individualist" philosophies disapproved of them, including numerous people he respected.

If those advocating incarceration alternatives, he said, didn't support shaming sanctions (and obviously the tough on crime crowd prefers incarceration over any alternative), then maybe it was time to look for a different approach. Kahan came to believe the problem stemmed from differences in "cultural cognition," which is a high-falutin' way of saying that people's values inform their political positions in different ways. Well, duh! Welcome to politics, Mr. Kahan!

Kahan's past endorsement of shaming was essentially a political ploy, to hear him tell it -- an effort to come up with punishments besides incarceration that could be politically sold to the right wing. In doing so, though, he said shaming proposals ignored the values of liberals and thus didn't provide a stable platform for reform. By contrast, prison's meaning is more ambiguous, allowing people of different political stripes to find ways to support it for different reasons -- some because it's punitive, some because it's (theoretically) rehabilitative, some because it incapacitates the offenders, and some because it humiliates or shames them.

Kahan argued that alternatives to incarceration need to express condemnation more ambiguously than shaming, allowing people with different values to simultaneously tell different stories about the what the punishment means in ways that affirm their own values. I thought that was a pretty good point. It's not simple to craft proposals with appeal across value systems, but when it can be done it's the best way to push reform in the political arena.

Concepts of "restorative justice," Kahan said, more readily fit the bill. They're seen as less punitive by liberals, but many conservatives see them as another brand of shaming aimed at placating the victim, whose moral authority in the equation they see as definitive.

(Doc Berman, BTW, has written extensively on the subject of shaming, including a number of excellent posts linked here.)

Donald Braman's presentation discussed his research into what people in poor communities want from punishment, as opposed, he said, to what liberal or conservative politicos think. He said poor folks wanted punishments to focus on helping offenders better contribute to society and reducing the collateral consequences of punishment. Instead of focusing on criminals' rights, he said, poor folks want to force offenders into more beneficial behaviors, especially drug treatment, job training, and literacy programs. These approaches, Braman said,

• Reinforce "pro-social norms" while incarceration erodes them,
• Protect pro-social relationships, especially family and employment relationships, and
• Are perceived by the community as just and fair.

Braman said in public opinion surveys 90% of the public supports these types of punishments as alternatives to incarceration, and that the level of support varies very little across political philosophies or partisan affiliation.

His most concrete proposal, though, struck me as one of those ivory tower moments that make you wish law professors made it into the courtroom more often. He thought that prior to sentencing, jurors should be polled to determine what they thought would be the most just, effective sentence, then that information should be aggregated through sentencing commissions to generate recommendations for new incarceration alternatives. The big problem: Virtually no criminal cases any more ever go to a jury. In Texas, e.g., 99+% of all cases today are resolved through plea bargains.

Jonathon Simons' presentation argued that Americans' view of punishment, even in its most punitive forms, stemmed from a "positivist" view, or a desire to protect society, to "keep them away from us," rather than an overarching desire to punish. In recent decades, he said, a "neoclassical" view of crime emerged which considers crminality essentially in market terms -- raising the "cost" of crime by increasing the penalty should cause it to go down. Now, he said, elite opinion was heading back toward a "neopositivist" view.

Beginning with this framework, he delved into the obscure work of Italian criminologist, Cesare Lombroso, who pioneered the "positivist" approach to criminology in the late 19th century. Virtually all of Lombroso's findings have been debunked, he pointed out, and many were facile, foolish or overtly racist. But Simons argued that Lombroso left behind a three-part legacy:

• Criminality is defined not by its relation to the law but by its relation to normality - the perception of criminals as definably, measurably different from the rest of us, he said, can be traced to Lombroso.
• Criminology is the most "political" of the social sciences. (Simons said criminology is so politicized that it sometimes is confused as being "apolitical" because the politics are so infused in the fabric of its study.)
• The object of criminology is construction of the nation, to overcome regional and social difference to embrace what's common among us.

I have to say, though I was interested in his historical diversions about Lombroso, I thought Simons' analysis too facile to be very useful. I think most folks have mixed feelings about crime and punishment, rooted in lots of different cultural values and sources that intermingle and sometimes contradict one another. The theoretical labels, in the context of such a complex cultural melange, just don't help all that much. In that sense, I found Kahan's advocacy of ambiguity in one's philosophical approach a better fit for the political arena. What's really needed isn't to identify and label the dominant philosophies of the day, but to craft proposals with which various philosophical approaches can all be comfortable.

Now if we can just get these fellows to all read George Orwell's essay on Politics and the English Language, and implement his suggestions, all the brainpower in that room might actually be of use to somebody out in the world.

More counties grumbling at backlog of incompetent defendants in Texas jails

Following up on a story first covered on Grits a couple of weeks ago, there are more complaints in the press about defendants who've been declared mentally incompetent languishing in Texas jails waiting for state hospital beds to open up. Every time this gets covered we learn a little more about the problem. Reports the Waco Herald Tribune ("New state policy limiting criminal psychiatric beds has local officials upset," Feb. 3):

The majority of criminal commitments are for people who have been found incompetent to stand trial. That means they don't understand the charges against them and cannot aid in their defense.

On average, such competency patients are hospitalized for 85 days, officials say. But some stay longer.

The rest of the forensic population is even slower to treat. They are people who have been found not guilty by reason of insanity, and their treatment often lasts for years, if not their lifetime.

[Barbara] Tate, the head of the local MHMR, estimated that it will now take several months to move someone from a local jail to a state hospital. In the past, the process usually only took a few days, she said. ...

“We should not be holding these people because this is not a place (designed) to do that,” [McLennan County Sheriff Larry] Lynch said. “It's kind of scary. We are not trained to do this ... but they keep forcing it on us.”

If the Sheriff is scared, imagine how the inmates must feel. Local officials are also increasingly fearful of growing costs. According to the San Antonio Express News ("New state rule adds to Bexar jail burden," Feb. 2), in addition to treatment costs in the jail, when space finally opens up counties must now fork over travel expenses to transfer incompetent inmates to faraway locales because hospitals near the big cities are full up.

The county will have to take such inmates to Kerrville if beds are available. If not, they'll have to go as far as El Paso, Vernon, Rusk or Big Spring.

That means shelling out up to $1,000 per overnight trip with two deputies, said Deputy Chief Dennis McKnight.

Bexar County deputies took forensic patients to San Antonio State Hospital 190 times last year, McKnight said.

"If we do 190 next year" to the four more distant hospitals, "that's $190,000 that's getting dumped on the taxpayers all of a sudden," he said.

That's in addition to treatment costs for those waiting in the jail to be transferred. What's more, even when they are transferred, reported the Express News, the new arrangement will mean they get less appropriate care than health professionals prefer, because new doctors must get up to speed on each case. Some mental health professionals say it was better for public safety when more of the severely mentally ill were permanently institutionalized:

If the patients caught in the current revolving-door system of state mental health care go to a new hospital each time, they'll be strangers, making treatment harder, said Dr. John Sparks, medical director of detention health care services

And their commitment begins on the day of the judge's ruling — so if it does take longer to get them to treatment, it's that much less time they have to get better before their next hearing before Carruthers. New hearings mean more costly trips, McKnight noted, although he hopes the county can buy video conferencing to cut that cost.

To Garcia, it's just part of a decades-long erosion of state care for the mentally ill that leaves them no home but jail.

"A lot of these chronic schizophrenics, they were living at the state hospital with room and board, smoking cigarettes. They never got into trouble," he said.

I'm not sure I support permanent institutionalization of the mentally ill -- with new generation medications and proper support, in theory most should be able to function outside hospitals or prisons. But since Texas' de-institutionalized these folks many years ago, dumping them in the streets, basically, with no means to support themselves or maintain their treatment regimens, now the only means for getting them help is through the criminal justice system. That's an unmitigated tragedy.

The Waco paper offered up a fine editorial on the topic ("Fiscal Psychosis," Feb. 3), demanding that Texas' Legislative Budget Board step up and find emergency funds needed to fix the problem. Their commentary, I thought, hit the nail on the head:

This is not just an issue about the handling of one segment of our mentally ill population. It's about Texas' general unwillingness to meet the needs of the mentally ill.

Mental health advocates say the problem goes beyond psychiatric hospitals per se to community mental health services in general, where Texas ranks 47th in per capita spending.

“When individuals with mental illnesses get mental health treatment in their communities, they are less likely to deteriorate and end up involved with the criminal justice system,” said Lynn Lasky Clark of the Mental Health Association in Texas.

Clark said law enforcement officers sometimes drive mental health patients across the state for hospitalization because of a lack of local mental health services.

Texas should put more of its faith and its resources into mental health services that can treat people and keep them out of jail.

But when they land in jail and a judge says that's not the place for them, they shouldn't be there.

Damn straight. This issue seems to be picking up steam, doesn't it? I don't know that the Legislative Budget Board has the authority or more importantly the ready cash to fix the problem, but if Texas makes it through another special session without ponying up more money, the state probably risks civil rights litigation on behalf of these inmates, whose rights have already been stripped from them by a judge.

UPDATE: More from the McAllen Monitor

See prior Grits coverage of this topic:

• Chincy state hospital funding leaves mentally incompetent defendants stranded
• Unfunded mandate: Counties struggle to pay for mentally incompetent inmates' care
• Blog Activism: How it's supposed to work
• Meth use may be boosting criminal commitments to psych hospitals

Burglar alarm subsidies harm taxpayers, public safety

Maybe another reason police are solving fewer violent crimes than ever before is that they're spending so much time chasing down false burglar alarms. Dallas PD has decided to stop responding to commercial burglar alarms until alarm companies verify a crime was committed at the business. Dallas police say 97% of such calls are false alarms. In other cities, the false alarm rate tops 99%. Even when a crime has been committed, it's extremely rare for police to find a burglar still on the premises when they arrive. Such "verified response" policies save police departments in other jurisdictions huge sums, and free up officer resource to pursue actual criminals.

Alarm companies profits stem from massive, regressive taxpayer subsidies -- police respond to the alarms, after all, not the companies who get the money. Taxpayers should welcome DPD's common sense policy, and the city should extend it to residential alarms -- that'd be the equivalent of putting dozens of new officers on the street without raising taxes or reducing public safety in the least.

Drug war focus lets violent criminals go unpunished

Is the focus on the so-called drug war by US law enforcement causing clearance rates for burglaries, robberies, rapes and murders to go down? That's the implication of an analysis of FBI crime statistics by former New York corrections official Scott Christianson, published recently in the Christian Science Monitor ("Questioning US arrest statistics," Jan. 18).

We've all heard police and politicos claim credit for reductions in reported crime nationwide over the last decade or so, and there's a certain facile logic to the notion that more arrests should reduce criminality. But from a statistical perspective, it appears police effectiveness has little to do with that decline -- in fact, those who commit serious crimes are less likely to be caught by police today than at any time in modern history. That's because the criminal justice system has empirically become less effective at investigating and solving serious crimes in recent years, even as the number of arrests skyrocketed. According to the Monitor:

discussions of police performance often fail to note another important but overlooked trend, apparently unrelated to the falling crime rate: Federal statistics reveal that the nation's "clearance rate" - the percentage of cases for which police arrest or identify a suspect - has fallen dramatically. And this shift is fraught with implications.

The arrest clearance rate for reported homicides recently dropped to about 60 percent compared with about 90 percent 50 years ago. This means that a murderer today has about a 40 percent chance of avoiding arrest compared with less than 10 percent in 1950. The record for other FBI Index Crimes is even more dismal: The clearance rates have sunk to 42 percent for forcible rape, 26 percent for robbery, and 13 percent for burglary and motor vehicle theft, all way down from earlier eras.

Can you believe that? At a time when blustering politicos call for "zero tolerance" on drugs, 87% of burglaries and 58% of rapes go unsolved. Why in the world would we prefer to tolerate those crimes in order to crack down on drugs? That's exactly what this article says is happening:

So, if reported crime has been going down and arrests have gone up, what accounts for the plummeting arrest clearance rates for murder, robbery, rape, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft?

Part of the answer must involve drug law enforcement - victimless offenses that aren't reported to the police or included as FBI Index Crimes. Instead of arresting suspects for burglaries and other serious reported crimes, cops today spend much of their energy going after illegal drugs. Their arrest rate for drug possession (especially marijuana) has shot up more than 500 times from what it was in 1965.

And what are some possible implications of this shift?

For one thing, it may give criminals the impression they can get away with nondrug related crimes.

For another, it may lessen public support for the police. Polls show those who live in "high crime" neighborhoods are generally the most dissatisfied with the police. Maybe this is because they have reported to the police that they have been victimized by robbery and other serious crimes, then witnessed that the police are not arresting anyone for it but are instead aggressively waging a "war on drugs" in the community.

Nevertheless, the matter of falling arrest clearance rates hasn't received much scrutiny from the police or the public.

Maybe it hasn't received scrutiny, but it should - especially since our prisons are overflowing with nonviolent offenders to the point where violent felons must be released to make room. Christianson says this trend should prompt "serious discussion" of law enforcement's priorities -- I'd say it should prompt a radical overhaul, and soon, before violent crime rates climb again and we're all wondering why.

New PD office should improve "Law West of the Pecos"

In Del Rio, Val Verde County officials are about to enact one of the most important changes in their criminal justice system since Judge Roy Bean declared himself the "Law West of the Pecos."

Val Verde recently received a fat grant from the Texas Task Force on Indigent Defense to launch a new public defender office that should help control attorney costs and jail overcrowding ("County to get public defender program," Del Rio News-Herald, Jan. 22). They're hoping the new office will cover up to three other counties besides Val Verde, making it the first regional public defender in the state. The job may wind up being contracted out to a nonprofit legal services group. Reported the News-Herald:

According to figures provided by the task force, Val Verde County’s expenses in providing legal representation for persons who cannot afford attorneys when they are charged with a criminal offense have risen 83 percent since the state passed the Fair Defense Act in 2001.

In Fiscal Year 2001, the county spent $176,404 on indigent defense.

In Fiscal Year 2005, it shelled out $323,659.

The $470,304 grant provided to the county through the Task Force on Indigent Defense will help the county set up a regional public defender program that will serve both Val Verde County and neighboring Edwards County.

“Two other counties, Terrell and Kinney, will be offered the opportunity to participate. The program will be implemented either as a county department or a non-profit corporation,” said Bryan Wilson, grants administrator for the Task Force on Indigent Defense.

“A request for proposals (RFP) will be issued by commissioners court in accordance with the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure. The county’s current preference is for a non-profit corporation. If a non-profit is awarded this contract, it will be the first time in Texas that indigent defense would be provided in this manner,” Wilson added.

Wilson also noted that “it will be the first time in Texas that a regional solution for constitutional effective assistance of counsel has been provided in a formal program.”

Regular readers know I'm a fan of public defenders' offices, especially compared to the sorry, court-appointed system many Texas counties operate under now, where indigent clients too often receive inadequate representation from attorneys who aren't really paid enough to care. That doesn't mean every attorney who accepts court appointed clients does a bad job -- not at all. I know some first-rate lawyers who give court-appointed clients the identical representation they do to those who pay them. But in aggregate, the results are spotty, inconsistent from client to client in comparison to public defenders.

By contrast, PDs typically provide more consistent, zealous defense than appointed systems. What's more, they save counties money on indigent defense costs, and help reduce jail overcrowding by advocating more frequently for personal bonds and processing cases faster through the system.

A little birdie told me that the nonprofit group being considered to run the public defenders office is Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, a quality outfit that seems like a good fit for the border region.

Meth use may be boosting criminal commitments to psych hospitals

In Wichita Falls, the Times Record News reports, the failure of the state to fund psychiatric hospital space for criminal commitments is contributing to jail overcrowding ("Space may get tighter," Feb. 1):

Finding a space at state hospitals has always been hard, Sheriff Tom Callahan said.

"It just means they'll back up more into the county jail. That's probably not an appropriate place for them to be ... We're not designed to handle the mentally ill on a long-term basis."

The change could be costly, too.

"Lord help us from having to transport somebody from here to El Paso. That's a long ride," he said. "Obviously it's a funding problem and the Legislature has to correct it."

Grits for Breakfast actually broke this story a couple of weeks ago after an attorney left a comment about the plight of one of his clients. As a result of that post, Advocacy Inc. got involved with the issue. Then the Fort Worth Star Telegram followed up with a terrific story over the weekend.

In Wichita Falls, the Record-News reports, officials view meth abuse as a major driver for criminal commitments, which is an aspect of the problem I hadn't heard about before. The director of the local mental health center advocated:

focusing on ways law enforcement assess mental health needs and ensuring such inmates get processed and out of the hospital as quickly as possible. Meth use is also an option to tackle, Atkins said.

"A lot of our admissions that end up going to the state hospital have methamphetamine problems," he said.

If meth abuse is really what's driving criminal commitments, local officials will need to change their draconian, lock-em-up approach to focus more on prevention and drug treatment. Since their drug task force won't be getting Byrne grants anymore, maybe Wichita County officials should apply to use that money to pay for drug courts and drug treatment services, as other counties have done. Bottom line: The criminal justice system just isn't equpped to deal with serious substance abuse or mental health problems, not through incarceration alone.

For too long Texas has chosen to deal with difficult health problems like mental illness and substance abuse with police and prisons instead of doctors and clinics. Obviously now we've reached a crisis point.

Era of Tulia-style drug task forces coming to an end in Texas?

Scandals, mismanagement and skewed priorities at Texas drug task forces paid for by the federal Byrne grant program appear to finally be catching up to the rogue units. More have announced they'll close shop at the end of March when Governor Rick Perry will reportedly shut off their funds. In a major shift, Texas' Governor has chosen to spend that money on other critical programs like drug courts and border security.

"The Byrne Grant no longer exists to fund narcotics task forces solely," Anderson County Sheriff Greg Taylor told the Palestine Herald Press ("Area law authorities plan drug war strategy," Jan. 30) . That's a victory for civil rights groups and others who've pushed for the past several years to get rid of these odd pseudo-agencies altogether.

I've reported earlier how Perry's announcement already forced the closure of most drug task forces in the state - there were 49 at the time the Tulia scandals occurred, and today the number has dwindled to the mid-teens. The latest casualty - the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force based in Palestine, TX - should be well-known to long-time Grits readers, especially its history of racially skewed drug enforcement. Reports the Herald-Press :

Anderson County, the City of Palestine and others throughout the state are in the process of developing a new strategy in waging the war on drugs.

As of March 31, the federal Byrne Grant which has been the primary source of funding for the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force expires. Participants in the multi-jurisdictional task force include Anderson County; City of Palestine; Houston County; and Cherokee County.

While the participating city and county entities have historically contributed either an officer's salary or cash, the Dogwood Trails Narcotics Task Force has been chiefly funded through the Byrne Grant. Although the federal share has steadily dwindled in recent years, the local task force received a total of $565,901 during its 2004-05 fiscal year, with $416,483 coming from the Byrne Grant and the remainder from local sources.

So the money teat has run dry, it seems, for Texas' Tulia-style drug task forces. That's a good thing. The money can be spent on many different types of programs, including drug courts, drug treatment programs or strengthening probation.

Dogwood Trails ofificials hope to keep up a multi-county drug task force even after losing 74% of their budget, the Herald Press reports:

The sheriff made it clear Anderson County and the City of Palestine remain "committed" to providing resources to fund some type of narcotics task force. At what level that task force will operate is a question that only time will answer. ...

"Our first goal is to have a multi-jurisdictional task force (two or more counties) like we do now," Taylor said. "The difference will be there will be no (federal) funding."

I find it especially interesting that local officials would choose to continue multi-county task forces after the federal funding ends. Under a new state law, drug task forces that operate in more than one county must fall under the supervisory authority of the Texas Department of Public Safety or lose their asset forfeiture income. I wouldn't think local officials would want to submit to those rules if they weren't required to do so to receive grant money.

The North Texas Narcotics Task Force based in Wichita Falls is also fretting over what to do when the well runs dry.

In just a couple of months we'll know how many, if any, Tulia-style drug task forces will remain in business in Texas. My hope: the final number is zero. Stay tuned.