Why does fighting crime in East Austin always mean ramping up the drug war?

How is it that Austin police continue to arrest hundreds of people on petty drug charges in the neighborhoods surrounding the 12th and Chicon corner, but neighborhood groups still complain about underpolicing? Maybe that's the surest sign that past git-tuff efforts like the city's now-defunct "weed and seed" program were misguided and focused on the wrong priorities.

Following up on Jordan Smith's coverage of East Austin policing and prosecution tactics (and Grits' reaction), the Austin Statesman published a related story ("Neighbors, police look for right approach to clean up East Austin neighborhood," July 13) that included this chart (see below the jump) which graphically depicts Austin PD's drug-war myopia when it comes to policing this area (a jurisdiction, btw, which includes Grits' own neighborhood.) Astonishingly, 91% of arrests among the categories listed were for drug and narcotics violations, though most of the public attention has been paid to a handful of episodes of violent crime. If APD is operating under the (common) theory that arresting people for drug crimes preempts other types of offenses, it's not necessarily an effective approach in the 78702 zip code.

There's strong reason to believe most Central East Austin drug busts aren't nabbing "big fish." Though the geographic overlap is not precise, Austin's Krimelabb database recorded that Austin PD made 297 arrests for marijuana possession in 2011 in the 78702 zip code; with another 399 arrests in 2011 for harder drugs - mostly possession - and another 83 delivery arrests sprinkled in. The KrimeLabb database doesn't break out how many of those were less-than-a-gram state jail felony cases, where in many cases probation is mandated by state law on the first offense. Similarly, what proportion of those arrests occurred  at so-called open-air markets, these data do not reveal. But intensified policing in Central East Austin, both historically and almost certainly in the current context, has meant ramping up the drug war through arrests of large numbers of young black men. This is not at all a left-right issue. After all, both the current Travis County DA and her long-time mentor and predecessor, Ronnie Earle, are dyed-in-the wool Democrats and considered the most liberal elected prosecutors in the state. And the Austin City Council members whose priorities guide APD are for the most part yellow-dog Democrats.This particular mumpsimus enjoys a strong, almost unfailing bipartisan consensus (which of course makes the approach and its myriad proponents no less misguided).

Consensus among law enforcement and the political class aside, Grits remains unconvinced such a myopic focus on prosecuting the drug war gets to the heart of crime problems people really care about most. It was remarkable to me that 98% of wiretaps in Texas were used in narcotics cases. The drug war has swallowed up modern American policing, courts, jails, probation rolls, and (to a lesser extent than those other categories) prisons. By contrast, according to KrimeLabb data, Austin police made just five arrests in response to 200 burglary of a residence reports in the 78702 zip code in 2011, and another 5 arrests out of 109 burglaries of non-residences. Due to limited staffing resources for non-uniformed slots, APD's crime scene unit only shows up at less than 40% of reported burglary sites. So it's easy to see from these data which types of offenses Austin PD prioritizes, and the problem is decidedly NOT that there are too few drug arrests made in Central East Austin.