Crappy criminal-justice reporting demonstrates journalism flaws exploited on national stage

“A lie ain’t a side of a story. It’s just a lie.”

                                                                  - Terry Hanning, The Wire

Since the presidential election, the national press has been struggling with the question of what to do when a politician is willing to tell outright lies and make assertions completely contrary to all available evidence. But the truth is, this was a problem long before Donald Trump threw his hat in the presidential ring. And the problem is perhaps worst in local coverage of criminal-justice topics.

Take, for example, this missive from the Bryan-College Station Eagle,  informing us that "the Brazos County Commissioners Court voted this week to approve hiring an additional state prosecutor to study how an extra attorney could help push cases through the criminal justice system."  The justification for the extra expense?

As the population of Brazos County continues to increase, law enforcement will have to continue to respond to an increase in local crime. Space will be set aside in the Brazos County Courthouse after renovations are complete for a fourth district court, to be used when needed. But [District Attorney Jarvis] Parsons said it's important not to go too big, too fast. Hiring more prosecutors could be an intermediary step, he said, one that leaves a much lighter financial footprint. 

"With an increase in populations comes an increase in crime," he said. "The last thing you want is be understaffed to deal with the massive amounts of people who have moved to this area and are going to move to this area."

Here's the problem with that analysis: Crime in Brazos County has gone down, not up, as the population increased. See crime stats for Brazos County for the last decade or so. Not only are rates (crimes per capita) down but also raw numbers for most crimes, and certainly the high-volume ones which occupy prosecutors' workaday duties. Brazos saw 549 burglaries in 2014 compared to a recent high of 1,207 in 2005. Thefts in 2014 were at 1,865, down from a high of 3,140 in 2004. There were 207 assaults in Bryan in 2014 compared to 550 in 2004.

So it's just false for Brazos County officials to pretend that a) crime is rising or b) that the amount of crime inherently rises with population. Neither are true. But the DA can make those claims confident that the reporter will merely quote what was said and not fact check it or hold him accountable.

This example helps explain why Americans believe crime is increasing when really it's falling. Reporters all over the country repeat this pattern every single day, quoting tuff-on-crime goverment voices from local police departments and DA's offices without fact checking their statements or seeking out contrary views. Local TV news, in particular, is rife with examples, but as with the Eagle reporter, print media are culpable, too.

This deferential methodology is precisely the flaw in American reporting that Donald Trump exploited to lie his way into the presidency. He'd make some ridiculous claim that 30 seconds of fact checking on Google would have refuted. But instead of evaluating the lie and either calling it out or declining to report it, reporters would avidly promote false statements as valid discourse. At most, they'd seek to "balance" lies with "the other side," almost always represented by a partisan voice whose motives could be discounted.

But a lie isn't "the other side" of the truth, it's just a lie. And reporters have become too habituated to letting them slide, allowing the he-said, she-said journalistic form to mask self-interested agendas. That defect in American journalism was made more glaring during the presidential election, but it by no means originated during this election cycle.

For an alternative approach, see here.

Which prisons should Texas close next?, Part II

Earlier this year Grits had speculated which prison units might be targeted for closure if Texas incarceration levels continue to decline. Recent news has raised a couple of additional possibilities.

First, flooding in Brazos County forced evacuation of three prison units: Terrell, Stringfellow, and Ramsey. How much might it cost to repair flood damage? How likely is such an event to recur? Does this argue for placing one or more of these units on a possible closure list, or was flooding a one-off, as TDCJ officials are telling the press? It'll be interesting to learn more about the circumstances surrounding these evacuations once the crisis has passed.

Meanwhile, arsenic levels in well water at the Pack Unit in Navasota County (see earlier Grits coverage) perhaps argue for adding that facility to the potential closure list. The issue has arisen in ongoing heat litigation because inmates who need to cool down have not choice but to drink it. Reported the Houston Chronicle:

Arsenic has been found in the well water at the Pack Unit at levels that violate the Environmental Protection Agency's cap for safe amounts, and the Pack Unit operates one of 60 Texas water systems that are out of compliance with the federal standard, according to testimony from Michael Honeycutt, director of toxicology at the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.

Prior to 2001, the EPA's cap for safe amounts of arsenic in an aquifer was 50 parts per billion (PPB), Honeycutt said.

A federal law lowered the cap to 10 PPB, he said, and enforcement of that level began in 2006. The Pack Unit put in a new filtration system in 2007, but the water still tests at 25 or 30 PPB, he said.

Though state officials claim the situation is not an emergency, an expert told the court those levels are unsafe.

Michael McGeehin, a national expert on heat exposure, told U.S. District Judge Keith Ellison that the situation is urgent at the Pack Unit in Navasota, where inmates are trying to force the state to provide an alternative to well water that contains elevated levels of arsenic.

"If you're asking me if I can say to a captive population, 'You should continue to drink this water until it gets fixed,' I can't," testified McGeehin, a former division director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

TDCJ is paying for a new filtration system, but perhaps closure would be the better option.

Brazos judges violated Open Meetings Act on decision to fire probation director

Judges in Brazos County met privately three times last month to plan the firing of probation director John McGuire, reported the Bryan College Station Eagle (Feb. 1):

No criminal charges are expected against the judges who voted to terminate Brazos County's probation director on Friday after discussing the matter in private earlier in the month in admitted violation of the Texas Open Meetings Act.

District Judge Travis Bryan notified Brazos County District Attorney Jarvis Parsons of a possible violation on Tuesday. Bryan said he immediately contacted Parsons after attorneys made him aware of the situation.

After researching the matter and discussing it with attorneys around the state, including former Brazos County District Attorney Bill Turner, Parsons declined to prosecute because no action was taken during the discussions and there did not appear to be a "willful violation."

Instead, he drafted a memo for the judges informing them on the Open Meetings Act "so this never happens again," Parsons said, adding that the previous judges' meetings were "not an intentional or deceptive misstep but one that needed to be corrected." As of Friday evening, Parsons said he had delivered the memos to three of the five judges.

Bryan and District Judge Kyle Hawthorne, along with county court-at-law judges Jim Locke and Amanda Matzke, unanimously voted on Friday to terminate the employment of John McGuire, who had been director of the Brazos County Community Supervision and Corrections Department since 2010. Judge Steve Smith was not in attendance due to a State Bar Rules Committee meeting in Austin that was scheduled in November.

The judges cited a loss of confidence in McGuire following more than a year of complaints as the reason for his dismissal following a public meeting and a 35-minute closed session.

The notice of the meeting was signed by the county clerk just before noon on Tuesday, providing the required 72-hour notice.

Bryan, however, acknowledged Friday that the judges had met three times earlier in the month to discuss McGuire's employment while unaware that their meetings regarding the head of a probation department would be subject to the Open Meetings Act, as noted in a 1996 opinion by then-Texas Attorney General Dan Morales. 

Fascinating. With some frequency over the years Grits has had various judicial candidates approach me to discuss issues, the job, whether they should run, and a variety of other topics. Something I always tell folks running for local criminal courts, particularly people who've never been a judge before, is that one of the most important duties they'll never get credit for is serving as a de facto board of directors member for the probation department. Most candidates are unaware until I say that that such service would number among their duties. And scarce few judges indeed take those duties as seriously as they warrant upon assuming office.

In a past life, your correspondent spent 14 years performing opposition research for political campaigns, including numerous judicial races around the state. It was then that I learned screwups at the probation department - for which judges are responsible but only vaguely aware - could be an excellent source of a blind-side attack to which an incumbent would typically fumble and flounder in reaction.

Since I'm out of the game, here's a pro tip on developing campaign attacks against judges: It can be frustrating as an opposition researcher to vet judicial incumbents' casework for campaign attacks because wannabe judges rightly don't want to risk future recusal by campaigning on issues about which they may later rule. Thus, attacks involving individual decisions or stuff that happened in court typically must be relegated to surrogates, who in turn can be difficult to recruit and even harder to control. Unlike other political candidates, judicial campaigns as a practical matter can't (or shouldn't) address the legal issues over which they'll eventually preside. Judges' policy decisions, however, are fair game, and their role as de facto boardmembers for the probation department is a policymaking function. So if you're looking for areas where a judicial campaign can spend money on direct attacks, critiquing management of the probation department is an area where your candidate can come out and say something specific and critical about an incumbent, like, "They violated the Open Meetings Act!" Or, "They were ignorant of the laws and duties governing their office." etc..

Management of probation departments is one of those dark underbelly areas of government where the press seldom venture and few but the most experienced judges take the responsibility as seriously as they probably should, as evidenced by this episode in Bryan. Nobody in the local judiciary understood the management role they were playing and how it differed from their function in the legal process. They're not alone, I can assure you, they just happened to get exposed.