Four stories let public peer into soul of Houston justice system

The justice system can be difficult to understand for experts and darn near impossible for laypeople. Grits believes that's in part because the public best understands issues of crime, punishment and justice through storytelling. But there are too many stories emerging from the system which often seem to produce contradictory moral conclusions. Which story one latches onto may tell more about the storyteller (or the listener) than the system. Yet at the same time, the stories are important and without them, the public can't comprehend what's happening and drowns in a sea of policy recommendations.

Many of the most difficult dynamics facing the 21st-century justice system are revealed through the lenses of four black Houston men's tragic stories making recent headlines: Houston PD Sgt. Harold Preston, shot down after 41 years on the force while responding to a domestic dispute; Narcotics Detective Gerald Goines, whose false affidavit resulted in the deaths of two innocent homeowners; George Floyd, whose death in Minneapolis was preceded by numerous run-ins with Houston PD, including a drug conviction in which he was possibly set up by Detective Goines; and Lydell Grant, a Houston man convicted of murder and exonerated by DNA and the confession of the real killer, but whose innocence the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals refuses to acknowledge.

The justice system in Houston isn't just one of these stories, it's all of them. (And many more, but these are all particularly iconic.) There are good cops like Sgt. Preston who touched many lives and are a credit to their badges. But the same department provided tolerance and succor to Detective Goines and a sizable cohort of allegedly corrupt cops at an HPD Narcotics Division that arguably should be shut down. Telling either story without acknowledging the other provides an incomplete perspective.

Like Sgt. Preston, George Floyd grew up in the Third Ward and attended Jack Yates High School. The Washington Post has published an excellent series titled "George Floyd's America" which does a better job than I could showing how the justice system, Houston schools, and segregated housing layered together to present virtually insurmountable barriers for Floyd and generations of youth just like him.

Then there's Lydell Grant: Falsely convicted despite a legitimate alibi, based on multiple eyewitnesses' testimony which DNA results later contradicted. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals wants the witnesses re-questioned, even though DNA evidence contradicted their recollections and the person the DNA matched has confessed to the crime! In essence, Texas' court system would rather uphold a bad conviction than free an innocent man, and it's hardly the first time.

Each of these men's stories reveals unheralded truths about the justice system. George Floyd's sad saga reminds us that it's a short step from institutional racism to terrible, negative outcomes for individual black folks. Lydell Grant's story reinforces the folly of assuming the justice system will seek or embrace just outcomes. Gerald Goines' ignominious apologue highlights the reality that law enforcement appears to tolerate bad actors in its midst, often for many decades. And Sgt. Preston's story reminds us that plenty of cops went into the business for the right reasons and there's still much good to be done in that role.

All of those things can be true at once. Focusing on any one story misses the big picture, while failing to acknowledge individuals' stories misses the most compelling aspect for the public. Today, Grits encourages you to think about four of them.

Houston Mayor's Policing Task Force Recap, Part 3: Mental-health first response, What counts as diversion?, the 'all-purpose panacea promoted by people who oppose policy change,' and other stories

Here's Part 3 of Grits' tripartite, annotated analysis of the new report from the Houston Mayor's Task Force on Policing Reform. See Part 1 and Part 2.

Mental-Health First Response
In Austin, Dallas, and elsewhere across the country, one of the approaches to displacing police from non-law-enforcement tasks has been mental-health first response, where many clients do not ask for a law-enforcement presence and end up in involuntary detention, more often than not, because police don't know what else to do with them. Adding insult to injury, when cops drop them off at the emergency room, they get credit for a "jail diversion"!

The Task Force found that "Diversion of mental-health-related 911 calls at the call center level is the earliest point of diversion before any law enforcement involvement. Since the beginning of the [counseling] program, CCD [Crisis Call Diversion] diverted more than 4,902 calls from law enforcement response and saved the equivalent of 7,353 hours of police time (March 2016 to May 2019)." The Task Force recommended funding 24/7 counselors to boost the diversion rate, as well as boosting the number of Mobile Crisis Outreach teams (civilian medical folks who respond to MH crises in the field), and tripling the number of HPD's CIRT teams, which are police officers teamed with mental-health practitioners.

The Task Force endorsed a legislative proposal folks in Dallas and Austin have been clamoring for as well: Amending state law (Chapter 573 of the TX Health and Safety Code) to allow health care professionals to handle decisions related to emergency detentions. Right now, only police can do so, and that law is a barrier to removing law enforcement from the equation in non-criminal mental health calls.

Mental health cases are a growing part of HPD's case load, as they are all over the state. In an article on CIRT teams, the Chronicle mentioned that, "In Houston, encounters between police and people with mental illness ballooned over the last decade from 23,913 mental-health calls in 2009 to 40,884 in 2019." That means that the Crisis Call Diversion handles a rather paltry 3.8% of calls.

Importantly, the CIRT teams are not actually "first responders," but "secondary responders" similar to the EMCOT program in Austin, which also appears to go to relatively few calls (10.5%.). What happens to the other 86% of mental health calls? It appears they get the nearest police officer regardless of training. That's both a big waste and heightens the chance that people in mental-health crisis get shot.

What counts as diversion?
The Mayor's task force claims HPD's CIRT teams focused on mental-health cases has a 95.9% rate of "diversion from jails." But that's a miseading figure. Fewer than one in four calls are resolved at the scene; in all other instances, somebody is taken away, usually against their will, and sometimes against the wishes of their parents, guardians, or care givers.

The data shows that more than a third are dropped at hospital emergency departments because area psych hospitals had no space. Since these patients may not have insurance, and ERs are not set up to handle behavioral health issues at any significant scale, this has been a source of complaint for years in many jurisdictions, not just Houston. 

It's time for H-Town to challenge itself to substantially increase the share of mental-health calls met with a non-police response. A major goal should be boosting that "resolved on scene" number from less than 25% to 2/3 or more, reserving "emergency detention" for situations where a person poses a danger to themselves or others. Those criteria may include abusive behavior toward family and there may be good reason to detain any given individual (so spare me the parade of anecdotes in the comments, I get it). But in a huge number of cases there is not; too often, cops take someone based on a "better safe than sorry" logic. After all, the hospital/ambulance bills aren't going to show up in their mailbox months later.

Domestic calls: Do all of them need a cop?
The Task Force endorses a pilot program at HPD for intervention with high-risk domestic violence victims called DART (Domestic Abuse Response Team), which pairs officers with a victim advocate nurse. The pilot has been ongoing since January 2019, operating three nights per week (7pm to 3am) in three HPD districts. No information on how much it would cost to expand.

For that matter, I'd love to see any outcomes or research based on this pilot, comparisons to control groups, etc.. When I searched on the HPD website regarding the program, I only found one responsive web page: This flyer. If it's been going for nearly two years, one would think there'd be something out there.

When agencies do pilots, Grits believes they should always budget a research and data collection component. Domestic violence policies and police responses have always been all over the map. Maybe this is a great program; maybe other approaches would be better. When experimental programs are tested, somebody should be tasked with reporting on what they're doing, including any relevant metrics. Even better: Evaluating the program compared to a control population. That doesn't appear to be have been done yet for DART.

Regardless, Grits remains unconvinced that police need to go to every domestic disturbance call, even as security, as described in the DART program. There must be a response, and if a cops are needed, they should be called. But once the cop engages in violence or pulls their gun, that trumps clinicians' authority or decisions. Sending them only when needed reduces the chances that happens.

Indeed, one can make an argument that cops are simply the wrong messengers on this topic, as our pal Jessica Pishko recently reminded:

Other studies have found that police themselves are often the perpetrators of domestic and sexual violence, rendering them undesirable as a source of help, particularly for women of color who experience much greater rates of violence, including sexual violence, from police. Interactions with the police can also exacerbate existing conditions, like economic instability or trauma.

Pishko quoted law prof Aya Gruber expressing a sentiment your correspondent has held for some time: "victims may be making a rational choice when they decline to testify against their abusers. 'Domestic violence prosecutions have little benefit to women and in fact can harm them,' she explained, 'but the prosecutors are very convinced they are saving women’s lives.'"

Task Force: Decriminalize prostitution! But make them work in criminalized environs.
Grits didn't foresee the Mayor's Task Force recommending that prostitution be decriminalized. That said, they weren't exactly suggesting the re-establishment of the city's red-light district: They still think the state should to prosecute "pimps, brothel and illicit massage parlor owners and managers, sex tourism operators, and sex buyers." But right now, they declare, "Law enforcement is arresting the wrong people."

Here's the oddity: Clearly they consider most prostitutes victims who deserve protection. Different folks feel differently about that, including sex workers, and I'm not trying to launch that debate. But I do question the virtue of claiming to "decriminalize" prostitution and then criminalizing everything about the industry except service provision.

In the age of the internet-personal ad, many prostitutes operate individual sole proprietorships without a formal "pimp" or brothel. For them, the Task Force's distinction doesn't make a difference.

If we're now going to express sympathy for prostitutes, then let's be clear: The biggest dangers they face all stem from the government banning their services and forcing members of the Oldest Profession to provide their wares in a black market. The sole proprietor of the liquor store may rely on police for protection; the sole-proprietor prostitute seeking security must turn to a pimp, which is an inherently unhealthy partnership.

Training: The all-purpose panacea promoted by people who oppose policy change
Look, I'm all for good police training. Indeed, much of what I've learned about police practices (and jailers, and prosecutors, and defense lawyers, and district judges, and appellate judges, and forensic analysts, etc.) has come from attending their professional training sessions, conferences, and CLEs over many years and/or reading training materials (plus chasing down items from their footnotes) from those events. While, between my illness and COVID, 2020 has been a dry spell, in the past I might normally attend several such events per year, including many that put me in rooms filled with police officers. Frankly, I've never had a bad experience doing that and highly recommend it.

That said, having worked on police reform now for more than 25 years, here's Grits' view: "More training" is the first thing reform opponents suggest whenever substantive reforms are proposed. It's always the first "reform" suggested and, as soon as it's implemented, reform opponents push hard to stop there. Every time. Some of the trainings on implicit bias and racial equity in particular appear to have little effect on outcomes. Grits didn't consider it good enough a quarter century ago and it's certainly not good enough now.

Yes, change your policies, train on the improved ones, and consistently, effectively punish officers who fail to follow them. That's how you change departmental culture. But training alone won't help.

Reflections on Mayor's Task Force Recommendations
Having now gone through the entire report, what to make of it as a whole? There are moments where it is bold, for example, recommending changes to the 180-day rule and insisting officers suspected of misconduct should be questioned at the beginning of the investigation process. And I was excited to see the recommendation that un-redacted bodycam video should be released, though I don't agree to limiting that to critical incidents.

Similarly, the suggestions that 1) Houston PD create a complaints database and 2) publish an annual report on disciplinary actions against officers, would constitute a major leap forward in transparency for the department. But it falls short of what's needed: Police departments also need to begin publishing data and detail about use of force incidents in online databases where researchers and the public can access them. Grits knows for a fact legislation requiring that statewide will be filed during the 87th Legislature, and the an executive order from Donald Trump mandated creation of a national database documenting "instances of excessive use of force."

Texas already has good data on police shootings and deaths in custody. That's the next step.

Grits remains less than confident they've figured out the right way to keep Houston cops from shooting people on mental-health calls or domestic disturbance calls. I'd prefer to see them working to expand the subset of those encounters at which police are absent entirely. They can always be called in if needed.

Other suggestions seem more like half measures that don't really get at the problems they hope to solve - redesign a website, issue a report on diversity efforts, etc.. All perfectly reasonable stuff the government must think about, but boring and unlikely to be decisive in addressing the problems.

Finally, I don't believe they've identified the right model for the Independent Police Oversight Board, potentially designing it to perform a fruitless, Sisyphean task that leaves them set up to fail. The Task Force acknowledged that the all-volunteer IPOB needs significant staff to do its job, and that more staff are needed to process complaints, both from the community and from officers themselves. Why not follow Austin's lead and create a full-blown Police Monitor to manage that staff, add value through regular reporting, and to advise the Mayor and Council on issues related to departmental conduct, discipline, and culture from an independent perspective?

Grits sees these Task Force recommendations as the beginning of a conversation, not in any sense the final word on what reform in Houston might look like. If all of them were implemented tomorrow, it would be a Banner Day for Criminal-Justice Reform. And yet, it would be insufficient. In just a few years, many of the same problems would arise.

This report had a great deal of crossover with recommendations from several city council members earlier this week, and was in a sense even more aggressive. Between them, they're a good conversation starter, but now the conversation must move forward. 

Task Force on reforming Houston police: Empower oversight board, remove civil-service barriers to accountability at #txlege, and have someone besides the DA prosecute police misconduct (Grits has a suggestion)

"The loss of public trust and credibility makes it difficult, if not impossible, for the police to forge partnerships in local communities, let alone expect community cooperation in criminal investigations," declared the Houston Mayor's Task Force on Policing Reform (TFPR), which issued its recommendations this week. Even if your correspondent might have gone further, or may quibble with their suggestions (as indeed, I will, below), they're more significant than Grits had anticipated. Good for them!

The Houston Chronicle reported that the Mayor asked for "a few days" to digest the report and meet with the task force chairman, sub-committee chairs, and council members before formulating a response.

Grits, however, has no need to wait. Let's dig into this report and see what's there. Obviously at 104 recommendations, we don't have time to discuss all of them. And some of them are rather small-time, anyway. But let's run through the big stuff, describing their recommendations with Grits' own annotations. This is Part One of what I anticipate will be a three-part analysis: I read the 150-page report so you won't have to! :)

Community Policing (yawn)

So-called "community policing" has always been a hustle. No one can define it and in practice departments interpret it as officers spending time hanging out with whomever instead of responding to calls or performing police work. As fear of crime has declined as the go-to driver of more police spending, "community policing" offers departments a new metric -- percent of time available -- to demonstrate that we always need more officers no matter what is happening with local crime stats. At HPD, Chief Art Acevedo uses the term "relational policing," but, "The Task Force believes it is similar, if not mostly the same." In other words, it's a buzzword intended to confuse with results that can't be measured. None of the recommendations here seem destined to reinvigorate this tired and fruitless approach, from giving cadets community tours, making them sit through more lectures, or having officers document "out of car engagements with civilians and/or businesses."

Updating promotion matrices to give points for community policing might be helpful, once there is a consensus on what exactly officers should be doing, but the report failed to discuss taking points away for officers with misconduct records. That might help, too. In 2017 legislation, Houston state Rep. Senfronia Thompson recommended deducting points for officers found to have engaged in misconduct. Perhaps it's an idea worth reviving?

I liked the "mobile storefront" idea, which was the final recommendation (#16) in the community policing segment. Most of the rest in this section seemed pretty lightweight.

Independent Police Oversight Board

Grits has never been a great fan of civilian-review boards because most of them are as worthless as the one in Houston. Austin's oversight board, along with the Office of Police Oversight (essentially a Police Monitor-Board model), at least has become a window into policing problems we've never had before. (Local press don't cover the complaints, but they're out there from a credible source, and advocates discuss them.)

The Task Force agreed with city council members who recently said they have "no confidence in the current format" of the IPOB. Its powers are truncated and it fails to perform even the duties it's been assigned, they concluded. (These recall the complaints of an IPOB member who recently resigned over the group's inefficacy.) The Task Force laid out three broad models of police oversight:

• Auditor/Monitor Model
• Investigative Model
• Review Focused Model

They recommended IPOB expand to 31 members and adopt an "investigative model," but Grits wonders, "to what end?" Their investigation results would not be part of the department's decision making process when it comes to disciplinary decisions. They have their own investigators for that in the Internal Affairs division. How will these investigations affect real-world outcomes, including policies and practices, much less in the individual cases they investigate?

Since it's been empowered to a) review previously confidential documents and b) publish sometimes de-identified results, Grits has found Austin's fusion of Monitor/Review models (to use the Task Force's nomenclature) gives advocates more empowering information than we had before. The oversight board here reviews cases with an eye toward recommending policy improvements, and the record they create was been a valuable tool for documenting problems in a way that city officials are able to hear. Requiring the Chief to respond in writing to civilian oversight recommendations has also helped.

The Task Force does recommend hiring dedicated, paid staff to support the civilian review board, including investigators who it hopes will have "subpoena power." (FWIW, I'm not sure what more they think they'll get with a subpoena beyond what they get by mandating access to the department's full file.) Regardless, having staff led by a dedicated Police Monitor's position, as Austin did, has the added benefit of creating a counterweight to the chief in the city bureaucracy on police-misconduct questions, where officials might not listen to part-time civilian volunteers. That's a big practical benefit and has been welcome change.

Legislative changes needed to civil service

The portion of the report which made your correspondent jump out of his chair and whoop with sheer delight addressed legal changes needed at the state or city level, but with particular focus on the state.

They want to change the much-derided 180-day rule in two ways - one significant, one not. For the uninitiated, state law and many union contracts say officers in civil service cities can't be punished more than 180 days after they commit a misconduct violation. The Task Force recommended changing this in two ways: 1) have the clock launch on the "date of discovery" of the misconduct instead of the date it occurred, and 2) change 180 days to 210.

The first change is significant; the second much less so, though the first change magnifies its impact. Together, they'd be an important reform. That said, make Grits Philosopher King and I'd say for police the rule should be a full year from the date of discovery.

The Task Force wants to fix another civil-service practice your correspondent has railed against for years: "Require officers involved in incidents in which their conduct is under scrutiny to make statements at the beginning of the investigation." As the Task Force noted on p. 34, "Current practice allows officers to defer making statements until after the investigation is complete and they can read the entire file," as well as review any body camera footage.

Imagine if in a regular murder investigation they waited to interrogate the suspect until s/he reviewed the investigation file with their lawyer: Unthinkable!

Who should prosecute police misconduct?

The Task Force believes the District Attorney has a "symbiotic relationship" with the police department, which results in an "inherent pro-police bias." Thus they think "an independent agency," unnamed in the report, should prosecute those cases instead.

This has been suggested many times before. Some iterations see special prosecutors appointed each time, though that gets expensive.

Speaking of which, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has said he'd take the job, but I don't think anybody would trust him.

Grits has a suggestion I believe would be popular with everyone but Alex Bunin, the Harris County Public Defender: I think the Harris County Public Defender Office should take over prosecuting cops instead of the District Attorney.

I've given this a lot of thought: Bunin and his shop are respected, and they already have an oppositional relationship with the Houston PD. I can't think of another outfit that would care less about pissing off the union. They've got the talent in the office to do the job. Plus the commissioners court just expanded their budget.

Now, they may not want to do it. Many of those folks are life-long defense lawyers who chose not to go into prosecution for a reason. But sometimes, the person who doesn't want the job is exactly the right person to handle it responsibly. (They know what's required; that's why they didn't want it!) It wouldn't be that many cases by comparison to their usual docket and I believe they're the right crew to handle the job.

Next time: Improving the complaint process, body-cam policies, use of force, and "rebuilding trust through transparency."

On the dangers of dick-ish drug enforcement, racist cop rose in Austin PD ranks, indigent defense denied in Amarillo, and other stories

Just in time for the drive to Grandma's house, here's the November 2019 episode* of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast covering Texas criminal justice politics and policy, co-hosted with Amanda Marzullo of the Texas Defender Service.


In this month's episode:

Introductory tomfoolery

• ¡Poncho!

Top Stories

• Houston PD narcotics division a black hole of bad practices (2:32)
• Federal judge defines limits of DNA mixture software (8:54)

Fill in the Blank

• Victoria County Jail death from drug withdrawal (16:25)
• Racist Austin PD assistant chief outed, what's next? (21:01)
• Indigent defense shortchanged in Amarillo (24:50)

The Last Hurrah (29:30)

• Denouement of Harris County bail litigation
• Why Greg Abbott owns a homeless camp
• Rodney Reed execution stayed

*N.b. It really is the November episode, despite my embarrassing screw up in the intro to say it's June. 

Find a transcript of this episode below the jump.

The Art of Deflection: HPD chief shows how to blame judges for policing failures

Police chiefs in Harris County continue to attack bail reform - most recently Houston police chief Art Acevedo - but the examples given never seem to bear out their complaints. Acevedo yesterday went on local TV to blame judges for releasing a defendant who later ended up shooting a police officer with his own gun after a struggle.

His comments came at the scene of an unrelated police shooting near a school where the suspect was killed, and the chief attempted to conflate the cases. In the Fox26 news story, he succeeded in conflating them; the article was so poorly constructed, I had to go to other sources to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Reported Fox26:

Acevedo threatened to call out judges who grant bond to violent offenders while speaking at the scene of an officer involved shooting on South Gessner Monday. The shooting happened as one of his officer [sic] is recovering from being shot Thursday by a suspect who was out on bond. 

Court records show that suspect—Brandon Bell, 17—paid zero dollars to bond out of jail two weeks ago after allegedly carjacking a woman at gunpoint. 

"If you lived in a high crime area and you knew that these judges were gonna let a violent criminal go in one door and within a matter of hours or a day or two get out on a low bond, do you want to testify against them?" asked Acevedo.

Brandon Bell was NOT the shooter at the school where Acevedo gave the comments, but you really can't tell from the story until the final line, when the reporter finally named the deceased.

It turns out, however, there's more to Mr. Bell's story than the chief is letting on: "In Brandon Bell's case, records show he bonded out on a misdemeanor trespassing charge September 3, before investigators could collect enough evidence to charge him with felony aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon."

So think about what's being said: Acevedo crows to the media that Bell was let out on a personal bond for carjacking, and the reporter dutifully repeats the claim. But she already knows that's not exactly true, and buried the counterfactual at the bottom of the story. His officers hadn't filed the carjacking charges when he was released, only misdemeanor trespassing!

How long should courts hold misdemeanor defendants to let police investigate them for crimes with which they haven't been charged? On what basis should they have detained the 17-year old, who in most other states would have been charged as a juvenile?

In America, police don't get to arrest people and hold them in jail when they are unable to supply probable cause the person committed an offense. And if they'd presented evidence against Mr. Bell in the carjacking incident, he'd have been charged with a felony and remained in jail. The failure to do so is the only reason he wasn't held longer.

The judge who bonded the guy out told the reporter:

Judge Darrell Jordan who approved Bell's bond told Fox 26 he was just following Texas law. 

"If there is a trespassing case or something like that—then that person will be released on a general order bond," said Jordan. "The bond amount will say $100, but they pay nothing."

Even if Bell had been required to pay the $100, that's not going to keep anybody off the streets for long. The real issue is Houston PD and the DA's office hadn't charged him with anything more serious, even though he'd allegedly committed a carjacking. Two weeks later, the kid shot a police officer.

This is pure deflection, blaming judges for Houston PD's own failures.

MORE: For those interested in more detail, Don Hooper of the Houston Conservative Forum posted the police affidavit on Twitter alleging Mr. Bell engaged in carjacking, and proceeded to argue the details of the episode (contentiously) with a cop. The complainant recognized the carjacker at the scene, and a robbery detective conducted a photo array on the same day in which she identified him again. But police didn't file the affidavit alleging the carjacking charge until Sept. 9th, after Bell had already been released. How is this the judge's fault, again?

Local press calls out Houston mayoral candidates' false statements on crime

Challengers in local political races love to engage in demagoguery about crime and try to blame the incumbents. That becomes a tad more difficult when crime is actually low. But usually they can still get away with it because the local media thinks their job is to "quote both sides" (in this case, the two sides being "lies" and "reality") and will put out their message even when it's false.

So we must give credit where it's due to St. John Barned Smith and Jasper Scherer of the Houston Chronicle for their article on crime debates in the Houston mayor's race. Drawing on lessons national journalists have had to learn in the age of Donald Trump, they wrote a piece that calls out exaggerations and falsehoods about crime in a way that's incredibly rare for local reporters.

Challengers to Mayor Sylvester Turner attempted to mislead the public about crime in the wake of his recent State of the City speech.

“I know what’s going on in this city,” [millionaire attorney Tony] Buzbee said. “Don’t tell me crime is going down when everybody across the country knows that Houston is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States.” 

Bill King, another prominent mayoral contender, has decried a “growing randomness and violence to crime that alarms people.”

The next paragraph, though, let's us know that these reporters have learned a lesson or two about lying politicians that makes your correspondent a bit more sanguine about the profession:

While experts say such arguments aren’t unusual for political challengers, the numbers largely say otherwise. Like the rest of the country, crime in Houston has plummeted over the last 30 years, as has residents’ fear of crime being the city’s most pressing problem. FBI data show that most categories of crime in Houston have fallen or remained stagnant during Turner’s term, which began in January 2016. Criminologists also scoff at the claim that Houston is among the country’s most dangerous cities.

During Turner's term, in fact, "From 2015 to 2018, murders dropped and robberies fell; burglaries decreased; thefts fell; and fewer vehicles were stolen. The exceptions were aggravated assaults and rapes, which rose in 2017 before declining again in 2018." On Buzbee's campaign website, by contrast, he insists without a shred of evidence, "All types of crime are on the rise." That's patently false.

Indeed, your correspondent was quoted in the story declaring, "“We are at the bottom of a 30-year decline, more or less, in the crime rate,” and insisting, “Houston is safer than has been for a really long time, honestly, is the truth of it."

Buzbee says that Houston has more crime than 95% of American cities, which is true, but misleading. Heck, since Houston is the third largest city and there are nearly 20,000 municipalities in the United States, I'd have said more than 99%. But that's a meaningless number. Comparing crime totals in Houston to those in Dalhart or Raymondville is a silly and pointless exercise. The article quoted national experts to give context to the claim:

“When we talk about the murder capitals of the country, the violent crime capitals of the country, Houston is not one of the cities people put on that list,” said Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based criminologist. “At least anyone familiar with the data.” 

Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice in New York, said it is misleading to compare the crime rate of a city with 2.3 million people to those of small towns, which frequently have much lower crime rates. 

A more accurate measure, he said, would be to look at other large cities across the country. 

Among the nation’s 30 largest cities, Houston’s murder rate “is thoroughly middle of the road,” Grawert said. “I don’t see Houston as being one of the more ‘violent’ places in the country.”

Buzbee insisted that, if he were mayor, Houston would add 2,000 police officers to the force (currently with a little more than 5,000 officers), over his first four years. Mayor Turner, by contrast, has suggested adding 500.

Buzbee's suggestion is simply ridiculous (and thus, demagogic) to anyone who understands municipal budgets. The Legislature just capped spending increases by municipalities, so adding that many officers would require eliminating spending on things like roads and flood control. There's no math that makes the suggestion work, it's just silly on its face.

By contrast, Turner's other opponent had a more legitimate criticism:

King contended HPD’s increase in sworn officers under Turner is “window dressing,” because the officers have to perform the functions of the declining civilian employees. Soon after taking office, Turner vowed he would never lay off any police officers.

King is right about the civilian staffing. I like Mayor Turner and was a fan of his when he was in the Legislature. But even then, he has always been in the pocket of the police unions and was never comfortable bucking them. King is right that the decision to lay off civilian staff instead of cops was short-sighted. Having more expensive, uniformed officers provide clerical and support functions is wasteful, bad management.

That's why, when Dallas hired management consultants to tell them how many more officers to hire, they couldn't get a hard number. How many cops you have is less important than what those cops do. The consultants in Dallas told the city council, much to their consternation, that they needed to hire more civilians and reorganize officer duties before considering hiring more cops. If the same analysis were performed for Houston, I believe they'd find that's the case there, too. 

In Austin, where Houston chief Art Acevedo was posted before becoming chief in H-Town, civilian duties were widely neglected in favor of hiring more officers. Crises at the crime lab and failures at sex-assault victim services cropped up nearly as soon as he left, and virtually every other civilian function in the agency (except the Public Information Office - he does value PR) was starved and short-shrifted during his tenure.

That said, even with this debunking, the strategy of lying about crime could still work. Survey after survey shows the public thinks crime is rising, even when it's precipitously falling. That's slowly starting to change, but it's something a demagogue can manipulate. Candidate King touched on what I think is the reason public opinion doesn't track with reality: “When you actually see a crime being committed on your computer screen, especially if it involves violence, it obviously (has) a much greater impact than reading dry crime statistics.”

Bingo! It may be hard for anyone under 50 or so to imagine, but thirty years ago, local news was local and crimes reported in the newspaper or on nightly TV news happened in the town a journalist covered. Today, crimes committed anywhere and everywhere on the globe show up in our news feeds in seemingly endless waves, giving an impression of lawlessness and danger that's just not borne out by data.

That's what Buzbee and King are counting on: that the public's ignorance and gullibility will trump reality. And it could work. As H.L. Mencken long ago advised, no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. But when the media do their job well, as for once happened here, it makes capitalizing on public ignorance a lot more difficult.

Why we know so little about the bad cop at the center of the botched Houston drug raid

A couple of weeks ago, Grits raised numerous questions about a drug-raid-gone-bad in Houston that left four officers shot and two homeowners and two of their dogs dead. Police-union leadership blamed police-accountability activists for the episode, and the mayor and city council members backed them up.

Now, it turns out the informant identified in the search warrant may not exist, and the narcotics officer in question has a lengthy disciplinary history, though much of it only documented in closed records that are not part of his official disciplinary file. It's become clear that the officer in question, Gerald Goines, should have been ousted from the force long ago, or at least rotated off the narcotics squad.

Revisiting key questions
To sort through this unqualified mess, let's start with some of the questions Grits raised immediately after the episode. For several of them, we now have answers.

What was the informant's background, and what was their relationship to their detective handler? It turned out the informant did not exist. Relationship to the detective? Imaginary friend.

Where did the informant get the heroin? Officer Steven Bryant retrieved the heroin out of Gerald Goines car, it did not come from the home in question.

Is it plausible that this couple would sell smack to a CI sent to their front door whom they'd never met before? No. This was a fabrication; it did not occur.

I'd asked, "Will the Conviction Integrity Unit at the Harris County District Attorney's Office now review those 10+ cases using this informant in the past?" But now that question shifts to cases by officer Goines and Bryant. (The latter man turned on Goines during questioning, but he was part of the faked-buy bust and was the one who turned planted evidence into the lab for testing.) There is at least one man currently petitioning the Court of Criminal Appeals to be declared actually innocent from one of Goines' past drug stings.

Why were Goines' disciplinary records secret?

Finding the answers to these questions shed a lot more light on the episode, but also raises many more, including about the department's policies related to body cameras and over-use of SWAT tactics for routine search warrants. There will be lots of time to delve into those in the coming weeks and months as more information comes out, but here's an interesting one that relates to pending Texas legislation: 

Why were so many of Officer Goines misconduct episodes absent from his personnel file? As you read through the Houston Chronicle story, multiple incidents involving Goines that appeared in the newspaper's archives were not recorded in his official disciplinary history reporters received from the department.

Here's why: Houston is one of about 70 Texas municipalities that have opted into the state's "civil service code" for police and firefighters (Ch. 143 of the Texas Local Government Code). Most cities whose voters opted into it did so in the 1940s and '50s. But thirty years ago, police unions succeeded in making most disciplinary records secret in these "civil service cities." Under Ch. 143.089(g) of the Local Government Code, only information about misconduct that results in a suspension is public, and then only a summary, not the whole file.

That means the episodes documented by the newspaper probably do exist in the department's Internal Affairs files somewhere, but are secret in Houston because of Ch. 143.

By contrast, if the same episode had occurred in Dallas, which never opted into Ch. 143, every jot and tittle of the old investigative files would be public, only excepting narrow issues related to personal privacy like addresses, social security numbers, etc..

This is a huge carve-out: Texas has more than 2,600 agencies employing licensed peace officers, about 1,800 of which are municipal police departments, plus another 254 county sheriffs. Of those, all but 70 "civil service" departments and all but one sheriff (Harris County) operate with their disciplinary files subject to disclosure under the Texas Public Information Act. (N.b., many cities and counties have some version of "civil service" in their own charters or codes, but here I use the term only to apply to Ch. 143 cities.)

This leads to absurd results. For example, in Fort Worth, the police department is under the civil service code and the Sheriff is not. Let's say an FWPD officer and a Tarrant County Sheriff's deputy engage in the same misconduct - in fact, let's say for illustrative purposes that they committed the misconduct together - and both were given a written reprimand.

At the Sheriff's Office, the entire investigative file regarding the incident would become a public record after the reprimand was handed down. At FWPD, there would be no public record of the episode at all. If the two were suspended, only a summary of the FWPD officer's misconduct would be released, but requestors would not receive remotely the level of detail available down the street at the Sheriff's Office.

This secret file even creates problems for prosecutors. Under Brady v. Maryland and (particularly) the Michael Morton Act, prosecutors are required to disclose impeachment evidence about their witnesses to the defense. So, for example, in Officer Goines situation, his misconduct in this case, or past details about the cases described by the Chronicle, might call into question his reliability as a witness. But police departments cannot release that information, even to prosecutors, under Ch. 143, leading people like Barbara Hervey of the Court of Criminal Appeals to support making such records public.

At the Legislature this go-round, Sen. Juan "Chuy" Hinojosa this year has filed SB 433 to open currently closed records under that 143.089(g) file, referred to colloquially as "the g file" in civil-service parlance. The bill has already been referred to the Criminal Justice Committee. Hinojosa filed the same bill in 2017 after a terrible episode in San Antonio where evidence of innocence was concealed by police from Bexar County prosecutors, allowing a man who'd been beaten by police while handcuffed to plead guilty to assaulting a police officer. 

Now, in the HPD's Gerald Goines, we have another excellent example of how making these records secret undermines justice and accountability.

There will be many more policy issues arising from this episode, Grits is certain, in the coming weeks and months. But this issue of secret-misconduct files is one the Texas Legislature should address this session. SB 433 (Hinojosa) should be passed as soon as possible.

Eleven unanswered questions about the botched police raid in Houston

Four officers were shot and two suspects and their dog are dead after a botched narcotics raid in Houston. Friends and family of the deceased say they were innocent victims. Obviously, I hope all the officers recover. But having watched this play out in the press for several days, Grits has questions.

Here's the background: According to the search warrant, police claimed they sent a confidential informant into the home who had assisted in 10 or more prior investigations, all of which had led to arrests and seizures. They searched the CI, gave him cash, and allegedly watched him go into the home in question. He came out with brown heroin in a bag, telling police he'd seen many other bags of heroin and a 9mm pistol. The officers placed the home under surveillance until they could get a warrant.

Problem is, they found no bags of heroin. There was no 9mm pistol. But when the narcotics unit (not a SWAT team) entered the home at five in the afternoon, announcing themselves as the battering ram broke the door down, there was an angry pit bull facing them that an officer immediately killed with a shotgun blast. At that, one of the homeowners returned fire, and an intense gunfight occurred.

The homeowners didn't have a 9mm, but they did have shotguns and a .357 Magnum, and they responded to the home invasion the way many gun owning Texas homeowners brag they would. Maybe they were violent criminals trying to kill police, but they could also have been unwitting victims of a lying informant who didn't understand who had broken down their door and shot their dog.

That's the first question: Were these people heroin dealers? The available evidence says no, and regrettably, they're not around to defend themselves against the allegation. Their neighbors told reporters they almost never had visitors, and their friends and family adamantly deny the charge. Cocaine was allegedly found on the scene, but one bag, at user levels. And the multiple bags of brown heroin and 9mm weapon alleged in the search-warrant affidavit were nowhere to be found.

So the second question is: Where did the informant get the heroin? Police claimed they followed best practices, searching the informant beforehand and watching him go in and out. The couple couldn't have moved it because police had the house under surveillance. And they'd have seen if there'd been enough customers for all the volume to deplete. So if the informant brought back heroin, where did it come from?

Third question: Is it plausible that this couple would sell smack to a CI sent to their front door whom they'd never met before? Something there doesn't add up.

Fourth question: Will the Conviction Integrity Unit at the Harris County District Attorney's Office now review those 10+ cases using this informant in the past? If he lied about this couple selling heroin, what else might he have lied about?

Fifth question: HPD claimed they raided the home for safety reasons because they knew there was a gun inside (even though they had bad information about that; there was no 9mm). But given the outcome, was it really safer? It was 5 p.m., so they were awake. Mightn't the outcome have been better if they'd just knocked on the front door?

Sixth question: Should police use "dynamic entry" to execute search warrants every time there's reportedly a gun in the home? There are probably guns in half the homes in Texas! Relatedly, if you're afraid someone might shoot at you when you break down their door, why not just wait outside for them to come out? The house was already under surveillance.

Seventh question: Were these narcotics officers sufficiently trained to perform a dynamic entry? There's a subsidiary question: why wasn't a SWAT team used? After his wife and dog had been killed, the husband, a Navy veteran with no criminal record, snuck out the back and opened fire on the officers from behind, the Houston Chronicle reported. This was a basic tactical error - someone should have been manning the back door. Also, such raids are frequently conducted pre-dawn to minimize the chance suspects will be awake and shoot back. This one was performed at five in the afternoon. So did these narcotics cops just not know what the hell they were doing?

Eighth question: Could they have raided the wrong house? The search warrant affidavit says police watched the informant go into the house and come out with drugs, then watched it until they raided it. But what if that's a lie? What if the informant merely told an officer the address of the house, and got it wrong? Otherwise, where is the heroin?

Ninth question: How much was the informant paid for this service? What is this person's background? How much was s/he paid in the past, and for what services? An officer vouched for the person in the search warrant affidavit, what was their relationship? It's okay to tell, the person can never be used as an informant again.

Tenth question: Chief Art Acevedo said neighbors thanked police for taking out a known drug house. But reporters interviewed every neighbor they could find and everyone said these were quiet people who seldom had visitors, loved animals, and kept to themselves. Why weren't those grateful neighbors corroborating the chief's claims to reporters?

Eleventh question: Why does Fox and Friends give union boss Joe Gamaldi a platform? The guy's a blowhard.

For more commentary on some of the implausible aspects to this story, see Reason's Jacob Sullum here and here.

MORE: On Twitter, someone suggested another excellent question: "Who shot who?" It was said the wife was shot when she lunged for a downed officer's shotgun after her dog had been killed. Does that mean she was unarmed at the time and the husband did all the shooting? Were any of the police injured by friendly fire?  Who shot who is an excellent question.

UPDATE (2/15): We're starting to get a few more answers. The informant may not exist, reported the Houston Chronicle, and police officers used heroin already in their possession to claim they'd performed a controlled buy. The narcotics officer who signed the warrant, Gerald Goines, from his hospital bed named two informants who may have performed the controlled buy, but both denied participating when questioned by investigators.

In the original warrant - the one used to justify the raid - Goines wrote that he watched the buy and, along with [Steven] Bryant, identified the substance as heroin. But when investigators went back to talk to Bryant, he admitted that he'd actually retrieved two bags of heroin from the center console of Goines' car, at the instruction of another officer. 

Though he then took the two bags of drugs for testing to determine that they were heroin, he eventually admitted that he had never seen narcotics in question before retrieving them from the car. That, the investigator noted, contradicts the search warrant affidavit filed before the raid, which indicates that Bryant "recognized the substance purchased by the CI as heroin."

Do ankle monitors on parolees make anyone safer?

In response to episodes where two different parolees being supervised by ankle monitors reportedly committed murder, one of them allegedly killing three people, law enforcement officials in Houston have been blaming TDCJ for not notifying them more promptly that a potentially dangerous parolee wasn't being monitored. From the Houston Chronicle:

Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said the current system reveals communication gaps between TDCJ and local law enforcement. 

“There has to be a better way to identify those individuals that are parole violators who pose a serious threat to public safety,” said Gonzalez. 

Rodriguez’s case is not the only one in recent days that raised concerns about the monitoring of dangerous parolees. Earlier this month, parolee Garry Jenkins, 56, slipped out of his house after curfew — a violation that should have been detected by the ankle monitor that was a condition of his parole — and later allegedly stabbed his mother to death. Five days later, after being arrested for violating parole, he was charged with murder. 

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo said the recent incidents highlighted the need to notify law enforcement of potential parole violations more quickly. 

“We need to come up with a process that’s almost instantaneous,” said Acevedo, who added that he wants to work with other departments around the area to create a regional task force dedicated to parole violations. 

Houston Police Officers Union President Joseph Gamaldi agreed. 

“We need to know when these monitors are … being cut off, so we can send people out there to look up these people and make sure they’re doing what they’re supposed to do,” Gamaldi said. “Three days is entirely too long before we know about it, that (someone) could get out there, do crimes and victimize people in our community.”

To the uninitiated, a call for "almost instantaneous" notification whenever parolees' ankle monitors raise a red flag surely sounds reasonable. But people in law enforcement circles - including IMO the officials making these comments - know it's complete bullshit.

In reality, ankle monitors are unreliable supervisors that create more problems than they solve. They exist because the idea sounds good in principle to the political class and is promoted aggressively by vendors, who've seen a big increase in market share. But in practice, if Houston PD began hunting down parole violators every time they (may have) absconded based on GPS data, they'd do almost nothing but that and still not make a dent in the problem they're trying to solve.

That's because ankle monitors have been plagued with false positive problems, to the point that they generate so much bad data as to be practically useless for supervision purposes.

In California, ankle monitors strapped to "high-risk" felons resulted in "agents [who] are drowning in a flood of meaningless data, masking alarms that could signal real danger." One expert told the LA Times in 2014:

"When these alerts are in the tens of thousands, it seems like an unwinnable situation," said Matthew DeMichele, a former researcher for the American Probation and Parole Assn. and coauthor of the Justice Department's guide on electronic monitoring. 

"In some ways, GPS vendors are selling law enforcement agencies, politicians, the public a false bag of goods," he said.

In Massachusetts, according to criminal-defense lawyer Daniel Capetta, "About 3,000 people are currently subject to electronic monitoring in Massachusetts. It has been reported that of these 3,000 GPS bracelets, there are approximately 1,800 alerts generated per day. In the overwhelming majority of these cases, there is no real problem."

In 2007 in Arizona, "140 offenders monitored that year experienced a total of 35,601 false alerts, due to problems such as low batteries or signals lost in dead zones." Of those, "The study group found 463 confirmed violations, meaning that false alerts outnumbered proven infractions by a 77-1 margin."

An essay from the Brookings Institute last year was titled, "Decades later, electronic monitoring of offenders is still prone to failure." Many GPS trackers are easily removed. They mainly exist to provide the public a false sense of security, a CYA backstop for probation and parole departments, and political cover for judges and/or parole boards making release decisions. 

By reducing available supervision resources thanks to spending so much time on false positives, however, arguably these devices harm public safety when used as widely as they are today. It would be even more harmful if HPD officers began spending lots of time tracking down parolees every time an anomalous blip shows up from their tracking device.

Not only can false positives make it hard to track actual evil-doers, they risk punishing innocent people because of technological glitches. Notably one of the inventors of an early GPS monitoring system now thinks they're used improperly and their functions could be shifted to smart phones. He also thinks companies that operate these services should be liable when they exacerbate public safety problems instead of improve them, characterizing their rent seeking posture coupled with a let-the-chips-fall-where-they-may attitude as a "negligent tort."

The same cost-benefit analysis related to ankle monitors applies to sending local police chasing after every parole absconder. According to the latest TDCJ Annual Statistical Report (2016), as of Aug. 31, 2016 (page 5), there were 12,883 parolees, out of 113,363, categorized as "pre-revocation, not in custody." Figure a fifth or so of those are in Houston. However, most of those pose nothing like the danger of the "mattress killer" parolee who allegedly went on a killing spree after cutting his ankle monitor. In fact, many of them just missed a meeting, will likely show up at the next one, and would not be revoked even if captured and brought in.

The truth is, even if TDCJ had notified them "instantaneously" in the recent cases, the Sheriff's Office wouldn't have followed up until a crime had been committed. The Associated Press reported that Harris County "deputies don’t necessarily search for parolees who have violated their terms of release and would only arrest those offenders they come across during the course of a patrol and run a background check."

The chief, sheriff, and police union have a mutual interest in hyping fear in an era of declining crime when law enforcement is making fewer arrests than any time in decades. They all have an interest in bigger budgets, more officers, and increased moral authority for themselves when the public sees them as protectors rather than incompetent bureaucrats.

So there's self-interest in their decision to ignore the problems with ankle monitors - even though their shortcomings are widely understood in law enforcement circles - and IMO it's that self interest we're seeing bubbling up in these comments. It's a win-win: deflects blame for local crimes onto TDCJ, and sets them up to look like champions of public safety when really the solutions suggested harm public safety thanks both to their politicized nature and extreme impracticality.

Suggested rules for using Precision Immobilization Technique

At the Houston Chronicle, St. John Barned-Smith has a story on Houston PD's decision to use the "Precision Immobilization Technique" (PIT) - causing a fleeing suspect's car to crash by intentionally ramming the back corner of their moving vehicle - for use during car chases in that city.

The article only quotes law enforcement personnel, no accountability advocates, researchers, or others who might have suggested needed limits on the tactic. So, since this was a topic that came up years ago when your correspondent was Police Accountability Project Director at the ACLU of Texas, allow Grits to fill that void. Offhand, here are some of the bare-minimum policies needed to make this decision acceptable from a public-safety perspective:

1. PIT should not be used for pursuits resulting from traffic violations - only when pursuing alleged felons. 

2. It should require initial training and regular retraining of authorized officers, including proper locations for the maneuver. 

3. Policies should require pre-approval from supervisors before the technique is used. 

4. It should not be used at speeds above 35 mph. 

5. Officers may not ram suspect vehicles outside of the PIT parameters. 

6. Officers should be encouraged to break off chases where PIT maneuvers would endanger the public.* 

7. Ban PIT's use on motorcycles. 

8. Only allow officers to use the technique who have dashcams in their cars.

9. Track data and video on incidents where it's used and re-evaluate the policy after one year.

There are almost certainly other limitations that should be included in HPD's chase policy on the use of this technique (feel free to suggest some in the comments), but at a minimum these subjects should be addressed. There are good reasons the previous chief chose not to use this technique, and lots of things that can go wrong.

*E.g., "Research has shown that if the police refrain from chasing all offenders or terminate their pursuits, no significant increase in the number of suspects who flee would occur. ... For a discussion of the experiences of the Orlando, Florida, Police Department, see G. Alpert, R. Dunham, and M. Stroshine, Policing: Continuity and Change (Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 2006), 194-205."

A few facts and an observation about labor economics, immigration politics, and the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey

If readers will forgive an off-topic aside, here are a few facts and a quick observation regarding Texan labor economics, Hurricane Harvey, and the current political moment:

Fact: Hurricane Harvey is about to leave Houston facing one of the biggest reconstruction jobs in the history of the planet.

Fact: Between 28 percent and half of Texas construction workers are illegal immigrants. And Texas home prices are already rising because many of them are departing.

Fact: If President Trump's border wall is funded, either large numbers of illegal immigrants will assist in its construction, ironically, or there won't be enough workers to build it. And that's before any national infrastructure plan adds additional large jobs to the plate of the Texas construction industry.

Fact: The feds have promised ramped up immigration enforcement and the Texas Legislature passed SB 4 (aka, the "show me your papers law") mandating greater law enforcement cooperation with immigration authorities and authorizing more aggressive police tactics toward illegal immigrants. Their stated aim was to increase the number of deportations of people picked up by law enforcement, even for minor traffic violations.

All of which leads to this observation:

Despite high-profile roundups after President Trump took office - sending ICE agents into Texas courthouses to arrest domestic violence victims, for example - as a practical matter the threat of mass deportations, at least in Texas, probably ended after Hurricane Harvey. Somebody actually must perform the labor involved in rebuilding America's fourth largest city.

White Texans aren't going to learn the skills to participate in the booming building trades overnight, nor would most of us be willing to endure the labor conditions typically involved in that industry. Anyway, we're basically at full employment already in Texas and there are only so many workers.

Regardless, just as Bush II was judged on Hurricane Katrina, President Trump will be judged in a major way based on how well he handles Harvey's aftermath. This president cares deeply about others' opinions about him, and IMO he will soon come to understand that what happens in Houston going forward will define his historical legacy.

In the medium term, once someone explains the labor market issues to him, Grits suspects Hurricane Harvey may turn out to stymie the President's anti-immigration fervor for the foreseeable future. And maybe even scrap the border wall, too, at least in Texas. It will be impossible to rebuild Houston while simultaneously deporting the construction industry's labor pool, much less build a pointless 18-30 foot high wall across the desert.

In the end, you can't do all the contradictory stuff he says - eventually you have to pick - and Hurricane Harvey in all likelihood just made a lot of President Trump's choices for him.

How Houston police officers are (not) held accountable for bad shoots

The Houston Chronicle's Lise Olsen and her colleague James Pinkerton have been pulling back the curtain on Houston PD police shootings over the past year. We've known for a while that HPD officers are almost never indicted for shooting people no matter what the circumstance, even when the officers' story blatantly contradicts known facts. Now we know that Houston officers are rarely disciplined in such cases, even when grave errors lead to deaths of unarmed victims. From Olsen's 12/29 story:

Only five of 40 cases involving police shootings of unarmed individuals since 2010 have resulted in disciplinary action against officers after police chiefs found that they violated policy, a new Chronicle analysis shows. None of the officers were criminally charged, and none of the disciplinary actions were announced to the public. Because the department's internal affairs probes are cloaked in confidentiality, the analysis required cross-matching data from the city, HPD and the Harris County District Attorney's Office. 

All five officers were disciplined for policy violations that occurred when they shot people while off-duty. 

One failed to train with the weapon he used to shoot an innocent man. Another exhibited a lack of "sound judgment" by shooting a fleeing man in the back while working an unapproved security job out-of-uniform. A third had been repeatedly disciplined for working an unauthorized apartment security job when he confronted and killed a wrecker driver. The fourth was found to have been intoxicated at the time he shot two people, among other policy violations. Still, as in all other intentional shootings, these were determined to have been "justified."

Even when disciplinary actions were taken, they seemed aimed more at providing cover for the shooter than punishing misconduct. Check out this example:

Officer Christopher Slater, who fired his weapon across a busy street and hit an unarmed 29-year-old, Gerard Barnett, in the back of the leg. Federal court records in a related civil rights lawsuit show the officer gave different versions of why he shot Barnett. The officer initially claimed Barnett had pointed a weapon at him. No gun was found, and Barnett's hands bore no sign of having fired a weapon. Still, the officer insisted someone else must have picked up the gun after Barnett fell. 

After interviewing suspects and reviewing surveillance video, HPD's own investigators concluded Barnett was an innocent bystander. Video cameras and other witness statements indicate that Barnett had been filling up a car with gas at a Citgo station when shots rang out and he ran to get out of the line of fire, according to documents made public in a related federal court case. 

Slater received a written reprimand in February 2010 - but only because he had "failed to qualify" with the gun he used by not practicing often enough at the department's firing range, his personnel file shows. In 2013, the city of Houston approved a rare $90,000 settlement for the man he shot. 

Despite that settlement, the Houston Police Department has never updated its account of the April 2009 shooting that claims Barnett pointed a weapon at Slater, who was off-duty and out-of uniform at the time of the incident. 

Barnett, reached by phone, said most of the settlement money went to pay a lawyer who finally agreed to take his case. Barnett has been able to work but has never been able to afford surgery. The officer's bullet remains embedded in his thigh.

Olsen highlighted the recent testimony of an expert witness who "analyzed 670 internal affairs reviews of HPD officers who had discharged their weapons between 2006 and 2016." He testified that, "HPD investigators relied too heavily on statements given by officers who'd been coached what to say by union lawyers," she reported.

Another recent Olsen story highlighted that, even though Harris County does not prosecute police officers for bad shoots, other jurisdictions are beginning to do so. That article opened:

Prosecutors in all but one of Texas' biggest counties have launched a spate of police officer prosecutions in the shootings of unarmed or mentally ill people over the past three years that parallels a similar rise in police prosecutions nationwide. 

Harris County, which leads the state in police shootings by a wide margin, is the exception. Prosecutors have presented evidence in more than 200 officer-involved shootings to grand juries that happened here since 2012. One of every five individuals shot by police was unarmed. But in every case, the officer was not indicted, records show.

One HPD officer cited was drunk when he shot an unarmed man but that fact was never presented to the grand jury by the DA's office.

Olsen's story goes on to demonstrate how difficult it is to secure convictions in cases against police officers, which nationally succeed only about a half of the time. "Out of the 78 police officers charged with murder or manslaughter in shooting-related prosecutions tracked since 2005, only 27 officers were convicted; 29 were acquitted or had charges dismissed; 22 cases remain pending as of November," according to an academic Olsen quoted who tracks them. Considering police kill nearly 1,000 people per year nationally, those are paltry numbers.

This fact bite in part shows favoritism toward police by prosecutors, but it's also a function of the plea-mill system into which the modern criminal justice system has devolved. For the most part, prosecutors don't try cases any longer - they cut deals and dismiss the hard ones. And these are hard ones. Police union attorneys are always willing to roll the dice with a jury, hoping sympathy for the profession will trump the facts. It's a smart strategy: Often, it does. 

Great coverage of an important issue. For more reporting on shootings of unarmed people, see the Chron's Unarmed series as well as Grits contributor Eva Ruth Moravec's Point of Impact series.

Underfunded police pensions plague big Texas cities

Texas police and fire pensions in the big cities are a mess the legislature is ill-prepared to deal with in the coming 85th session. The cost of a possible bailout is too large to consider during a budget-year bleeding with red ink, but other alternatives require ignoring fundamental economic realities that could bankrupt the state's largest cities. Reported the Texas Tribune:

Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio collectively face $22.6 billion worth of pension fund shortfalls, according to a new report from Moody’s, the credit rating and financial analysis firm. Moody’s analyzed the nation’s most debt-burdened local governments and ranked them based on how big the looming pension shortfalls are compared with the annual revenues on which each entity operates.

“Rapid growth in unfunded pension liabilities over the past 10 years has transformed local governments’ balance sheet burdens to historically high levels,” the report says. ... 

Houston, which came in fourth, faces a $10 billion shortfall, according to the report. That amount is more than four times the city’s annual operating revenues.

In Dallas, the Mayor has sued in a personal capacity to stop payouts that would bankrupt the pension fund and, ultimately, the city. According to the Dallas News, "hundreds of police officers and firefighters have become millionaires while insulated from the whims and risks of the markets." Moreover, “More than $500 million has been withdrawn from the $1.5 billion fund this year,”

One big issue which Grits had highlighted earlier is the pension funds penchant for excessive optimism when predicting future growth rates. According to the Tribune;

Moody’s applied its uniform analyses and formulas to the myriad governmental entities so that consistent comparisons could be made. But the firm’s process also resulted in different shortfall amounts than government agencies may estimate themselves. One reason for the differences is that Moody’s used each funds’ recent growth rates to estimate future fund balances, while many governmental entities estimate that their funds will draw higher growth rates in the future. 

For instance, Dallas reported a 5.4 percent growth rate that would put its shortfall at $5.4 billion. But Moody’s found the city’s pension fund was growing at a rate of 3.95 percent at the end of 2014. It calculated a higher shortfall of up to $7.6 billion. 

Houston reported a 7.72 percent growth rate and a $4.9 billion shortfall. Moody’s concluded that the city’s pension funds were growing at 4.44 percent in mid-2015 and adjusted its shortfall estimate to $10 billion. 

The report concluded that both Dallas and Houston in 2015 likely exacerbated their pension problems because they each contributed less to their funds than what was needed to keep the shortfalls from growing. Moody’s also downgraded the credit rating for both Dallas and Houston to AA3 this year. Unfunded pension liabilities were a primary driver in Dallas’ downgrade, whose outlook was also revised to negative.

Though, in the press, Houston's situation is always portrayed as less dire than in Dallas, it's worth noting Moody's downgraded both cities to the same levels. That's particularly salient once you account for Houston's high-balled estimated growth rate. Both of these pensions are in bad shape.

Already facing a multi-billion dollar shortfall, it's hard to imagine the Legislature effectively dealing with this issue next spring. But given how close the cities seem to be to full-blown catastrophe, it's possible they won't have a choice. If it comes to that, look for them to deal with it in a special session. I don't believe anyone is walking into opening with a set of real-world solutions that would satisfy everyone, and the issue is too big, complex, and involves too many powerful, interested parties to resolve in just a few months.

Bodycams and transparency: Houston PD edition

Just got an email from the good folks at KHOU. It read in part:

In an era of smartphones and social media, body cameras have become increasingly prevalent in police departments nationwide. Our five-person investigative team, based out of Houston, is part of TEGNA and KHOU. TEGNA has a new initiative in two of its stations to take a group of journalists “off the grid” and allow them to work on a project until it’s complete. On Sunday, our team launched our first project and we are hoping you will share our investigation with the readers of Grits For Breakfast. We researched more than 60 police departments nationwide to get information on their body-camera programs. 

Here’s a bit more information:

Body cameras are touted as tools to help on both sides of the lens: for the police and the citizens. To date, nearly 4,000 departments have implemented a body-camera program. The focus of our investigation is the Houston Police Department’s $8 million body-camera program, touted as the blueprint to transparency and accountability. 

But a four-month investigation by KHOU-TV, the CBS affiliate in Houston, found that the body-camera program is falling short of its promise. In a four-part docu-series called Transparency, KHOU investigates HPD’s implementation of the program.
The major findings were:

• HPD promised to conduct monthly audits of videos to check that officers are recording when it counts. We found that one random audit was conducted in six months.

• The Harris County District Attorney’s Office is missing videos in more than 700 cases. Houston’s interim police chief did not dispute this, but said they are investigating the issue.

• HPD delivered videos in 132 cases to the DA for use in court after the cases were already closed.

• Although the vendor that provides HPD’s cameras offers a safety net that ensures that footage will not be missed (free of charge), HPD chose not to activate that function.

You can see the full investigation at bodycamtransparency.com.

Houston PD pension mess could spur officer departures. Should we care?

Houston PD could see more officers retire soon as a result of the proposed pension deal Mayor Sylvester Turner negotiated with the unions, reported the Houston Chronicle last week. City leaders say "huge numbers of first responders are eligible to retire" immediately. In all, "37 percent of police officers and 25 percent of firefighters today are eligible to begin drawing pension checks." The fear is that ending super-generous, budget-busting benefits will spur more officers to leave sooner than later.

OTOH, doing nothing isn't an option. And the new recruits who replace aging officers will cost the pension fund (and city budget) less. Even so, it's unlikely that the deal cut will resolve the problem. The new deal slightly boosts employee contributions and lowers the expected rate of return from 8 percent to 7, but IMO that's still a wildly unrealistic number that I don't believe can be sustained for 30 years. If I'm right, the  pension fund won't be solvent in three decades, as promised.

The article expressed a particular worry that the department will lose staff at the commander level, but in Grits' view that should be the least of their concerns. Let's face it: Has the department really been run so well that they can't afford for top managers to be replaced?

Houston relies on defined benefit plans for officers which are far more generous than anything seen these days in the private sector. Under the new deal, many officers could retire when their age plus years of service equals 70 and then collect full benefits for the rest of their lives. Who else gets to retire at 50 with a guaranteed income for life? Certainly not most taxpayers in Houston footing the bills.

Bottom line, like so many US cities, politicians in Houston promised police and firefighters unions far more in benefits than taxpayers could afford, drastically underfunding pensions and assuming way-too-high rates of return on investment. Now, the politicians who made those promises are long gone and those financial chickens are coming home to roost. The transition from this unsustainable scenario will not come without disruption, and won't be limited to Houston, either.

Police pension bailouts, dreaming of Oklahoma, and other nightmarish scenarios on Halloween

A few things, while I've got you:

Lab delays spur boost in Nueces Co. personal bond use
In Corpus Christi, prosecutors have enacted a standardized policy of offering personal bonds to defendants charged in synthetic marijuana cases, mainly because of crime lab delays. The most likely reason for the shift: "The time it takes to get test results on the substances has been longer than the maximum allowed sentences. Possessing synthetic marijuana is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. Test results from the Department of Public Safety labs have been taking about nine months to a year to get back." They should keep close track of outcomes with these defendants, it will create a natural experiment to compare them with defendants convicted before they changed the policy.

With the chairmen of the House Criminal Jurisprudence and Calendars Committees both residing in Nueces, perhaps this news will place more pressure on the Lege to either adequately fund crime labs or adjust sentences to reduce pressure on them. Honestly, the whole crime lab system - at DPS and otherwise - is at the breaking point. Numerous disciplines have come under attack as fundamentally non-scientific, and even disciplines like toxicology with a more sound scientific basis are overwhelmed by volume and undercut by attempts to perform them on the cheap, as evidenced by the following item.

News flash: Bad field tests cause false drug convictions (and not just in Houston)
ProPublica has a great piece on the use of scientifically flawed "field tests" for drugs used in Las Vegas, NV, following up on important NY Times coverage earlier this year of the use of the same type of $2 tests in Houston. Both are must-read pieces of journalism for anyone interested in the topic. In Houston, this topic plays directly into debates in the DA's race over racial disparities in drug enforcement, as 59 percent of defendants falsely accused and convicted based on false positive from cheap field tests were black. They also pump up the state's "exoneration" numbers, ensuring that Texas will lead the nation in disproven false convictions for years to come just based on what's come out of Houston alone. The thing is, we know that EVERYONE who uses these field tests likely accuse innocent people, not just those in Houston or Vegas. These stories show us the tip of a much larger iceberg.

Requests for police pension bailouts pit cops vs. anti-tax conservatives
Increasingly it's clear that police pensions are a latent but fully primed flash point between anti-taxation Republicans in the Legislature, more liberal city councils, and local police unions. In Dallas, the pension us oversubscribed with too-generous benefits, has engaged in a series of flawed, risky real estate deals, and is losing money hand over fist. The fund in Houston isn't much better. In those and ten other Texas cities, local control of police and fire pensions has been wrested away by the Legislature and vested into independent bodies on which cities have a voice but unions (and the Lege) have ultimate control. Lately, the Laura and John Arnold Foundation's Josh McGee has been pounding away at the fundamental fiscal insolvency of these funds, mos recently in this excellent short report written with Paulina Diaz on the Dallas police and firefighters' pension. Their bottom line assessment of the crisis in Dallas: "The city’s public pension debt has doubled in less than two years due to inadequate funding, irresponsible benefit enhancements, and poor investment decisions. The total unfunded liability is now at least $4 billion—and the plans do not have enough money to pay for nearly half of the retirement benefits workers have already earned."

All these pension funds want bailouts either from local or state taxpayers, putting the police and firefighters unions directly in conflict with low-or-no-tax conservatives around the state, not just in the Tea Party wing of the GOP but also among establishment Chamber of Commerce types who abhor large tax hikes. Police and firefighters are among the last employees who receive defined benefit pensions instead of defined contributions (typically in 401ks) like most everybody else. They'll claim the sky will fall if that's changed, but the truth is, as the Arnold Foundation report ably demonstrates, the sky will fall if nothing changes. MORE: The Texas Public Policy Foundation is holding an event on public employee pensions in Austin next week.

Dreaming of Oklahoma, and other unlikely scenarios
Grits never thought the day would come when I could write this, but part of me is a little envious of Oklahoma, or I should say Oklahoma reformers. They've put drug sentencing reductions on the ballot and therefore can have a conversation about the idea's merits directly with the voters instead of filtering reform through the legislative process, with the resulting compromises, delays and special-interest interventions that inevitably entails. OTOH, Grits was doing this work in the '90s, so I can remember an era when I was quite grateful Texas didn't have initiative and referendum. The tough-on-crime crowd could and would have proposed, and voters would likely have passed, much worse stuff, even, than actually got through, except in a venue where opponents have had no way to oppose, modify, counter or coopt the details of the proposals.

So while the prospect of ballot initiatives is tempting - and while part of me wishes we could similarly test Texas voters' views on criminal justice reform more directly than just polling, which generally shows support for the main reforms presently on the table, but whose results haven't been tested by the gauntlet of special-interest attacks which face a ballot initiative of this sort - I'm still glad Texas doesn't have initiative and referendum and would oppose it here if it were seriously suggested. If I were in Oklahoma, though, right about now I'd be busting my hump to help Questions 780 and 781 pass. Good luck to them.

Piling on CCA CoreCivic
In response to federal prison contracts being rescinded and surprisingly successful divestment campaigns aimed at reducing their capital, Corrections Corporation of America, the private prison operator, has rebranded and renamed itself as CoreCivic. According to this source, "Last month, CCA fired 12 percent of its corporate workforce to deal with sharply dropping investment—largely thanks to growing pressure campaigns to divest from private prisons." Here's the company's press release. Not to pile on, but I should mention several of the private prison facilities Grits has argued should be prioritized for closure by the Texas Legislature in 2017 are CCA CoreCivic units.