Austin's Chief Manley blames victims for misunderstanding his victim-blaming comments

Austin Police Chief Bryan Manley apologized if rape victims felt he had blamed them in his department's coverup surrounding inflated sexual-assault clearance rates, but insisted he had never done so. Here's what he said.

"If my comments made survivors of sexual assault in my community feel like we were victim-blaming, then I absolutely apologize," Manley said in the interview. "Sitting here today, absolutely, if there are survivors in my community that felt like we were in any way victim-blaming or finger pointing, that's not what we were doing. We were trying to point out the possibilities of why we had a higher exceptional clearance rate."

That's not an apology, that's more victim blaming. Rape survivors didn't feel that he blamed them, they observed it.

Here's the context: Manley's predecessor as APD chief, Art Acevedo (now chief in Houston) replaced the head of Austin's sex crimes unit because she refused to alter clearance-rate data to say cases were closed because victims wouldn't cooperate in situations where that wasn't the case.

The department actually did that to her. It's not a perception. It's documented history.

When, last year, Chief Manley spoke to your correspondent about the topic, he continued to claim that the cases were closed because victims wouldn't cooperate, saying there was nothing his department could do in such circumstances.

This was a false characterization. We now know that for certain. Out of a sample of a hundred, Texas DPS said a third were closed improperly. What was improper about them? Results were miscategorized to say the victims chose not to cooperate when that wasn't true.

Victims who observed 1) the department miscategorize their positions after 2) removing the department head who'd been doing it right, then 3) heard Chief Manley doubling down on the false characterization over and over in the media, will feel blamed. That's because they were blamed, in a cynical attempt at media manipulation.

Think "media manipulation" is too harsh? Last fall, Manley told anyone who would listen that his department couldn't help it if victims wouldn't cooperate. But when it was proven he was wrong - when DPS audit results showed many victims had not refused to cooperate and had been wrongly blamed en masse in APD data - he held onto the information for nearly three weeks before revealing it at a hastily called press conference late afternoon on New Years Eve. That's a tactic to minimize media coverage, but it backfired, demonstrating the Chief's mens rea on the subject.

Manley says he was trying to "point out the possibilities" regarding why "exceptionally cleared" cases were miscategorized. But the only possibilities he focused on, in fact, blamed rape victims. He has refused to countenance the "possibility" that APD brass intentionally, improperly inflated the data and removed the head of the sex-crimes unit when she refused to participate in their malfeasance. But that is, in fact, precisely what happened. Manley's "apology" claiming victims misunderstood him is another insult. He's the one issuing all the misleading statements.

If Manley's not going to actually apologize, he should stay mum. No one needs to hear him claim victims are too dumb to understand what's going on here, when everyone but him can see quite plainly.

See prior, related Grits posts:

• Austin police chief is the last person who should be giving other chiefs advice on rape-clearance rate data.
• Whistleblower: Austin PD fudged rape clearance rates to boost numbers, pretend hundreds of crimes were solved when no arrests were made
• Austin police chief needs better responses to whistleblower allegations of improperly cleared rape cases
• Third party will review clearance-rate data that spurred ouster of Austin PD division chief
• More than a clerical error: DPS audit proves Austin PD forced out sex-crimes chief for refusing to fake clearance rates

Austin Police Chief is the last person who should be giving other chiefs advice on rape-clearance rate data!

Bizarrely, Austin Police Chief Bryan Manley is scheduled to speak to the Major Cities Police Chiefs' Association in Washington D.C. this week to share "hard lessons he's learned" about how police categorize sexual assault cases.

He's not ready. Manley hasn't yet taken responsibility for what happened or been held accountable for his cynical strategy to blame rape victims for APD-management malfeasance. Until he does, he shouldn't be lecturing anybody on this topic. In fact, this might be a good week to cancel his trip and spend the time instead on self-reflection, or perhaps listening to some of the growing cadre of victims upset about how the department handled their cases.

Readers will recall Austin PD ousted the head of the sex crimes unit, Liz Donegan, because she refused to inflate data to make it look like her unit solved more crimes than it did. Under former Chief Art Acevedo, who is now chief in Houston, the department pressured her to claim detectives solved crimes but cases didn't go forward because victims refused to cooperate.

Donegan refused, and was dismissed from her post, replaced by officials who immediately began to change the data to increase "clearance rates" by 50 percent. When the news came out in a national podcast last fall, Manley doubled down, repeatedly insisting to the media, including to this writer, that victims' failure to cooperate was the source of the problem.

But an audit by the Texas Department of Public Safety, released with little notice by Chief Manley at a late-New-Years-Eve press conference, found that a third of cleared cases in the sample analyzed were improperly categorized as "exceptionally cleared" because the victims wouldn't cooperate.

That's significant because Chief Manley describes Donegan's ouster as stemming from a "disagreement" over how to report clearance-rate data, which he says was resolved when she was replaced. So he's granted publicly that she was dismissed over this issue under his predecessor, the only remaining question was whether APD was right to do so?

We learned on New Years Eve that they were not; she was a victim of some seriously shady employment practices. Donegan was wrongfully removed from her position because she wouldn't blame rape victims in her clearance-rate data for her own unit's failures. This can now be stated without fear of contradiction or accusation of libel. It's just true.

Manley wants to pretend the problems all stemmed from clerical errors, hoping to elide any culpability for malfeasance by APD brass. But that ignores the severity of the now-admitted/proven allegations. To repeat: APD dismissed the head of its sex-crimes unit because she wouldn't fake data, then changed the categorization of case results to blame victims for cases not going forward.

The chief has never publicly apologized either to Sgt. Donegan or the wrongly-blamed rape victims for his department's slanders against them, but now is going to lecture other chiefs about the "hard lessons" he's learned? Please!

Only one of two things can explain it: complete obliviousness or excessive chutzpah. Or, I suppose the third possibility is he's receiving really bad PR advice.

See prior, related Grits posts:

• Third party will review clearance-rate data that spurred ouster of Austin PD division chief
• More than a clerical error: DPS audit proves Austin PD forced out sex-crimes chief for refusing to fake clearance rates
• Whistleblower: Austin PD fudged rape clearance rates to boost numbers, pretend hundreds of crimes were solved when no arrests were made
• Austin police chief needs better responses to whistleblower allegations of improperly cleared rape cases

Third party will review rape-clearance data that spurred ouster of Austin PD division chief

Last night, the Austin City Council voted to have a third party review years worth of cases to discover the extent to which the Police Department inflated clearance rates in sexual assault cases. the agency pressured the head of the sex crimes unit to declare more cases "exceptionally cleared," then removed her when she refused and began puffing up the numbers, anyway. Now we know she was in the right and APD brass was fudging data to misrepresent success rates to the city council and the public.

Here's the Statesman's minimalist coverage, but you can watch the testimony yourself if you like. On the latest episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast, my co-host Mandy Marzullo and I included a segment on this topic, in which I took APD Chief Bryan Manley to task for blaming victims and playing hide-the-ball. I've excerpted it here to highlight the issue; give it a listen:


The city council is letting Chief Manley off easy. He has not behaved like a man who understands why what the department did here is a problem. OTOH, the controversy isn't over: Manley is scheduled to address the issue before the public-safety commission on Monday evening.

See prior, related Grits posts:

• More than a clerical error: DPS audit proves Austin PD forced out sex-crimes chief for refusing to fake clearance rates
• Whistleblower: Austin PD fudged rape clearance rates to boost numbers, pretend hundreds of crimes were solved when no arrests were made
• Austin police chief needs better responses to whistleblower allegations of improperly cleared rape cases

More than a clerical error: DPS audit proves Austin PD forced out sex-crimes chief for refusing to fake clearance rates

Auditors from the Texas Department of Public Safety  confirmed allegations that the Austin Police Department pressured the head of its sex-crimes unit to improperly classify rapes as "exceptionally cleared" when that was not the case. She was removed from her position when she didn't comply.

Chief Bryan Manley announced the results from the DPS audit late afternoon on New Years Eve, hoping it would get lost in the holiday media cycle. That's a disgraceful, punk move. This is too serious an issue to play media games. UPDATE: ProPublica reported that Manley received the preliminary results from DPS on Dec. 13, more than two weeks before he released them.

As is typical in Austin, the local press downplayed criticisms of APD, portraying the problem as a clerical error. The Statesman headline was, "Austin police improperly classified some rape cases, audit finds." KXAN's headline was, "DPS report: 30 APD rape cases should not have been cleared," although in fact DPS audited just a sample and those 30 cases represent many, many more. KUT parroted the same line, failing to mention that APD forced out its division chief over the issue.

These headlines could/should have been something along the lines of "DPS confirms whistleblower account of inflated rape clearance rates," but the Austin press remains in the pocket of local police and rarely publishes explicit criticisms unless backed into a corner by outside reporting and circumstances.

That's what happened here. Despite local advocates pressuring the department all year over inadequately investigated rape cases, the Austin press didn't cover the story until a podcast from national outlets reported on the whistle blower and bogus clearance rates.

Notably, although the DPS audit released Monday found a third of audited rape cases were misclassified,  Manley earlier claimed his own staff had audited the cases and found nothing wrong. The Statesman reported in December that "he asked his staff to do a random audit of cases to ensure they were properly closed. He said they found the department was complying with FBI guidelines."

I'd like to know more about this random audit the Chief supposedly had his own people do. Why did they find zero cases were miscategorized, and DPS found a third of them were? Were these staff incompetent? Or were they given directions designed to cover up the problem instead of expose it? That's the sort of thing an aggressive local press ought to be digging into with open-records requests, but Grits won't hold his breath.

All press reports that portray this as some obscure data mix up are misleading. This was a scandal, flat-out fraud and malfeasance, with APD removing the head of a major division because she wouldn't falsify data to make the department appear to be solving more crimes. As Grits opined on Twitter when the news came out, "This was not a bureaucratic error, as Manley would like to portray it. The head of the sex crime unit was removed from her job because she refused to falsify clearance-rate numbers. Thank God she spoke up!"

The ouster of the sex-crimes-unit head happened on former Chief Art Acevedo's watch, but Chief Manley's ham-handed response has made the scandal and its cover-up his own. In a city with an aggressive, watchdog press, he might not survive the scandal. In Austin, he's betting he'll limp through thanks to lapdogs in the lame-stream press, and a few years ago, that might have been a safe assumption.

But survivor advocates and city council members are going to read the audit for themselves, and in the wake of the union-contract fight, mainstream media has proven less important in the capital city than ever before when it comes to policing politics. Whether the press report it or not, APD has been caught in a lie for all to see. If he wants to keep his job, Chief Manley must stop the media games and obfuscations and address these topics more forthrightly.

An apology to the rape survivors whose cases APD lied about - claiming their cases couldn't move forward because the victims wouldn't cooperate - would be a good start.

Austin police chief needs better responses to whistleblower allegations of improperly cleared rape cases

After the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX aired complaints in a podcast from an Austin PD whistleblower claiming she'd been pressured to declare rape cases "cleared," the City Council got an earful at the hearing on police oversight Thursday evening. (Go here to listen to the podcast; the APD segment begins at ~35:10 mark.) KUT has now followed up, with one of the reporters discussing in detail what evidence they do and don't have surrounding the alleged clearance-rate coverup.

Grits wrote about the case the other day, so Chief Manley came up to me after the vote on the union contract (more on that, soon), earnestly wanting to explain to me why the issue was no big deal. But just as he did with the podcast reporters, he stopped short of being able to defend his position with specifics. He would say he had supervisors audit this or he was told that, while the whistleblower was speaking of specific cases about which she had first-hand knowledge. And his stance that he never intended the City Council to think "cleared cases" meant "solved cases" really doesn't match his comments to city officials quoted in the podcast. That's how any reasonable person would have taken it.

There probably needs to be an independent investigation of this episode by someone outside the department. The law enforcement responses so far seem more bent on obfuscating whether potentially viable rape cases were improperly cleared than on clarifying the matter.

Until then, my advice to Chief Manley: Find out to the letter what the sergeant thinks was wrong with your definitions of exceptionally cleared cases, then be able to explain the differences to reporters and the City Council. Don't just say there was a difference of opinion, as you declared on the podcast, and said to me at least twice. That's not good enough.

As it stands, the difference of opinion is that she has accused your agency of pressuring her to improperly clear rape cases, and your predecessor resolved the "difference of opinion" by removing her from her position as head of the sex-crimes unit so someone else could pump up the numbers. Given that fact pattern, the difference of opinion isn't trivial. Your side damn well better be right.

Whistleblower: Austin PD fudged rape clearance rates to boost numbers, pretend hundreds of crimes were solved when no arrests were made

A former Austin police sergeant who was in charge of APD's sex crimes unit claims she was forced out after refusing to clear cases where arrests were never made and no one was prosecuted, even if the suspect had been identified. The result was to give a false impression that the department had solved many more rape cases than was really the case.

The podcast, Reveal, from the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX, covered the topic of clearance cases in rape cases, and about 2/3 of the way through the episode (~35:10 mark), they hone in on Austin as their primary case study. Go here to listen. The former sergeant in charge of the Austin PD sex-crimes unit described being ordered to re-categorize cases, refusing because they did not meet the criteria, then being moved out of the job and replaced by people who immediately made the data changes she would not.

Police chief Bryan Manley was quoted giving puffed up stats to the Public Safety Commission, then unconvincingly defended the decision to re-categorize cases as closed to reporters after Mayor Steve Adler ordered him to sit down with reporters.

Manley comes off as non-responsive, while the Sergeant comes off as credible, with specific facts and data to back up her claims. The chief framed the issue as a simple difference of opinion which was resolved when the sergeant left the position. But the whistle blower saw more politicized motives at play in re-categorizing so many cases. While allowing that Manley may have been misled by subordinates, she insisted the re-categorization of cases as "exceptionally cleared" - which means cops had probable cause to arrest a suspect but could not, for some legitimate reason - simply wasn't justified for the cases in question.

Manley denied he was "blaming the victim," but his only explanation for "clearing" more than 1,400 rape cases in which a rapist had been identified, but not arrested, was that the "survivor" would not participate in the investigation. Problem is, victims can't participate if they don't know what's happening. The example of a UT student whose case was used to frame the story definitely fit the sergeant's characterization more than the chief's. She had to learn from reporters that Austin PD had found her rapist but closed the case without referring it for prosecution. She said she would have been willing to testify. It's hard to imagine, from the data presented by reporters, that that was an isolated circumstance.

Grits doubts we've heard the last of this topic. I'm looking forward to hearing the city council's next public conversation with the chief - perhaps this Thursday, when they finally approve the union contract and enact a new oversight system - in which council members have an opportunity to raise these questions.

Beyond Austin, a lot of the podcast focused on law enforcement gaming clearance rates, which is a topic this blog has returned to repeatedly over the years. Just to review a few of those items:

Clearance rates may represent the results of departmental-level decisions and priorities. For example, research shows that departments that are more focused on generating revenue through traffic tickets have lower clearance rates.

Low clearance rates are a source of political vulnerability for police, so there's an incentive to puff up the numbers, especially on something like rape where public sentiment is easily inflamed. Even so, clearance rates for many property crimes, in particular, are exceedingly low.

Homicide clearance rates have been on the decline in recent years, and one of the odd, unexplained ironies of modern criminology is that murder rates have declined even more than clearance rates, meaning the fact of solving a lower proportion of murders did not prevent overall homicide reductions. On the podcast in September,  Mandy Marzullo and I discussed (and for the most part, dismissed) a theory by an academic that those reduced clearance rates were a result of reforms achieved by the innocence movement.

MORE: This post brought to mind this classic, cinematic commentary on police clearance rates:

Study: When cities rely on ticket revenue, police clearance rates decline

On the latest Reasonably Suspicious podcast, released yesterday, Mandy Marzullo and I discussed a theory suggested by Jay Wachtel that the innocence movement and measures taken to prevent false convictions had contributed to a decline in crime-clearance rates.

Grits wishes I'd read this Washington Post op ed, published online the day we recorded, before that conversation, and perhaps we'll revisit the topic. The authors suggested another provocative, possible cause of low clearance rates: A disproportionate focus by police on revenue generation over public safety.

The writers are academics who recently published a study demonstrating that "Police departments that collect more in fees and fines are less effective at solving crimes." In particular:

Examining nearly 6,000 cities’ finance and crime data for each of the two studied years, we find a strong link between revenue collection and clearance rates. Police departments in cities that collect a greater share of their revenue from fees, fines and civilly forfeited assets have significantly lower rates of solving violent and property crimes. 

We suspect that this comes simply from how these police departments focus their time and resources. Departments that need to collect fee and fine revenue shift their officers away from investigatory work. That’s especially true in smaller cities, where we found an especially clear link: Higher revenue from fees and fines meant fewer violent crimes solved. Cities with smaller departments and fewer resources are less likely to have specialized investigators, so when patrol officers are collecting revenue, they’re not investigating more serious crimes.

How big an effect are we talking about?

Let’s imagine a city of 50,000 people — call it Middletown — where the per capita income, racial demographics, crime rate and similar variables are the same as the state averages. Nationally, on average, municipalities bring in 2 percent of their revenue from fees and fines. If Middletown’s police department collected only about 1 percent of its revenue from fees and fines, our model predicts it would solve 53 percent of its violent crimes and 32 percent of its property crimes. But if Middletown’s police department instead collected 3 percent of its revenue from fees and fines, our model predicts that clearance rates would fall to 41 percent for violent crimes and 16 percent for property crimes. That’s a stark drop of 12 and 16 percentage points, respectively.

In the podcast, Mandy suggested that one viable, alternative theory for low clearance rates might be increased alienation between marginalized communities and law enforcement, and the study authors also framed their findings in that vein:

Some communities have a saying: “The police are never there when you need them and always there when you don’t.” Our findings help explain this adage. In cities where police are collecting revenue, communities are at once overpoliced — because they are charged with more fines and fees — and underpoliced — because serious crimes in their areas are less likely to be solved. 

This dynamic of simultaneous overpolicing and underpolicing reduces the community’s trust in policing and in government more generally. For many citizens, police interactions may be their only contact with any government official. If citizens see the police in particular and the government in general as exploiting them for revenue, they are unlikely to see either as allies in keeping their communities safe. Low clearance rates, especially for violent crimes, reduce public trust in the police and in government as a whole — leading them not to cooperate with either.

A reduction in crimes solved surely is an unintended consequence of municipal revenue generation through ticketing. But just because the costs are borne by crime victims, and not the taxpayers as a whole, doesn't justify government ignoring them.

Notably, at their state conventions in June, both the Republican Party of Texas and the Texas Democratic Party included provisions in their platforms calling for an end to jailing drivers for non-payment of traffic tickets and other Class C misdemeanor debt, using commercial collections methods, instead. This new analysis shows that such a shift in focus may result in more, actual crimes being solved, bolstering the case for reform.

One recalls former Dallas police Chief David Brown suggesting that society calls on law enforcement to handle too many problems. Surely, municipal revenue generation is one of those demands that should be taken off their plate.

John Wiley Price discovery measured in terabytes, and other stories

Here are a few items which failed to make it into independent posts over the holiday but deserve Grits readers' attention:

Violence, not jobs, driving current immigration trends
Traditionally undocumented immigrants entering Texas came because of jobs. Increasingly they're people fleeing violence, death and chaos. El Paso has witnessed an influx of refugees from the states of Michoacán and Guerrero because of extreme drug violence there, mirroring the causes of a mass influx of children from Central America earlier in the year. 

Abbott may back bills to help ex-felons get jobs
Apparently incoming Gov. Greg Abbott supports scaling back occupational licensing restrictions to help more ex-felons get jobs, a measure backed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation and championed in the linked story by state Sen. John Whitmire. Given that, expect some movement on this in the coming session, though to what extent remains to be seen. "In Texas, where about a third of the jobs are licensed, that means fewer opportunities for those with a criminal past. Advocates of modifying the current licensing laws say the change could get thousands more Texans working and paying taxes and get many off welfare-assistance programs."

When the prosecutors' open file has 150 million pages
Though the figure seems unbelievable, in the John Wiley Price federal corruption case, according to the Dallas News, “Prosecutors reportedly have about 6.5 terabytes of digital information to turn over to the defense. That does not include audios, videos, photographs, tax documents or 'materials too bulky to scan,' a defense motion has said. The government has estimated that 2.5 terabytes of data will remain after 'processing and culling.'” According to the News, "That is roughly the equivalent of 150 million pages of material."

Turn out the lights: SAPD chief to leave, work for electric utility
San Antonio police chief William McManus is leaving after nearly nine years on the job to head security at the city's electric utility, reported the SA Express-News in an outgoing profile.

Novelty act?
Is the new client choice model of selecting indigent counsel in Comal County a bold new strategy or a novelty that distracts from larger issues of insufficient resources?

How to judge homicide clearance rates?
With a 65 percent clearance rate at Houston PD, "A [Houston] Chronicle review of homicide cases in Houston from 2009 through the first half of 2014 found at least 353 investigations that remain open. Stepping back through the years, the number soon tops 1,000." Parents of victims in unsolved cases insist more should be done; detectives insist when they've exhausted all leads, that's what there is to do. Broken out by race, clearance rates are highest for whites, lowest for Hispanics. The department got into trouble this year when it was revealed a detective wasn't investigating some cases assigned to him at all, so it's understandable the homicide clearance rate is a sensitive subject. In a city the size of Houston, it's unrealistic to expect 100 percent of murders to be solved.  But lamentably, any outcome short of perfection will leave the department with some very emotional and unhappy detractors among families of victims in unsolved killings. Oddly, homicide rates have fallen nationally in recent years during a period in which murder rates have also radically declined. So, surprisingly, the data show little if any correlation between solving murders and reducing their number, to the extent that's any consolation.

Restorative justice in schools
School districts across the state, including several in Bexar County, are experimenting with restorative justice models for student discipline.

Perry pardon grinch at final Christmas as governor
Humbug! No Christmastime clemency from Rick Perry on his way out the door, so apparently these four piddling pardons from October will be his last as governor. Here's hoping Greg Abbott's team will make a New Year's resolution to embrace clemency with more vigor over the next four years rather than treating it as a symbolic Christmas ritual with little real practical effect.

Three stories from the darker side of Texas history
On my personal blog, recently I wrote about three murderous Texas land grabs - targeting Mexicans, Native Americans, and black folks - about which Grits was never taught in school. Were you? As fat as that 7th grade Texas history book was, you'd think they could have fit these stories in.

Austin will raise taxes to hire more cops, but still won't investigate more burglaries

Should the City of Austin hire 47 new police officers it can't afford when it's short $10 million and nearly 12% of police calls respond to false alarms? Among the Austin City Council and the local media, nobody seems to question such assumptions. But they don't make sense to me.

Austin spends 2/3 of its city budget on public safety (police/fire/EMS), mostly the police department, and in the last decade public safety spending, led by super-generous raises for Austin police, soaked up virtually all additional revenue generated by economic growth. Here's the breakout for how the city general fund is being spent in FY 2011:

For several years now, obligations for pay raises at the Austin Police Department have been a huge driver for local tax increases, to the point where now every city budget plan begins, as the 2012 budget does, assuming that the city will raise its tax rate the maximum allowable amount short of triggering a possible rollback. State troopers would need a 52% pay hike to match Austin PD, who are far and away the highest paid officers in the state and, when adjusted for the regional cost of living, arguably are the highest paid in the nation.

At times, I'm not sure what the high pay is buying us. The 2010 annual performance report (pdf) from the city manager for the Austin Police Department in places reads like something out of a bureaucratic fantasyland. See in particular the "key measures" listed on p. 63 of the pdf, in which we see that both violent and property crime rates per 1,000 residents have increased in the last half-decade, running counter to state and national trends. The final column asks "Goal met?," and for both performance measures the city placed a shiny green check mark. Ditto after data showed a 14% rise in per-capita DWI fatalities last year. APD had inexplicably predicted an even larger increase, despite declining DWI death trends nationally. This is a head-scratcher. If rising per capita crime rates are really APD's goal, maybe they're aiming is too low!

Compounding Grits' frustration with out-sized local police expenditures and below-average outcomes, when the Austin city manager compiled his list of "unmet needs" for the 2012 budget, it included 44 FTEs (full-time equivalent job positions) at the police department, including 18 new 911 call takers, in addition to 47 new officer positions already planned for FY 2012. The city manager says APD needs more resources to reduce clearance rates for serious crimes, particularly burglaries, which are notoriously declining:

APD requests that 8 of the 47 new officer positions for FY 2012 be upgraded to detective to improve caseloads and increase the number of cases solved. The percent of serious Part I Index crimes (homicide, robbery, burglary) that were solved decreased in recent years. The FY 2010 clearance rate was 8% lower than FY 2009 and 10% lower than the average of the last four years (FY 2006 through FY 2009). Austin's clearance rate for Part I crimes in FY 2009 was 13.2% compared to the 18.3% national average.

So the 47 new officer slots don't even implicate efforts to increase burglary clearance rates - presumably most will be patrol-level positions. The department's plan is to fill those 47 slots but to leave extra resources for burglary investigation in the "unmet needs" category. Indeed, a recurring theme throughout city budget documents is that APD needs endessly more staff than it currently has to do its job and any failures or shortcomings may be attributed to lack of more personnel: "Without sufficient staffing levels," says the city in a document titled "Horizon Issues" (large pdf), "crime problems are identified, but very little can be done other than to respond to the problem after it has occurred."

These complaints about unmet staffing needs while expanding the police force strike Grits as odd, since elsewhere cities and counties are cutting their numbers of officers as a result of the budget crunch. Just like the federal government attempts to cut its budget after excluding the military and healthcare - the things it spends the most on - the City of Austin limits its budget frugality to the third of the budget devoted to non-public safety spending, like parks, libraries and health clinics. The police budget is a sacred cow.

Especially in tight budget times, I don't support APD adding 47 new officers until I'm convinced they're not wasting the efforts of those they employ now. Grits has frequently argued the easiest way to free up more officer time would be to implement verified response for burglar alarms. After Grits a couple of weeks ago quoted materials from the Dallas PD calling false burglar alarms "the single greatest waste of law enforcement resources" in America," I was sent the internal document below created by a now-retired APD lieutenant in 2007 promoting the idea for Austin. I'm told it was written for discussion within the department but was never submitted to the city council.

According to that document, "In 2006 the Austin Police Department responded to 42,906 alarm calls.  At least 39,354 of those alarms were burglary alarms.  These calls accounted for 11.7% of calls dispatched to Austin police officers and 5.4% of all incoming calls to the Austin-Travis County 9-1-1 center in 2006.  Approximately 99% of those alarms were false alarms." Out of those nearly 40,000 burglar alarm calls in 2006, Austin officers made a whopping 11 arrests for burglary as a result of alarms, with 7,467 actual burglaries reported that year. Meanwhile, APD clearance rates for burglary (i.e., the proportion solved) trail the national average and have been steadily declining, with more resources focused on reacting to false alarms than investigating the actual crimes. Nobody but the writers of alarm company brochures thinks responding to burglar alarm calls will help solve more burglaries, but APD's proposed 2012 budget hires new patrol officers for that task while leaving as an "unmet need" resources to actually investigate burglaries. How messed up is that?

The cost spent responding to alarms in Austin is half again the revenue generated from fines and fees, according to the report, but on top of that there's the opportunity cost: Officers employed to chase down false burglar alarms aren't available to investigate actual burglaries or other crimes. Switching to verified response would be the equivalent of reducing dispatched calls to police by around 10% or so. With that option available, I don't see the wisdom in hiring 47 new officers just to waste their time tracking down false alarms.

Here's the internal report from APD on verified response from 2007; other than the dated statistics, nothing's changed. The department faces the identical practical and political issues today. And the best, short-term solution is the same as that identified by Lt. Pendergrass in this document: Expanding police coverage not through higher taxes and hiring more officers, but diverting police responses from non-productive false alarms to investigating actual crimes. Just hiring more officers to waste their time on unproductive tasks make little public-safety sense.

Symbolic Justice: LWOP for serial rapists creates more problems than it solves

One the the biggest differences between California's hyper-expensive prison healthcare system and Texas' relatively well-functioning one is the widespread use of life sentences and life without parole in the Golden State compared to Texas, which has driven up health costs for older inmates with long sentences, including end of life care. About 6% of Texas inmates are lifers, compared to 20% in California. Older prisoners are boosting Texas' healthcare costs as well (it's not like Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles is particularly generous toward this category of inmates), but California's overuse of life sentences has swelled the ranks of their prison geriatric wards.

Life sentences in Texas usually mean 30-40 years minimum, but until recently almost all "lifers" in Texas were eventually eligible for parole. Then in 2005, death-penalty abolitionists cut what IMO was a terrible deal with prosecutors to eliminate the possibility of parole in capital cases, creating Texas' first "Life Without Parole" (LWOP)  sentence. At the time, Shannon Edmonds at the prosecutors association predicted the sentence would become a camel's nose under the tent, with the list of qualifying crimes inevitably expanding over time just like with capital murder. And he was right; it almost immediately did. The next LWOP sentence was for "continuous sexual abuse of a child," and now we have House Bill 3 by Rep. Senfronia Thompson creating an LWOP sentence for sexual assault on the second offense. Rep. Thompson is a powerful, influential legislator with lots of seniority; there's a risk this legislation will make it fashionable to propose LWOP enhancements for all sorts of stuff if it goes through.

As it does with virtually every criminal penalty enhancement, no matter how big or small, the Legislative Budget Board says there will be "no significant fiscal implication" for the state from the legislation, which is nonsensical from a long-term perspective (though it's true enough for purposes of biennial budgeting). Paying for prisoners' health care in those final years of life through General Revenue funds basically assumes costs that, if they could be paroled after 30-40 years, would be assumed by the feds through the Medicare program. There are individual inmates with million-dollar healthcare bills at TDCJ near the end of life, so it doesn't take many of those to cause that line item to grow.

And for what? As is so often the case with criminal penalty enhancements, this proposal is a placeholder for actual solutions - a symbolic statement, not a serious plan to reduce sexual assaults. For evidence, one need only look to the Criminal Justice Policy Impact Statement, where we learn that a shockingly low number of people are successfully prosecuted each year for first or second degree felony sexual assault - just 105 in FY 2010, fifty of them for aggravated sexual assault (for which the estimated average sentence length is 22 years). I would not have guessed it was so few. In 2009, by contrast, according to DPS' annual "Crime in Texas" report (pdf), there were 8,286 rapes reported statewide. Given so few successful felony prosecutions for sexual assault, punishing the handful of rapists convicted more harshly wouldn't do nearly as much to reduce rape as focusing more investigative resources on front-end investigations, e.g., by testing the thousands or rape kits backlogged in crime labs around the state.

HB 3 is a political feel-good bill that causes more problems than it solves, pushing Texas sentencing further down the slippery slope toward California-dom that began with LWOP for capital murder in 2005. HB 3 passed the Texas House 144-0 based on its symbolic merits - who wants to vote against harsh punishments for serial rapists? (And who cares if our grandkids are stuck with their end-of-life health costs? Let them solve the tough problems while we put them off.) But if the goal is to actually reduce the number of sexual assaults, the focus should be on solving more crimes, starting with processing those outstanding rape-kit backlogs. In a time of scarce resources, that tactic would get a lot more crime-fighting bang for the buck compared to keeping a few extra old men in TDCJ long after they pose a risk.

Austin police clearance rates for burglary plummeting

Clearance rates by the Austin Police Department for burglaries have radically declined in recent years - from 9% in 2000 to 5% in 2009 - and remain far below the national average clearance rate for burglaries of 13%, according to materials (pdf) presented last month to the Austin Public Safety Commission.

Perhaps as a consequence, the burglary rate in Austin per 100,000 residents increased over the same period from 1,048 to 1,138, making it among the most commonly reported crimes in the capital. The biggest increase came in residential burglaries, where taking a serial offender out of circulation has a disproportionate benefit to victims. A survey of Austinites included in the materials found that "Burglary of a residence is perceived as the 'most critical' problem by a large majority (55%), with all other categories of crime trailing far behind." Asked to identify the most critical public safety issue in their neighborhood, Austinites said:

• Burglary of a residence: 54.6%
• Burglary of a vehicle: 13.4%
• Violent Random Crime: 3.3%
• Violent Domestic Crime: 1.3%
• Drug Related Activity: 7.7%
• Traffic Issues: 6.9%
• Neighborhood blight: 3.3%
• Graffiti: Less than 1%

Increasing penalties for burglary - either of a residence or vehicles - helps little when clearance rates are so low. The relative certainty of punishment is more important for preventing crime than its intensity. If only one in 20 burglaries are solved, compared to more than one in eight nationally, harsher punishments won't help much. These are problems caused in the big picture by misplaced policing priorities, spreading law-enforcement resources too thin by trying to use it to solve every new social problem while failing to adequately investigate traditional, bread-and-butter crimes.

Another staff power point (pdf) says that APD's 14 property crime technicians "Respond to 35-45% of burglary crime scenes (limited due to availability of personnel)." So most burglaries they don't even pretend to seriously investigate, but they've got officers available to sit around in school zones to write tickets for texting. What's needed here isn't harsher punishments or more "enhancements" available to prosecutors; APD just needs to shift scarce resources to solving crimes that most matter to the public.

Copper theft: Case study in failed criminal penalty enhancements

Every two years, Texas legislators troop to the House Criminal Jurisprudence and Senate Criminal Justice Committees to promote a seemingly endless array of penalty "enhancements," i.e., creating new crimes or increasing the penalties for existing ones in a one-way ratchet that has filled the prison system to capacity. But none of those legislators ever come back to tell us whether those "enhancements" solved the problem, and for the most part they almost universally fail.

A great example is copper and other scrap metal theft. In 2007, then House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee Chairman Aaron Peña carried legislation that boosted penalties of any amount of copper and other industrial metals to a state jail felony, no matter what its value, at the behest of construction and utility companies who cited growing metal thefts to sell for scrap. Since then, the amount of such theft has continued to rise unabated, seemingly driven almost entirely by the price of copper and other metals and entirely undeterred by the new felony status of stealing a few dollars worth of wire. Apparently the people willing to risk their lives pulling wire out electrical boxes didn't read their pocket copies of the penal code to pick up on the increased penalties (surprise, surprise!). As evidence, check out this recent report on the subject from KHOU-TV out of Houston titled "Copper Theft Plaguing Local Homebuilders":



So the new felony for stealing any amount of copper had no apparent effect at all. Why? Because the problem wasn't that the penalty was too low, but that police are using ineffective tactics. Targeting homeless copper thieves and locking them up is fruitless. Clearance rates for this crime are extremely low, and there's always another scrap metal thief where the last one came from, and will be as long as there are desperate people and a robust market for the stolen property. This is the wrong tactic: Instead, police should be targeting the handful of scrap metal dealers who provide the market for criminals of this sort in undercover stings. Then, if there's no place to sell their stolen wares, the thieves will move onto something else.

Many crimes for which legislators seek enhancements year after year - scrap metal theft, graffiti, car burglaries, etc. - are offenses with extremely low clearance rates. They're not solved very often, so on the rare occasions they are, authorities seek the chance to show the public how "tuff" they are. But the smart thing to do in such instances is focus on strategies that increase clearance rates so offenders are more likely to be caught, or in cases like metal theft, find ways to disrupt the black market that get more bang for the buck given scarce criminal justice resources.

Bottom line: The copper theft example shows that making things that are already illegal more illegal usually isn't a deterrent to people who're willing to do illegal things. Somehow, though, whenever the next problem rolls around, legislators seem to forget that lesson and reach for the same, tired non-solutions.

RELATED:

• Penalty for scrap metal thieve a bust; better police tactics needed
• Bigger priority on vehicle burglaries: Solving crimes or harsher punishments?

On the link (or lack thereof) between solving murders and reducing their number

An article in the Houston Chronicle today laments the declining clearance rate for homicides, which in many jurisdictions are below 50%. Reports Yang Wang (no really, that's the reporter's name):

Some Houston-area communities are among 120 cities and counties across the state where 63 percent of murders or fewer are solved — falling short of the national average — according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting database. The findings are based on cases reported by local agencies from 2004 through 2009.

For some communities, the problem is sheer volume: Too many murders, too many culprits and too many places to hide in a massive metropolis of nearly 6 million people.

For others, a lack of manpower, forensic crime labs and simple clues reduce the odds of finding a killer. The city of Galveston, for example, had just 32 murders between 2004 and 2009, but solved only 17.

San Antonio's Bexar County Sheriff's Office cleared just 39 percent of its homicides, Waco 56 percent and Odessa 52 percent, based on numbers the police agencies provided to the FBI.

But while murder clearance rates in some cities lag behind the national average, nearly 70 percent of the slayings in Houston get solved. In fact Houston, considering its size, is on par or better than most cities of its size.

But how much is enough? A 70 percent success rate still leaves 30 percent without answers. And the numbers provide little comfort to the families of victims across the region where 850 deaths have yet to result in arrests.

Even with its greater ability to solve these violent crimes, the Houston Police Department still had 550 unsolved murders; Harris County had about 170. At the same time, both agencies reported more than 1,609 homicides with suspects identified.

It's a strange conundrum that homicide clearance rates are declining nationally at a time when the numbers of murders are also going down. That means that the efforts of police and prisons - catching killers and taking them off the street - likely isn't the reason for the declining number of murders, though that's the traditional cause-and-effect paradigm that's portrayed in the media. Instead the reasons for declining murder rates are more demographic, economic and cultural than they are a result of improved police work.

But what is the reason for declining clearance rates? My theory is that society has come to use police too frequently to address social problems like alcoholism, drug abuse, child support, truancy, etc., or for revenue enhancement in the case of writing traffic tickets, instead of focusing on traditional crimes with actual victims. (Clearance rates for burglary are much, much lower even than for murder.)

It's simple, really: If all your cops are writing tickets, combing the streets for DWIs, busting penny ante drug users, chasing down truants, compiling photographic catalogs of graffiti, etc., those same cops aren't spending their time helping solve homicides. And Texas voters' anti-taxation sentiments mean local governments couldn't hire enough police to perform all these tasks, even if they wanted to do so. So the stuff that generates revenue (like writing traffic tickets) or that lends itself to political demagoguery (like graffiti and DWI enforcement ) gets prioritized over catching killers or burglars.

What do readers think explains declining homicide clearance rates? And if homicides are declining at the same time police are solving a lesser percentage of murders, what do you think accounts for the overall decline in recent years of homicides nationwide?

Homicide clearance rates on the decline

Scripps Howard News Service last week ran a series on the national decline in clearance rates (the percentage of cases solved) for homicides. The main story opens:

Every year in America, 6,000 killers get away with murder.

The percentage of homicides that go unsolved in the United States has risen alarmingly even as the homicide rate has fallen to levels last seen in the 1960s.

Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

In Texas, the statewide clearance rate is 71%. S-H had several additional stories accompanying the feature that may interest Grits readers:

• Many 'best practices' known to improve homicide investigations
• A look at what kind of homicides get solved
• One in nine Americans know the victim of an unsolved homicide

This trend strikes me as particularly odd because we've witnessed a decline in homicide rates over the last 20 years and expansive growth of the number of law enforcement agencies and personnel, but over the same period the proportion of murders solved has also gone down. Scripps Howard quotes law enforcement officials saying the reason is the type of murders: Crimes of passion tend to get sorted out, but "Only about two-thirds of all robbery-based homicides are solved. About 63 percent of killings committed during an illegal drug transaction are solved, as are only 57 percent of killings over gang-related disputes."

IMO that doesn't fully explain the data. Instead, I think we're witnessing the extraordinarily high opportunity costs for pursuing the war on drugs and expanding law enforcement's purview to address a wide array of social problems instead of focusing on traditional crime fighting. Cops issuing tickets for truancy, compiling photo albums of graffiti, making arrests for pot smoking, or trolling the highways to generate asset forfeiture income aren't focusing their time on more serious offenses. However solving murders doesn't generate revenue, while writing tickets for petty offenses helps fill up local coffers, creating perverse priorities that (at least partially) explain the declining clearance numbers.