Cameras, cameras everywhere, but who can see the footage?

Cameras are changing 21st century policing and debates this week in Austin typify two examples how:

1. Check out an article by Tony Plohetski at the Austin Statesman on the running war of words and video between the Austin PD and the Peaceful Streets Project, a grassroots group which films APD officers mostly on Sixth Street and has sometimes caught police officers engaging in disreputable behavior. Grits approves of filming cops - some of my earliest allies in the criminal justice reform movement were young folks in a now-defunct group called Cop Watch. But I don't understand why some Peaceful Streets leaders insist on treating police with profanity-laced hostility. It's unnecessary and discredits what's otherwise important and difficult work.

2. On Thursday, the Austin City Council will consider whether to give Taser an eight-figure contract for body cameras and related data services - most of the cost for the latter, as is their business model. On her blog, Debbie Russell has been all over the dubious economics behind the Taser deal. APD wants to move forward with the contract without having specified in their written policy how and when the public can access video. Check out the Open Austin website advocating for transparency and a press release from advocacy groups describing how little APD has budged on key transparency topics.

Grits considers cheap digital cameras a great boon to police accountability, with the caveat that they also pose risks as a means of mass surveillance, a potential threat to crime victims' privacy (and for that matter, police officers'), and risk other abuses of the technology which we may not be able to predict right now. My hope is that, in the medium to long run, bodycams, dashcams, recorded interrogations, and the rise of citizen cellphone cams will collectively serve to regularize and professionalize police interactions with the public.

But that will only happen to the extent the footage is used to hold officers accountable. If they can keep bodycam footage secret, as APD would prefer, they can conceal their dirty laundry. Knowing about problems you will not fix is NOT the point of this multi-million dollar camera investment! And anyway, in this day and age, cops can't shut down the public's cameras. They're quite literally everywhere.

Why so little video of Houston police shootings?

A New York Times article yesterday titled "Lack of video hampers inquiries into Houston police shootings," discussed here by Amanda Woog, highlighted the fact that, unlike most other Texas police departments, Houston PD does not have dashcams in the overwhelming majority of its police cars. As a result, "there was no video of ... most of the dozens of other questionable shootings of unarmed people by Houston police officers during the past decade. None of them led to the criminal prosecution of an officer or significant discipline by the department"

What the article didn't explain was why Houston cop cars don't have cameras.

Most Texas law enforcement agencies first installed dashchams after Texas' racial profiling law passed in 2001. That legislation required reporting on racial information about drivers at traffic stops and vehicle searches. In addition, the Lege authorized $18 million in bonds (which voters approved) to pay for dashcams to be installed in local police cars. As an incentive to use them, the Lege created much more extensive data reporting requirements which an agency could opt out of if it installed dashcams in their cars. If an agency had applied for a camera grant but there wasn't enough money, the law stipulated, they were still exempt from the extra reporting.

Ironically, at the time the law-enforcement lobby collectively was far more afraid of the data reporting than the video. The "tier one" data collection gave some information, but it's impossible to prove discrimination from it in any meaningful sense. The "tier two" data, however, included more detail on consent search patterns which would, it was presumed, be sufficient to measure use of officer discretion, and that's what departments really wanted to avoid. Thus, dashcams were adopted rather non-controversially by agencies which received grants.

It turned out, though, the cameras were the much more significant reform. While in the first year there was some probative reporting by departments, by the second the larger ones had begun to parse their definitions differently and report data in ways that made it more difficult to draw valid conclusions. (You can't really tell much from the tier two data as it's reported today.) Meanwhile, dashcam video became commonplace and brought with it more of an impulse toward accountability than one would have assumed from the intensity of debates back in 2001 over data collection.

As a practical matter, the bond money paid for everybody who applied for dashcams except for Texas' two largest cities - Dallas and Houston. So they were able to forego full implementation of dashcams, with Houston, if memory serves, getting either none or a token number. Reported the Times, "Currently, only about 100 of the department’s 5,200 officers have [body] cameras, and about 200 cars are equipped with dashboard cameras."

HPD now says "most officers would have body cameras within 18 months," reported the Times, but as we know, most body camera footage, unlike dashcam footage, is not subject to the Public Information Act.

Bodycam legislation closed too many records

Texas' new legislation related to police body cameras has been mostly praised in the media, but Grits must admit I'm not a fan. Your correspondent didn't have the bandwidth to track the legislation this year, but if I had I've have ardently opposed the version that passed.

Admittedly, the best thing the Lege did on the topic this year was to authorize $10 million in grants for police departments to purchase body cams, reminiscent of a $18 million bond issue in 2003 for in-car dashcams which your correspondent helped push for back in the day.

But the dashcam legislation - which was really part of a larger bill defining and banning racial profiling - did not include the sort of closed records provision in Texas bodycam bill, SB 158, which to me go too far. ACLU of Texas and the NAACP reportedly negotiated these provisions. With all due respect to my friends at those groups, if they really agreed to these closed records provisions then frankly they got rolled.

Under Texas' Public Information Act, police already don't have to release video unless there's a conviction or deferred adjudication in a case. So there exists plenty of discretion to protect privacy in situations where there's no public interest in disclosing the footage. 

At first glance, SB 158 appears to include open records provisions but, on closer inspection, imposed new, needless restrictions. (See text.) For example:

A member of the public is required to provide the following information when submitting a written request to a law enforcement agency for information recorded by a body worn camera:
     (1)  the date and approximate time of the recording;
     (2)  the specific location where the recording occurred; and
     (3)  the name of one or more persons known to be a subject of the recording.

So if you don't know all of those details, you can't access the records. Say you witnessed an event but didn't know the people involved? Can't get the records. Say you know who was involved and the date but not the "specific location"? Can't get the records. Moreover, this would prevent research projects using the video because one could not, for example, get all video for a certain time period if you didn't have the specifics stated above regarding each police encounter.

I really can't think of another brand of open records request where the requester must know so much detail before filing the request. Typically one files open records requests to get that sort of detail, requiring folks to have it up front is an unnecessary barrier.

Another loophole you can drive a truck through: You can't get bodycam videos from misdemeanor traffic stops under an open records request without written permission from the person being recorded, even though about 44% of police encounters with the public are at traffic stops. From the bill:

A law enforcement agency may not release any portion of a recording made in a private space, or of a recording involving the investigation of conduct that constitutes a misdemeanor punishable by fine only and does not result in arrest, without written authorization from the person who is the subject of that portion of the recording or, if the person is deceased, from the person's authorized representative.

As ESPN's Stephen A. Smith might say, that's asinine, assiten, asseleven ...

Consider: Dashcam video is still public at traffic stops but the bodycam video is not? What possibly justifies that distinction? Drivers in public don't have a legal expectation of privacy, so to me this is more about protecting the cop from accountability than enforcing privacy rights.

Ditto for the bit about a "private space." Once you let a cop in your door, you've lost any reasonable expectation of privacy regarding what they see.

And why should open records laws be different for Class C misdemeanors than other offenses?

These are awful provisions from a transparency perspective and, on the whole, I'd have rather no money have been allocated for camera grants at all if the tradeoff was scuttling open records access. Large departments are acquiring body cams anyway and there's also federal money; I don't think this trend is dependent on a small pot of state grant money.

These opacity provisions should be revisited by the Lege in 2017; they're seriously screwed up.

Texas police misconduct roundup

Grits makes no comprehensive effort to track police misconduct around the state but can't help but notice Texas has witnessed quite a few extreme and remarkable cases over the last month or so. Here are a few that jumped out:

• A Dallas police officer who was accused last month of sexual assaulting a woman in his squad car killed himself yesterday.
• A 23-year old cop in Victoria was fired after dashcam video of him tackling and tasing a 76-year old man went viral.
• From the Express-News (Jan. 9), "Late Thursday, San Antonio Police Department Officer Konrad Chatys was booked on allegations he stole items from a couple while on duty. On Friday afternoon, Billy Torres, 40, a Bexar County Sheriff’s Office deputy, was arrested on a charge of burglary of a building."
• In Laredo, "A South Texas sheriff's deputy and her brother have been charged with conspiracy in an indictment accusing them of drug trafficking."
• It was reported last month that an SAPD officer was fired for dereliction of duty last August after dashcam video showed her failing to respond to some two dozen calls, including driving away from a shooting to which she should have responded.  
• Two Corpus Christi police officers were disciplined for excessive force after dashcam video caught them slamming a handcuffed murder suspect's head into the side of a squad car. One officer resigned, the other has been suspended without pay.
• In December, "A police officer in Cedar Park [was] fired for being dishonest during an investigation into his friendship with a man suspected of multiple sexual assaults." As summarized at Policemisconduct.net, “According to the news report, the police department said that not only did they fire the officer for being dishonest, but because he accessed police databases about the suspect without legal reason to do so. The suspect has a history of sexual assault and is characterized in other reports as a potential 'serial rapist.'”
• In Houston (Jan. 8) "Bungled murder investigations by the Houston Police Department not only allowed killers to walk free, but may harm the ability of detectives to solve other slayings, warns an independent arbitrator," who concluded "the evidence demonstrated that it's allowed murderers to remain on the streets; caused unnecessary frustration and heartache to the families of victims; and led Houston's citizens to question the department's integrity."
• In Round Rock (Dec. 22) "A Round Rock man has sued the city’s police department in federal court and accused officers of using excessive force during a 2012 incident." Cops showed up at a domestic disturbance, went to the wrong house and allegedly kicked and beat the innocent homeowner before releasing him. The man was acquitted at trial of interfering with a police investigation. "The suit names 10 officers as defendants."
• A woman has sued DPS and four state troopers over a 2013 roadside cavity search.
• Last month, Joe Edward Cummings, a former jailer and patrol officer with the Denton County Sheriff's Office was arrested on child pornography charges.
• A 22-year veteran at the Brownsville PD was arrested on theft and forgery charges (Dec. 22). 
• A Harlingen PD officer was indicted in December for money laundering. 
• A former reserve officer with the Bryan police department was charged with possessing child pornography. 
• In Fort Worth, a "police officer has been fired for allegedly failing to show up at a court for an aggravated kidnapping trial and giving conflicting information about his role in the case." Prosecutors did not want Officer Royce Brown "to testify in court after learning that he had a prior suspension from the department for untruthfulness."
• In El Paso, "A young man left a quadriplegic when he was shot by an off-duty El Paso police officer in 2010 has died." The officer who shot him was indicted by a grand jury but remains on duty with charges pending.

While disheartening to read this litany of ignominious incidents, it's at least good to see dashcam video contributing to greater accountability in several of these cases, a development that IMO argues for expanding the use of cameras both to police bodycams and recording custodial interrogations at the police station. Most Texas departments got dashcams via legislation state Sen. Royce West carried back in 2003, which included a voter-approved $18 million bond issue for police to purchase equipment, and West has filed legislation this session to authorize grants for police bodycams.

Though some of these are new developments in old cases, it's unusual to see this many serious police misconduct stories crop up in Texas news outlets in so short a span. I wonder if that's because of an actual uptick in incidents or because, in the wake of renewed national focus on police misconduct, the media are simply more likely to cover such episodes than before events in Ferguson and Staten Island?

Houston chief says war on drugs a failure, and other stories

Here are a few items which deserve Grits readers attention as my own is focused for the moment outside the blog.

Houston police chief: War on drugs a 'miserable' failure
Houston Police Chief Charles McClelland on Friday called the war on drugs a "miserable" failure and suggested political attitudes have sufficiently shifted, even in Texas, to the point where altering marijuana laws could happen "soon." He declared that "people are beginning to think about this issue differently, and they know that we've got to do something different than what we're doing."

Prison doc: death by natural causes; ME: homicide
The Lubbock Avalanche Journal recently reported that "Six Montford Psychiatric Unit detention officers have not been reprimanded after using force to restrain a 63-year-old inmate who died shortly after the incident earlier this year." The episode may involve a coverup. The paper investigated "after a Lubbock County medical examiner’s ruling this fall contradicted previous rulings by the state." "A Montford doctor originally reported McCoin’s death as natural" but a Lubbock medical examiner declared the case a "homicide."

'Bad traffic law has to go'
The San Antonio Express-News had an editorial calling for abolition of the Driver Responsibility Surcharge.

Jail phones profit from a 'Captive Audience'
The Dallas Observer recently ran a cover feature on Securus and the rise of privatized jail phone service and video visitation at Texas county jails. The topic will be familiar to Grits readers but the coverage was thorough and reaches a new, different audience, one hopes, than this stodgy old blog.

Newspaper calls for mental health investments
The Houston Chronicle editorial board called for construction of a new state mental hospital in the Houston area. According to the paper, "When the Neuropsychiatric Center at Ben Taub Hospital in the Texas Medical Center is out of room, our law enforcement professionals must drive around in their squad cars with people suspected of mental illness, waiting for a bed to open up or looking for an alternative. This happens not infrequently, according to mental health professionals." They also complained of a shortage of competency restoration beds and the aging and outdated Rusk State Hospital, which is a three hour drive from Houston.

Juvenile justice and the arts
Ronnie Sanders, who serves on the Texas Commission for the Arts, wrote a column praising a Bexar County juvenile diversion program with remarkably low recidivism rates in which "Students who have often resorted to violence in the past are taught methods of conflict resolution through writing, acting, team-building and communication skills." Says Sanders, "We should all celebrate when people can be earnestly reformed through the arts," and "we should seek more opportunities and increase funding that could allow more young Texans to transform their criminal past into a life sentence of positive choices and a realization of their potential as a contributing citizen to Texas."

News flash: Crime labs screw up outside of Texas, too
The Jonathan Salvador fiasco was one of five recent misconduct scandals at U.S. crime labs described in this article from Chemistry World. Can you guess the other four? Perhaps, in the near future, Grits will compile Texas' own top five. Hard to believe we only got one in a national top five list on this topic; author Rebecca Tragle should Google "Houston police crime lab scandal" for the granddaddy of them all in Texas.

No way feds reimburse Texas on border security
Texas' request to the feds for reimbursement for the Great Border Security Boondoggle is a laughable exercise in hubris. Given that, IMHO, the entire spending program serves no real security purpose but instead is a political expenditure aimed at snubbing the Obama Administration, why would the feds ever consider paying for it. They're basically asking them to pay for an extended, years-long Rick Perry campaign commercial.

Ten predictions about police bodycams based on experience with dashcams
Having been deeply involved more than a decade ago in the effort to get dashcams in police cars in Texas, I find the description of their effects from The Atlantic to be fairly accurate. However, I disagree that past is entirely prologue when it comes to bodycams, which IMO may have greater deterrent effects for police misconduct because they're recording personal interactions, not just views from a distance. Time will tell. In practice, they support officers stories more often than contradict them and make report writing more accurate. There's as much incentive for police to adopt them as for reformers to support them.

Advice for 1Ls and lawmakers: Don't make laws you wouldn't kill to enforce
Yale law prof Stephen Carter in a recent column offered sound advice to law students that goes double or triple for lawmakers: "On the opening day of law school, I always counsel my first-year students never to support a law they are not willing to kill to enforce. Usually they greet this advice with something between skepticism and puzzlement, until I remind them that the police go armed to enforce the will of the state, and if you resist, they might kill you."

What big ticket criminal-justice items might TX Lege fund with 'surplus'?

Wow, I'm surprised at the size of the spending cap increase the Texas Legislative Budget Board estimated for the 2016-17 biennium: $3.4 billion above the amount of revenue allocated in the last budget, or $1.7 billion per year. Grits had guesstimated they might have about 2/3 that amount.

Of course, they could spend all of that on transportation and still not remotely fill the need. Ditto for public schools, where that amount hardly scratches the surface of what the state will likely owe when pending litigation is complete. And naturally, the Lege could always (in theory) keep spending the same and use the extra $3.4 billion for tax cuts; there will be pressure to go that route.

But let's imagine for a moment what the state might spend money on if they used some of that "extra" cash on prominent, big-ticket criminal justice needs. What would they be? In order from largest to smallest, here are several criminal-justice items the state can in theory afford to fund in light of this blithesome budget news:

Pay for TDCJ prisoner healthcare, guard raises, programming (w/o AC): $546.6 million
The Legislature has already been told that, unless the state changes policies to incarcerate fewer people, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice will need $175 million more in the next biennium just to pay for healthcare for current levels of inmates, in part driven by the aging of the prison population as a result of long, punitive sentences. (Plus, the agency's front-line medical competence is still recovering from 2011 budget cuts.) In all, TDCJ has asked for $546.6 million in "exceptional items" including a 10 percent pay raise for guards to compete with oil field work. Of course, diverting more offenders from prison and shuttering understaffed facilities would relieve the problem, too, letting the state pay for staff raises with savings from facility closures. But TDCJ brass has suggested no such alternative. (There are a few exceptional items for probation and diversion funding in TDCJ's budget request, but overwhelmingly their request for new spending would go to running and staffing facilities.)

Two caveats to this already-large number: First, all this assumes that, while the 84th Legislature in session, the 5th Circuit or a federal district judge doesn't require the state to provide air conditioning at the state's hottest prisons; then the extra expenses get much higher, especially if the prison population doesn't decline. Second, the Lege could and likely will reduce these figures significantly by cutting either the size of raises and/or diversion programming. The latter risks higher recidivism, the former risks unplanned, forced closure of facilities because TDCJ can't find sufficient staff in rural areas. According to the Texas Tribune, "Statewide, the agency has left roughly 1,400 prison beds empty since 2012 because of staff shortages." Pick your poison.

Eliminate the Driver Responsibility surcharge: $110 to $340 million
From a standpoint of bypassing the most vocal political opposition, the shortest distance to abolishing the ignominious Driver Responsibility surcharge would be for the state to find some other way to fund Texas trauma hospitals, which have been receiving about $55 million per year or $110 million per biennium from the DRP. Otherwise, most everybody agrees the program is a failure that's making worse the problems it was intended to solve, as well as creating new ones. Complicating matters, though, the state also mulcts $85 million per year, or $170 million per biennium, from the DRP for the general fund, and uses another $30 million or so to feign balancing the budget. So really, to replace the whole pot of money would cost around $340 million; just to make the hospitals whole (letting the surplus take care of the GR cut) would run $110 million.  On the bright side, about a third of phone calls to the DPS drivers license division related to the surcharge, according to the LAR (pdf, p. 184, formally p. 3B 13 of 23), so eliminating the surcharge would free up significant internal resources to focus on serving other motorists.

Expand Texas' Great Border Security Boondoggle: $105.4 million
Otherwise, Governor-elect Greg Abbott has said he wants to double state spending at the border, but DPS has suggested even more than that. So, as insensible as your correspondent considers that ridiculous, politicized policy, let's add it to the list. In its 2016-17 Legislative Appropriations Request (LAR), DPS has $73.9 million in its Legislative Appropriations Request for its Goal Number Two, "Secure Border Region," and has requested an additional $105.4 million for the biennium, or $179.3 million total, not including the National Guard, etc.. Elsewhere in the budget, there's another $17.4 million for the biennium under "Local Border Security"  to pay for overtime for DPS troopers already stationed along the border, bringing the total to $196.7 million, if all of DPS' border-security dreams were realized (not including the National Guard deployment, grants to local law enforcement, etc..) Of that, the $105.4 million would be considered "new spending" outside the LAR, though in truth it's all part of the same, politicized gallimaufry. Make me Philosopher King, of course, and I'd cut these entire line items from the budget, saving the state $74 million instead of spending nearly three times that on already-dated political theater.

Cover 'unfunded mandates' from Fair Defense Act: $100 million
The Texas Indigent Defense Commission has requested just shy of $100 million per biennium as an "exceptional item" to reimburse counties for increased indigent defense costs since the 2001 passage of the Fair Defense Act. There are reasons to believe that number is slightly overstated (e.g., inflation and population growth account for some of the difference), but in 2013, according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, "Texas counties paid approximately $189.7 million [for indigent defense] compared to the State’s $27.4 million." County spending on indigent defense more than doubled from 2001 to 2013. If the state chooses to fund indigent defense at that level, it should exercise more say in its efficient delivery via public defender systems as opposed to the sorts of screwy, outlier systems (I'm talking to you, Comal County) the TIDC has taken to funding of late. This would also give the state incentive to reduce petty offenses like possessing less than 2 ounces of pot or driving with a suspended license (second offense and beyond) as Class B misdemeanors, since the Lege won't like paying for those folks' lawyers any more than the counties do.

Confront competency restoration crisis: $55.7 million (or more)
Grits dislikes having reached this conclusion, but in the wake of court orders and persistent, problematic backlogs, Texas should expand the number of state mental hospital beds available for competency restoration and simultaneously fund local in-and-outpatient competency restoration programs at the county level, particularly for, say, the state's 20 largest counties. The Department of Health Services requested an additional $55.7 million for state hospitals to address this problem, so I've put the price tag in the headline at that amount. But in addition there needs to be new funding for handling competency restoration at the local level, at least in the larger counties, to permanently calm the waters on this topic. That might cost $15-20 million per year as a fully fleshed out, statewide program, substantially less on the front end,  Either way, if the state doesn't act soon - whether to construct extra hospital capacity, to facilitate the diversion of incompetent inmates into local, pretrial outpatient treatment, or both - then in this non-lawyer's opinion, sooner than later the courts will mandate more expensive solutions than the Legislature might prefer if it addressed the problem head-on. (N.b., these sorts of outpatient competency restoration programs should IMO also be a priority for grants from the Governor's Criminal Justice Division.)

Expand crime lab capacity: $15.7 million (at least)
Among its "exceptional items," DPS requested an extra $15.7 million for crime labs over the biennium, or a 19 percent increase over their base budget. Given current backlogs, plus extra caseloads thanks to revisiting hundreds of cases from the Jonathan Salvador debacle in Houston, not to mention the recent expansion of blood-alcohol testing (at least before Villareal), that amount probably underestimates what's needed just to remain afloat. Unless case volume somehow declines, DPS crime labs could spend that much and still be falling behind. The only other solutions are to  appropriate more money or have DPS shift to a fee for service model.

Other potential crim-just investments
With the exception of abolishing the surcharge, which is the subject of perennial legislation, these are all agency requests representing their ideas how to solve the problems facing them, not necessarily my own, personal preferences. If I were mocking up budgets, for example, I might have included an extra $100 to $150 million in TDCJ's for diversion programming and reduced probation caseloads and suggested cutting 3-4 private prison contracts. Texas' $200 million or so investment per biennium in diversion programs starting in 2007 prevented the state from having to build and operate more than a billion dollars worth of new prisons and let us close three instead. Doubling down on that investment, combined with adjusting sentence thresholds for nonviolent offenses, would let Texas close even more, saving money overall and easing managerial pressures on an array of labor and health-cost related problems. Otherwise, prison costs will continue to grow well beyond the effects of inflation and population growth.

Grits would tack on an extra $10 million or so for the biennium, for starters, for county level outpatient competency restoration in addition to the state hospital funding. (Texas may right now need extra beds - in fact, the $55.7 million number sounds low to me - but the state should plan how to not need them in the future.) Just a few million dollars in additional resources aimed at prisoner reentry could have a big impact; I'd focus in particular on people who spent a significant amount of time in solitary confinement while they were incarcerated. The state could set up a fund to pay for local department's police body cams they way they did in 2003 for dashcams in police cars (with a voter-approved bond issue). Finally, I'd bolster crime-lab funding with money for contractors to get rid of backlogs, while expanding the state's own capacity even more with an eye toward the future.

* * *

This blog post was a thought experiment to identify big-ticket criminal-justice budget asks at the 84th Texas Legislature, but it is certainly not exhaustive. E.g., if I weren't limiting the list to criminal-justice topics, I might have included judicial pay raises. Nor should it be read as an endorsement of every expenditure listed. Grits wouldn't agree with reimbursing counties for indigent defense, for example, without statewide standards and accountability. And regular readers know I wouldn't spend another dime on Texas' border security boondoggle.

Leaving aside Grits' personal preferences (i.e., the items under the final subhed), let's focus on already existing proposals we know the Legislature will be facing. If one totals the above sums requested by big criminal-justice agencies then add in the cost of abolishing the Driver Responsibility Program, one gets to around $1.2 billion per biennium in new spending on criminal justice - more if federal courts mandate installation of air conditioning in Texas prison units.

Compared to what's needed on roads, education or healthcare, that's a small sum. But with only $3.4 billion in new funds available and enormous transportation and education costs looming, it's also unlikely a third of the extra will go toward those purposes. So what should be prioritized? And what other big-ticket items did I miss? Let me know in the comments.

More criminal justice bills pre-filed at the Texas Lege

Here are a few more bills (see here, here, here and here for earlier installments) from the first week of pre-filing at the Texas Legislature that may merit Grits readers' attention:

Can prison spending be limited to population/inflation growth rates?
There are a couple of bills out there to restrict state spending to the combined effects of inflation and population growth, like this one, so it's worth mentioning that state prison spending has far surpassed those rates consistently for more than three decades. Also, there's a basic math problem with a constitutional amendment proposed by rookie Sen. Charles Perry limiting budget growth to the sum of inflation and population growth (or personal income growth, whichever is lesser). However, to actually index spending you would multiply those rates, not add them. Over time, his method would systematically under-fund the budget if not corrected. Perhaps if legislators want a smaller budget, they should propose cuts instead of constitutional amendments.

Whither border security funding if highway money spent on highways?
Also on the budget front, SB 139 by rookie Sen. Charles Perry and SB 184 by Sen. Charles Schwertner would cease using money from the state highway fund to finance the Department of Public Safety. The questions then become: Where does DPS funding come from? And, is their border security profile sustainable without tax increases?

How to raise local property taxes everywhere
HB 191 by Rep. Jim Murphy creating mandatory minimums for people convicted of multiple misdemeanors would launch a new 21st century jail building boom in Texas. County commissioners and Sheriffs, if they're wise, will come out of the woodwork to oppose this. In many counties in recent years, rising jail costs have been the primary driver for local property tax increases.

Record custodial interrogations
State Sen. Rodney Ellis has once again filed legislation to require recording interrogations of people suspected of serious, violent offenses. Make me philosopher king and I'd require recording of all custodial interrogations, but this is a good start. Last session state  Rep. Terry Canales carried  companion legislation in the House and Grits expects him to file the bill again in the 84th session.

Prioritize saving lives over prosecution in overdose cases
Rep. Ryan Guillen put forward a version of a Good Samaritan bill, HB 225, to make it a defense to prosecution on drug charges for people who call 911 when someone they're with overdoses. There have been several versions of this kicking around over the years. Last session a version cleared committee but, like many criminal justice reform bills, never received a vote on the House floor.

Grants, policies for police bodycams
In 2003, state Sen. Royce West carried legislation that created a grant fund for police departments to apply to install dashcams in patrol cars, and most of them did. Now he's filed SB 158 which would authorize the state to issue grants for police body cams and requires those using them to create written policies that govern their use and train on them. The difference between this and the one authorizing dashcams is that in 2003, Sen. West also passed a measure authorizing a statewide bond election for money to pay for them (which voters approved) and requirements for racial profiling reporting that were more stringent if departments didn't have cameras in their cars. This bill presently includes neither as many carrots nor sticks as his earlier legislation. For body cams to be adopted as widely as dashcams, there'd need to be a pot of money to fund these grants and some incentive for departments to use them.

No probation for illegal immigrants?
In SB 174, Sen. Joan Huffman recommends that "illegal aliens" be denied the chance to receive community supervision as a punishment, another potential budget buster for both state prisons and county jails. If this bill doesn't receive a gigantic "fiscal note" it will be proof once and for all that the Legislative Budget Board's mechanism for assessing bills' fiscal cost is utterly and profoundly broken.

Probation for ex-trooper charged over roadside cavity searches

Via the Dallas News ("Former DPS trooper gets probation, fine for illegal body cavity searches," May 23), we learn of a dissatisfyingly ambiguous outcome from the infamous 2012 episode when a Texas state trooper performed roadside cavity searches caught on dashcam video:

A former state trooper was sentenced to probation and fined Friday for performing illegal roadside body cavity searches on two women that were described as “humiliating and shamefully embarrassing.”

State District Judge Dominique Collins sentenced Kelly Helleson, 34, at the recommendation of Dallas County prosecutors after Helleson pleaded guilty to two counts of official oppression. She received a year in jail — which was suspended — and instead will serve two years of supervised probation. She must also pay a $2,000 fine. Two counts of sexual assault against Helleson were dropped.

The convictions stem from a July 13, 2012, traffic stop on the side of State Highway 161 near Irving. Angel Dobbs and her niece Ashley Dobbs were pulled over after state trooper David Farrell said he saw the women throw something out the window, according to the complaint.

Farrell called Helleson to perform the searches, which the women said she did using the same latex glove and in full view of passing motorists. The searches were captured on dashboard video camera.
 But Russell Wilson, special fields bureau chief with the [Dallas] district attorney’s office, said Helleson confessed the crime to authorities. ...

Following the incident, the Department of Public Safety changed its policy to prohibit troopers from conducting body cavity searches without search warrants.

Helleson, a state trooper for 10 years, was fired after the search and lost her peace officer’s license. Her attorney, Bob Baskett, said Friday that she has no desire to get back into law enforcement “after this crap.” ...

Farrell was indicted but later acquitted on a charge of theft by a public servant for allegedly stealing a bottle of hydrocodone pills during the search of the Dobbses’ car. DPS officials said last year that he would return to “full-duty status.”

Last June, the two victims received a $185,000 settlement from the state in a federal civil rights lawsuit. After Friday’s hearing, Angel Dobbs, 39, said she was disappointed with Helleson’s probation sentence.

Considering prosecutors walked in the door seeking felony sexual assault charges, walking out with probation and a $2,000 fine for a misdemeanor is a significant step-down, despite all the self-congratulatory rhetoric from the Dallas DA's office. Perhaps, given that DPS changed its policies after this and similar episodes to eliminate roadside cavity searches, Hellerson's claims that she was following DPS training carried some substance. We won't learn those details from the legal process, though, since the case resulted in a plea deal rather than a jury trial. Lots of records are newly available about the case under the Public Information Act now that the criminal cases are finished. This'd be a good spot for journalism to pick up the ball.

Odds and ends: Rules are there for a reason

Here are a few items that deserve Grits readers' attention but haven't made it into their own individual posts:

TDCJ staff breaking bad
A couple of items from The Back Gate website detail disciplinary problems at TDCJ units:

• 7 Officers Arrested at Gib Lewis Unit After Alleged Sexual Assault
• Investigation Pending After 63 Year Old Montford Unit Inmate Dies Following Force by Staff
• Busted at Eastham

Film this: Fort Worth PD adds body cams
Fort Worth PD has decided to buy 400 additional body cameras for its officers on top of 200 already in the field, reported the Star-Telegram. Though the police association has expressed concern about its members privacy and overreach by management, thus far that hasn't been an issue: "although the videos have led to some additional training for officers, so far none have resulted in formal discipline."

Dallas PD pays $1.1 million for roadside beating
The City of Dallas settled a lawsuit for $1.1 million after dashcam video contradicted officers' account of the arrest of a 62 year old man who was beaten and spent 15 months in the county jail, apparently on trumped up charges. See accounts from WFAA-TV, the Dallas Morning News, and the Dallas Observer.

Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/03/25/5679898/fort-worth-to-buy-additional-400.html?rh=1#storylink=cpy"

Texas sues feds over guidelines re: hiring felons
The Houston Chronicle published an item about the state of Texas' lawsuit, filed late last year, contesting the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's "new guidelines designed to give ex-offenders a chance to be considered for a job," arguing that "The EEOC urges employers to determine in each case whether the disqualification is job-related and a business necessity, and to consider such factors as the nature and gravity of the offense, how much time has passed since the conviction and the time served and the type of job that is being sought." The state of Texas argues:

that it doesn't need to perform the "individualized assessments" the EEOC "purports to require."

It also is asking the court to set aside the EEOC's enforcement guidance and prohibit the agency from giving any job applicants the right to sue the state of Texas over its rules regarding arrest and conviction records.

It also is asking the court to set aside the EEOC's enforcement guidance and prohibit the agency from giving any job applicants the right to sue the state of Texas over its rules regarding arrest and conviction records.

The EEOC didn't return requests for comment for this column. But in its response to the lawsuit, the federal agency noted that its guidance was simply guidance. It wasn't a rule employers had to follow, nor does it have the force of law.

The federal agency also noted that Texas, with its sweeping anti-felon policies, is failing to distinguish between risky job candidates and ones who likely pose little risk.

Former Willacy DA won't snitch
Reported the Valley Morning Star:

Former Willacy County district attorney Juan Angel Guerra was arrested in court on Wednesday and taken directly into custody after refusing to testify before 404th state District Court Judge Elia Cornejo-Lopez.

The arrest stems from Guerra’s continuing refusal to provide an accounting of money he, or an organization called Buena Suerte Social Services Inc., to which he has ties, received from Samuel Longoria. Longoria owned properties at the Cameron County and Hidalgo County line known as the “blue buildings,” the sites of lucrative gaming operations. ...

Assistant DA Matthew Kendall has maintained that Guerra is Buena Suerte and that the organization was nothing more than a shell corporation.

Former state rep faces forfeiture in bribery scandal
From the Valley Morning Star: "The U.S. Attorney’s Office has given notice that it intends to dispose of a quarter-million dollars forfeited by ex-state representative Jim Solis, for his role in the racketeering and bribery schemes." Solis is currently serving a 3 years 11 month federal prison term.

Money laundering blame game
In this New York Times story, US officials blame Mexico for failing to prosecute money laundering, but the truth is banks and businesses on the American side are also culpable.

Few Houston cop cars outfitted with cameras

Houston has the lowest proportion of squad cars in their fleet outfitted with dashcams among the largest Texas law enforcement agencies, reported the Houston Chronicle ("HPD lags in dashboard cameras; many shootings not filmed," Dec. 29). Here are the stats for the biggest agencies:

• Houston Police Department: 3,984 fleet, 199 dash cameras
• Texas Department of Public Safety: 4,411 fleet, 2,396 dash cameras
• Austin Police Department: 1,335 fleet, 510 dash cameras
• El Paso Police Department: 825 fleet, 365 dash cameras
• Fort Worth Police Department: 1,227 fleet, 326 dash cameras
• Dallas Police Department: 1,757 fleet, 960 dash cameras

Reported the Chronicle:

Houston police have fewer dashboard cameras than any major Texas law enforcement agency, providing them with little of the recorded evidence that other departments have to determine whether an officer violated procedures or laws. ...

A recent Houston Chronicle investigation showed more than one-fourth of civilians shot by HPD from 2008 to 2012 were unarmed, and apparently none of the 121 shootings in that time frame were captured by dash cameras.

HPD Chief Charles McClelland this month announced a program to test 100 small cameras worn on the front of officers' uniforms, saying this newer technology has made dash cameras obsolete. He did not address the future of HPD's dashboard cameras.

Grits is a fan of dashcams and has long believed that the bodycams HPD will be "testing" should be universally adopted. I don't know whether they'll make dashcams "obsolete" - given how often dashcams conveniently seem to malfunction during critical incidents, personally I'd welcome the redundancy. But the arguments in favor of cameras far outweigh those against them, particularly now that costs have precipitously declined.

Video contradicted Garland cop's story of deadly police chase, led to manslaughter charges

For the second time in recent months, a Dallas-area police officer shot someone then filed a false police report about the incident. In October it was a Dallas cop who shot a mentally ill man, then along with his partner filed a false report declaring he'd approached them menacingly with a raised knife. Now, a Garland officer has been charged with manslaughter after an August 31st incident in which he plowed his car into a suspect's at the end of a high-speed chase, falsely claiming the man had rammed his police vehicle. Officer Patrick Tuter fired 41 rounds hitting the man three times, emptying his clip and reloading twice during the barrage.

The DA's office asked for a $10,000 bond, well short of the standard $25,000 bail typical of manslaughter charges in Dallas County. But the judge raised it to $100K, declaring “I’m not concerned about whether he is going to return to court or not. I’m concerned about public safety.” According to the judge, "the only other officer on scene did not fire, and also sought refuge from the bullets behind his patrol car," reported the Dallas News.

According to Mint Press News, "Since 9/11, about 5,000 Americans have been killed by U.S. police officers, which is almost equivalent to the number of U.S. soldiers who have been killed in the line of duty in Iraq." Nearly all of these are deemed justified by Internal Affairs investigators, but for the most part the press and the public must take the word of police flacks in determining what happened.

These episodes to me demonstrate the need for police departments to quickly move to body cams worn by officers that can corroborate police accounts or dispel lies when they dissemble after the fact. "Trust us, we're the government" just isn't good enough in an era when the fact of police "testilying" is well established and video is ubiquitous and cheap. The blog Simple Justice has a running series titled "But for Video" describing episodes where video documented police misconduct that would otherwise have gone undetected.

Dashcams have improved the situation and helped debunk the officer's false report in this case. (There was also a woman in the car with the deceased suspect who likely contradicted his story; press reports so far haven't revealed whether the second officer backed up Tuter's false report.)  But too often the tech malfunctions at just the wrong moment, or the right one from the perspective of officers covering up misconduct. In Cincinnati recently, an officer's dashcam reportedly malfunctioned seconds before he ran over an innocent bystander during a high speed chase. This was the second recent episode where the same officer's dashcam malfunctioned at a critical moment; the first in 2012 involved a high-profile shooting. There are also many instances when dashcams are functioning but simply pointed in the wrong direction.

Body cams and mics for police would provide evidence of misconduct when it happens, protect officers from false accusations, and provide better evidence for prosecutors to use in court. There's little excuse in the 21st century for not deploying such technology as rapidly as budgets will allow. Certainly you could probably outfit the entire Garland Police Department with them for the amount the lawsuit in this case by the victim's family will ultimately cost the taxpayers.

Police tech: Body cams, Google Glass, and cop cars of the future

A decade ago Texas passed significant incentives as part of its 2003 racial profiling statute to put dashcams in police cars, with voters approving $18 million to pay for departments to install them. At the time the police unions complained of "Big Brother" and chiefs said they couldn't afford the expense. Since then, dashcams have proven invaluable both in prosecuting crime and protecting officers from false accusations, as well as occasionally catching police misconduct on video (at least when they don't conveniently "malfunction," which is a recurring theme when misconduct allegations arise). Very few Texas LEOs complain about them anymore, the benefits so far outweigh the detriments.

Now a new generation of cameras - so-called "body cams" - are stirring up a nearly identical debate. Cops in New York City are balking at their use. But Fort Worth, Austin, and other cities are both joining the trend of agencies experimenting with body cams, and where they're in use police officials sing their praises. Here's a news report out of California where the Rialto PD has decided to use body cams for all their officers:


In particular they find them useful for writing reports and ensuring that law enforcement testimony is as credible and backed up as possible. The cameras aren't a cure-all but they'd solve a lot of problems and prevent many he-said she-said disputes.

A related technological development are law enforcement applications being designed for Google Glass, where officers would get information related to vehicles, suspects, video feeds, etc., though the Google Glass technology in real time. According to Tech Crunch (Aug. 19):

Mutualink is demoing one such app today at APCO, a conference for public safety communications, with its Glass App for police, firefighters and first responders.

The app would allow public safety officers and officials to communicate in real-time via streaming video from the scene, as well as to receive and view key documents, including things like building schematics, medical records of victims, live feeds of security cameras in the area and more. It’s the ultimate on-demand intel platform for agents working in the field, and a way to stay in contact with HQ and other organizations even when radio systems won’t talk to each other.

Of course, there could be privacy concerns with such an app. Recently, news came out that NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other officials in the U.S. oppose the idea of police body cameras, suggesting they’d be open to all kinds of dangerous interpretation. Mutualink says its solution emphasizes agency control of media and recording on glass, so privacy would be in the hands of the cops and other officials using them and should be protected.

A tactical heads-up display being used by safety officers is a natural fit for Glass, and as the enforcement agents would be using the head-mounted computer as part of their uniform, they wouldn’t have to worry about looking like idiots, so this could be a place where Google actually finds some long-term adoption. Mutualink is also already a service provider used by NATO Special Operations Forces, homeland security, police and fire departments, so it has the relationships in place to make this happen.

It’s not Robocop, but it’s a step closer.

Robocop, indeed! This application brings to mind fantasy and science fiction scenarios that not long ago seemed too fantastic to believe. Readers with children might recall J.K. Rowling's "Omnioculars" in the Harry Potter series where sports fans (in that case, Quidditch) could see instant replays, slow down action and retrieve detailed information about the game, players, strategies, etc., by looking through magical lenses.  Or, consider the contemporary TV show, Continuum, on the SciFi channel, where the main character is a cop from the future who wears a special suit linked to a chip in her head that presents real-time data linkages, facial recognition analyses, and even monitors vital signs of people in view of the agent. Suddenly, those sorts of uses seem less fanciful than just a short time ago.

While we're on the subject of police tech, the Los Angeles Auto Show asked car manufacturers to come up with examples of what police vehicles would/should look like in 2025. See a slideshow with examples.

The Google Glass app, police body cams, and probably even the vehicles could and likely would  eventually be merged, giving police more information on the world around them but also gathering video and audio of what the cop sees, hears, says and does - these technologies inevitably cut both ways.

Lege slowly but surely plowing through Tim Cole Advisory Panel recommendations

One has to give the Texas Legislature credit where it's due.

The Timothy Cole Advisory Panel on Wrongful Convictions was a one-time task force charged with making recommendations to reduce false convictions in the wake of the posthumous exoneration of Tim Cole as well as dozens of other Texas men declared innocent of serious felonies after post-conviction DNA testing. See their report (pdf). One often hears that panel made eleven recommendations, but really it was fewer than that. For example, five of them related to eyewitness identification standards, all of which were addressed in just one bill. Consolidated, the group effectively proposed six different legislative solutions:

• Eyewitness ID reform
• Recording custodial interrogations
• Discovery reform
• Expand access to post-conviction DNA testing
• Clarify standard for adjudicating junk-science habeas claims
• Fund staff at law-school innocence clinics instead of an innocence commission

Remarkably, with the passage of discovery reform and Sen. Whitmire's legislation allowing habeas relief in junk-science cases, after this session, to its credit, the Texas Legislature will have approved five of the six major recommendations of the Tim Cole Advisory Panel. Some may have been in more watered down forms than Grits might have preferred but still, that's not a bad record.

Assuming Governor Perry approves these latest bills - and he's been supportive of past legislation based on Tim Cole Advisory Panel recommendations - the final major unresolved item from the list for next session will be requiring police to record interrogations in the most serious offenses. This year a bill to that effect was voted out of the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee but, like a great deal of criminal-justice reform legislation, never received a vote on the House floor. The police chiefs' association says smaller departments can't afford it and until now my response has been that if they can't afford a recording device the department isn't big enough to handle rape and murder investigations. But that argument hasn't moved the needle so next session I've got my eye on a pot of untapped money that could perhaps be used for one-time recording equipment purchases, in much the same way the state used bond money to pay for dashcams in local police cars back in 2001. Recording equipment is cheap these days, it wouldn't take much.

Still, considering the Legislature created the Tim Cole Advisory Panel in 2009 (the same year it increased compensation for exonerees to become the most generous in the nation) and this is only the second session since its recommendations came out, five out of six isn't a bad ratio. There's more to be done, no doubt, and these measures represent modest first steps toward reform, not its culmination. But to outline half a dozen significant legislative suggestions and see five of them enacted in just two sessions is pretty darn impressive.

Warning drivers of speed trap gets Houston woman arrested for contempt of cop

When my father first taught me to drive back in East Texas 30 years ago, he passed along a practice that used to be common in more rural areas but which I haven't seen much in bigger cities: Flashing one's headlights to let ongoing traffic know they're coming up on a speed trap. My Dad considered it common courtesy, justified because the ostensible point of a speed trap (besides revenue generation) is to get people to slow down, so if private citizens warn their fellow drivers, they aren't doing anything more than contributing to the goal of reduced lawbreaking.

Given that personal history, I can't help but pity poor Natalie Plummer, who was arrested last week in Houston for holding up a sign warning drives of a "speed trap" ahead on a street in downtown Houston. Here's KTRK-TV's coverage:



The officer told Ms. Plummer that she was being arrested for felony obstruction of justice that carried an penalty of 3-5 years. When she was taken to jail, though, she was only charged with "walking in the roadway where there is a sidewalk present," an allegation she says is a lie: Plummer insists she was standing on the sidewalk holding the sign, and when you watch the video with cars whizzing by, it seems unlikely any reasonable person would stand in the street with the sidewalk right there.

One has to wonder, if this were a young black man in the 5th Ward instead of a young white woman biking home from the Whole Foods, would media outlets even consider this news?

Of course, the main reason the officer didn't file felony obstruction charges against Ms. Plummer is that no such law exists. The closest thing on the books I know of is Sec. 38.15 of the Penal Code, "Interference with Public Duties," which is a Class B misdemeanor. But that statute includes a specific exception which should be well-known to any traffic cop. The law states that "It is a defense to prosecution ... that the conduct engaged in by the defendant was intended to warn a person operating a motor vehicle of the presence of a peace officer who was enforcing" traffic laws.

Further, "It is a defense to prosecution under this section that the interruption, disruption, impediment, or interference alleged consisted of speech only," which clearly would apply to holding up a sign. Ms. Plummer wasn't arrested for violating any law and I'd bet dollars to donuts she wasn't standing in the street: She was arrested for "contempt of cop," and the fact that there's no such law on the books didn't stop her from going to jail for it.

How much do you wanna bet it will turn out the officer's dashcam malfunctioned and failed to capture his conversation with Ms. Plummer? This episode exemplifies the adage enshrined in this blog's masthead: You might beat the rap, but you won't beat the ride.

Presumptive DA's stoner husband gets freebie on DWI beef

This set of facts out of San Angelo is cracking me up:

Earlier this spring, the husband of first assistant District Attorney Allison Palmer, who is now the Republican nominee for DA in Tom Green County, caused an auto accident. He told police he'd been drinking earlier in the day and officers could smell the pungent aroma of marijuana in his truck. They brought in a drug dog which alerted and a search revealed a baggie with rolling papers, seeds and "small pieces of a green leafy substance."

The local police chief and state troopers were called to the scene, but Palmer was not arrested and instead taken to the hospital for minor injuries. He was never given field sobriety tests, refused a breathalyzer, did not have blood drawn, and out of more than 12 hours of dashcam footage from various police vehicles at the scene, he was never captured on video once during the incident. As a result, the Tom Green County Attorney dismissed charges TWO days after Palmer won her primary race, which seems particularly well-timed for her.

So the husband of the presumptive District Attorney gets a freebie, with the County Attorney stringing along the public - pretending he might still be held accountable - until after his favor to a colleague's pot smoking husband could no longer damage the wife politically.

Maybe Mrs. Palmer didn't know about her husband's pot smoking, police didn't intentionally avoid gathering evidence against him, and the County Attorney based his decision on the evidence as quickly as he could. Perhaps everything's on the up and up. But from a distance, it all seems like an instance of brazen hypocrisy combined with crass, good-ol-boy back scratching. The idea of the DA prosecuting the war on drugs while hubbie drives around San Angelo smoking out in his truck is really quite an image.

UPDATE/CLARIFICATION: Palmer was charged with reckless driving, reports the San Angelo Standard Times, and a Class C paraphernalia charge has been appealed to a County Court of Law. So no DWI or pot possession arrest, but charges weren't dismissed entirely.

Rules are for other people: Police dashcam edition

Last year Dallas PD established a unit to review daschcam video, the Dallas News reported, but has suspended the program "because officers felt they were being nitpicked with disciplinary action for minor infractions" ("Dallas police to suspend squad car video reviews due to officers' complaints," April 23). Here's the list of nitpicky offenses the local union says shouldn't be monitored in that way:

These kinds of problems were found during the review process. Some could be considered serious violations warranting disciplinary action; others fall into a gray area where officers feel they should be allowed to exercise discretion. Officers:

Gave chase without activating lights and sirens.

Exceeded the speed limit in residential areas or active school zones during chases.

Topped the speed limit by more than 20 mph during pursuits and other emergency calls.

Failed to stop at stop signs or red lights during chases.

Violated the strict pursuit policy, for instance by chasing a motorist who fled while getting a traffic ticket.

Failed to activate wireless microphones, resulting in no audio recording of events during an investigation or arrest.

Failed to notify dispatchers that they were involved in pursuits.

Deactivated video recorders during police pursuits and assist-officer calls.

Failed to download video from their squad cars at the end of every shift. (If this isn’t done, the unit sometimes fills up and will no longer record.)

Moved GPS antennas from the car’s interior to the trunk, where reception is poor or nonexistent.

SOURCE: Dallas Police Department

Chief David Brown said, “The folklore among officers is, ‘I’m afraid to go five miles over the speed limit because I’ll be disciplined,’” but many of these seem like more serious infractions than that characterization implies.

On this blog I frequently see commenters insisting (e.g., here and here) that enforcing even the most petty criminal statute or bureaucratic regulation is vital because "it's the law" and otherwise we'd have anarchy if schoolteachers didn't lose their jobs over marijuana, if people who overstay their visas aren't deported over a traffic ticket, etc.. I wonder, will those same critics feel that every jot and tittle of the law and city policy should be enforced on Dallas police officers, or is strict enforcement only something that should apply to pot smokers and Mexicans?

Does your police car really need to talk?

Now, every cop can pretend to be Knight Rider: From KXAN-Austin:

If you talk to it, it talks back, giving its driver important information, like a car's registration or a car's speed. The iForce can do this without ever being looked at.

A police officer only need ask iForce a question, and thereby not look down or away from the road while using it. iForce can give directions, shoot radar, record dashcam video, turn on the car's lights, and much more, just by being asked.

"If you're on an emergency call, you really want your focus on the road," said Lt. Patrick Cochran, Austin Police Department's police technology unit.

The system is built on an airplane cockpit platform.

The systems cost $10K per car to put in. Worth it?

Best way to cover up police misconduct: Plant drugs, ditch dashcam video, threaten subordinates, or have supervisor tell media 'all is well'?

Several police misconduct incidents caught this blogger's eye recently that merit Grits readers' attention:

False arrest covered up with planted drugs
At the Aransas Pass Police Department, "Several witnesses are coming forward saying they saw officers tase and beat a suspect only to find out they had the wrong guy. Witnesses also claim to have seen police officers plant drugs on the man." Six different people signed affidavits saying the drugs were planted after officers earlier announced they'd searched the suspect and found nothing. Sounds like a spur of the moment thing: Do you suppose the cop in question just carried drugs around on the job just in case?

Beating leaves cyclist on life support
Also from the Aransas Pass PD, Officer Jason Torres was placed on administrative leave over allegations that he knocked down a bicyclist then beat him so severely last month it left him on life support unable to speak. The badly beaten man, who was riding his bike to his home just blocks from the incident, was later charged with public intoxication and resisting arrest. The officer's dashcam conveniently failed to record the incident. The chief says he expects an investigation by the Texas Rangers to clear Torres, but the family's attorneys claim to be in possession of damning evidence. In any event, for a small town of around 10,000, that's a lot of cop controversy.

In-uniform cop hits school bus driving drunk to work
In Houston, reports the Chronicle, a police officer with a blood alcohol content of .205 was in uniform, driving to work, when his car slammed into a school bus. The cover up was nearly immediate: At the scene, responding officers ticketed the school bus driver (who told them the officer "smelled like alcohol, appeared to have been drinking and had open bottles of beer and wine in his vehicle"), then a supervisor "told reporters at the accident scene that blood tests would show [Officer Ruben] Trejo was not under the influence of any substances." Now the officer has been fired and the union has been informed that "at least two HPD officers, including supervisors, are under investigation for unspecified misconduct" related to the April 13 crash. In most allegations of police misconduct, of course, there is no forensic evidence available to debunk officers whose first instinct is to cover for one another. Good on HPD management for not sweeping the matter under the rug.

Recurring allegations by women against Brazos deputy constable

According to KWES-TV, "A Central Texas law officer who quit last week after being charged with kidnapping has been accused of trying to rape another female. College Station police say the second young woman came forward after hearing news reports about the first case." In the latest incident, Deputy Augustin Rubio was "charged with abducting a woman Aug. 31 while working off-duty security." The other woman making accusations was arrested by Rubio in June for alleged underaged drinking: she told authorities the deputy "tried to rape her before driving her to jail."

Indictment follows constable's retaliation threats against deputies
In Dallas, reports the Morning News, "Prosecutors on Friday accused indicted Dallas County Precinct 1 Constable Derick Evans of enforcing a ticket quota, retaliating against whistle-blowers, forcing on-duty deputies to distribute campaign material and raising campaign money with an illegal raffle for almost a decade." This stems from one of the investigations Dallas DA Craig Watkins handed off to a special prosecutor after sitting on the allegations for two years. Reported the News, "The court documents filed Friday also allege that Evans tried to intimidate potential witnesses against him last fall by referring to special prosecutors in the case as 'snakes' and threatened to 'chop the heads off' any deputies who cooperated with them." A trial date has been set for Nov. 28.

False arrests for DWI in Austin highlighted by bust of talk-show host

Local radio talk show host and former All-Star Longhorns place kicker Jeff Ward recently had DWI charges dropped against him after prosecutors viewing the dashcam video deemed there was no probable cause to believe he'd committed the offense, reported the Austin Statesman. Travis County Attorney David Escamilla told the paper, "After our review of the evidence, including the officer's in-car video, we confirmed to APD that there was not sufficient evidence to support a DWI charge." Ward issued a statement afterward declaring "I have been respectful and patient throughout the process, knowing from the outset that I was not intoxicated. There was no reason to go forward with the case. I can only hope that my innocence is reported and discussed with the same enthusiasm as my arrest."

The incident re-raises an issue the Statesman tackled last month in a story revealing that Travis County dismisses "a higher percentage of drunken driving cases than other major Texas counties, in part because prosecutors said police filed weak cases." As indicated in the chart at left, law enforcement in Travis County - primarily Austin PD - arrest nearly twice as many people for DWI as other large Texas jurisdictions, and those cases are dismissed from 2-10 times more often than those other locales, raising the possibility that police in Travis County are systematically arresting people for DWI when there's no cause to believe they're drunk.

For years I've heard defense attorneys in Travis County complain that APD will arrest drivers merely if they've been drinking, whether or not they fail field sobriety tests or blow .08 on a breathalyzer, claims corroborated by the Statesman's findings and Ward's experience. An attorney in the May Statesman story voiced that view: "'Generally speaking, I think if you have alcohol on your breath in Austin, Texas, you are going to jail,' said Brian Roark, an Austin defense lawyer and former county prosecutor."

Wherein lies the problem. Drinking and driving, while increasingly a cultural taboo, is not in and of itself a crime. Driving with a blood alcohol content over .08 is a crime, but arresting everyone with alcohol on their breath inevitably ropes in people who've had a drink or two but are still abiding by the law. Folks like Ward may eventually have charges dismissed, but they've often still spent a night in jail, often paid thousands for an attorney, and in Ward's case, suffered needless public embarrassment.

Austin Chief Art Acevedo told the Statesman, "My No. 1 priority is telling my officers, 'Don't you worry about what happens to the court piece, your job is to get people off the road,'" which sounds to me like the department is encouraging a pattern and practice of false arrests systematically from the top down. Surely the "#1 priority" of police in such circumstances shouldn't be "to get people off the road" no matter what, but to determine first and foremost whether they've actually committed a crime.

Police arguments against recording interrogations allow fear to impede self-interest

Some law enforcement interests, to me, inexplicably, have come out against legislation carried by Rep. Pete Gallego and Sen. Rodney Ellis requiring police to record interrogations in serious violent crimes. The DAs are split - some want interrogations recorded because for them it's more and better evidence - but police unions and a handful of law-enforcement agencies have been adamant against the legislation.

The complaints are familiar: Police think the purpose of the video is to play "gotcha," to try to accuse officers of misconduct, that the public is too unsophisticated to understand the techniques used in interrogation (such as lying to suspects or attempting to intimidate them), and secondarily, that the expense and practical requirements of recording would be too onerous.

I say they're familiar because in 2001, (for the most part) the exact same people made the identical arguments against requiring law enforcement agencies to record police-citizen interactions involving patrol officers with dashcams, arguably the most important measure in landmark racial profiling legislation passed that year carried by state Sen. Royce West. Back then, Texas cops portrayed recording street encounters as "Big Brother" looking over their shoulder, as an attack on police offficers, creating a record which, in their minds, served no other purpose than accusing police of misconduct.

In actual practice, though, exactly the opposite turned out to be the case. Dashcam video did and does occasionally catch instances of police misconduct, but MUCH more often it debunks complaints against officers, providing irrefutable proof against false or inflated allegations. Dashcams protect officers in the street, or at least the vast majority of them who are doing their job the way they should. And when they don't, video gives police supervisors an excellent training tool, allowing them to identify areas where specific improvements may be needed or where officers made poor decisions that otherwise might not be apparent. In most cases the public never sees such video, but it provides excellent evidence in court, enhances both police training and oversight, and protects good cops from false allegations.

Today, even former critics of the 2001 legislation now say dashcams have been far more boon than bane for Texas law enforcement, particularly in DWI cases where video of intoxicated suspects have become a staple in drunk driving prosecution.

So given how utterly and profoundly wrong they were about video in patrol cars, I don't understand why the same law enforcement interests can't see that recording interrogations would provide the same benefits. Right now under Texas law, confessions must be recorded (or written) but not the interrogation that led to them. So inevitably, a common-as-dirt tactic by defense lawyers is to claim that unseen misconduct in the interrogation room led to a false or coerced statement. Recording interrogations in most cases will take that issue completely off the table. In the Brownsville Herald today there's a typical example from a capital murder case where a recorded interrogation would have been helpful:

In a pretrial hearing last year, a video statement [Ernesto] Martinez gave to Brownsville police was aired in which Martinez admitted to killing [Barry] Horn
.
Martinez said he was drunk and angry when he killed Horn. He said he stabbed Horn several times because he was upset over an assault at Horn’s home on Flor de Mayo two weeks earlier.

“I got very drunk because he raped me a couple of weeks before,” Martinez said in one of two video statements he made to Brownsville police on Oct. 26, 2009. “I did it. I did it, sir, because he raped me.”

Martinez’s attorneys had tried to get the statements suppressed, but 404th state District Court Judge Elia Cornejo Lopez denied the motion.

Martinez had claimed he was coerced into making the statements and did not understand his Miranda rights when he spoke to police.

Claims of coercion, inadequacy of Miranda, etc., are common, but if interrogations are recorded, there will usually be no need for such pretrial suppression hearings. As it stands, this defendant will likely continue to appeal based on an allegedly coerced confession, and there's no hard evidence besides the officers' say-so to prove to a certainty there wasn't coercion. Why not gather evidence up front that coercion didn't occur, since it's alleged so frequently? Even though most judges and juries tend to give officers the benefit of the doubt, as happened in this case, it'd be better to take the issue off the table entirely. And there would, of course, be a small minority of cases where misconduct is recorded. But by the same token, it would also serve as a preventive and perhaps there'd be fewer such incidents if police knew their actions would be caught on tape.

Just as importantly, when innocent people do falsely confess - which happens perhaps more commonly than one might expect, particularly in high-profile crimes - recording interrogations provides a record that can later help exonerate them. A terrific example was cited in the House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee last week by Mike Ware from the Dallas DA's Conviction Integrity Unit: The case of Stephen Brodie, a deaf man who falsely confessed after 18 hours of interrogation, much of it with no interpreter present. After discovering physical evidence in the old case pointing to another suspect (a fingerprint from a man who later actually confessed to the crime for which Brodie was convicted in an unrelated plea deal), the Integrity Unit closely reviewed a recording of Brodie's interrogation and found more than 40 instances where his statements failed to match other evidence and known facts. His recorded confession, of course, was more truncated and didn't betray those same inconsistencies, but because they'd saved the video record of the interrogation, Brodie was able to be exonerated despite the lack of DNA.

That right there is worth the cost of admission, and it's why groups like my employer, the Innocence Project of Texas, are pushing for recorded interrogations. But as a practical matter cases like Stephen Brodie's are much less common than are accusations of coercive interrogation in the face of a vacuum of evidence, as in the capital murder case in Brownsville. That's why, according to the national Innocence Project: "To date, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia have enacted legislation requiring the recording of custodial interrogations.  State supreme courts have taken action in Alaska, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire and New Jersey.  Approximately 500 jurisdictions have voluntarily adopted recording policies."

This bill would simply require recording in serious violent crimes (so-called 3g offenses). If interrogators failed to record, and if their reason for not recording doesn't fall under a lengthy list of allowed exceptions, the confession would still be admissible, but with a jury instruction informing jurors that police should have recorded the interrogation, but didn't. Nobody's confession would ever be excluded just because police failed to follow this statute.

Finally, I find the cost issue a red herring. On dashcams, I was much more sympathetic. Those really are expensive systems and the state issued $18 million in bonds to finance them for local police agencies. (The very largest - Dallas and Houston - didn't get cameras for all their cars because the state ran out of money, but smaller agencies did if they applied.) But for recording interrogations, these days the equipment is cheap. Sure, you can spend thousands to outfit an interrogation room with hidden cameras and recorders, but you can also spend $40 at Radio Shack to buy an audio recorder capable of many hours of uninterrupted recording. For that matter, any laptop or desktop computer can be outfitted to record, and storage of digital recordings these days is electronic, requiring little physical space or ongoing maintenance. Most agencies already have audio and/or video recording capacity in some form or fashion. And if some podunk department is so small it can't afford such technology - and I don't doubt they're out there given that Texas has more than 2,500 law enforcement agencies, some of them truly minute and obscure - maybe they shouldn't be the ones investigating serious violent felonies in the first place! That's what the Texas Rangers are for. Call 'em in, or else hand off such cases to agencies with sufficient resources to properly investigate.

Other than issues of cost, fear (sometimes bordering on paranoia) of the new and unknown seems to be what's driving opposition to recording interrogations, perhaps influenced by recent negative experiences Houston PD has had with video evidence of police misconduct in the field. I not only think those fears are overblown, I strongly suspect that once recording interrogations becomes the norm, just as with dashcams, this tool will quickly come to be viewed as all-but indispensable, providing stronger evidence in court, plus protecting good cops doing their jobs and innocent suspects who falsely confess. I just don't see the downside.

See related Grits coverage:

• Latest exoneration highlights problem of false confessions
• Are false confessions 'coerced' or 'persuaded'?
• CCA orders Yogurt Shop retrial based on possibility of false confessions
• Jurors from false confession case call for recorded interrogations
• Recording interrogations makes loads of sense
• Expert: Yogurt Shop case a prime example of false confessions
• False confessions a "systematic feature of American justice"
• Recording confessions saves much grief for police
• Police interrogation a 'guilt presumptive' process
• Would you confess to a crime you didn't commit to save your life?
• If CIA can record interrogations, so can police
• Abilene PD requires recording interrogations
• El Paso conference brought together top minds to prevent false confessions
• Why record interrogations?
• Juries need more, better information to prevent false convictions