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

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


In this month's episode:

Introductory tomfoolery

• ¡Poncho!

Top Stories

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

Fill in the Blank

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

The Last Hurrah (29:30)

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

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

Find a transcript of this episode below the jump.

Roundup: Lawsuit alleges cronyism and corruption at DPS; murder indictment of Dallas cop no aberration under outgoing DA; informant testimony makes for messy innocence claims; Pam Colloff's favorite #cjreform podcasts, and other stories

Here are a few browser-clearing odds and ends of which Grits readers should be aware:

Dallas cop indicted for Botham Jean murder
In Dallas, former DPD Officer Amber Guyger has been indicted for murder in the shooting death of her unarmed neighbor, Botham Jean. You've got to hand it to outgoing Republican DA Faith Johnson: She's been more willing to charge officers in wrongful shooting episodes than any Democratic elected prosecutor in Texas, or for that matter, as she boasted in this 13-second clip from the campaign trail, any other District Attorney in the country:


Lawsuit: DPS suffers from 'cronyism,' 'corruption'
A federal lawsuit has been filed accusing the Texas DPS under Col. Steve McCraw of "a 'good old boy' culture of cronyism and outright corruption." See initial coverage from KXAN in Austin.

Corrections Committee Interim Report out
The TX House Corrections Committee has published its Interim Report. Topics studied included responses to Hurricane Harvey, the need for specialized programming for 17-25 year olds, flaws in the state jail system, and heat litigation. More on this soon after Grits has had a chance to read it thoroughly.

Creuzot looking forward to Dallas DA stint
D Magazine published an interesting interview with Dallas DA-elect John Creuzot, for those looking for clues as to how this party hopping fixture in Dallas justice politics might operate at the helm of the DA's office. See the October Reasonably Suspicious podcast for excerpts from a debate between Creuzot and his Republican-incumbent opponent, Faith Johnson; the full 1.5 hour debate is here. Note to Judge Creuzot and other incoming elected prosecutors: Consider hiring this guy for prosecutor trainings.

Forum promotes public defender option for Travis County
A public-defender office has been proposed for Travis County. Those interested should check out this recent community forum discussing the possibility. See prior, related Grits coverage.

TDCJ troubles lead to calls for independent oversight
At the Texas Tribune, see coverage of prospects for independent oversight at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice in light of recent scandals, a rise in suicides, and gross understaffing at numerous rural units. House Corrections Chairman James White doesn't sound convinced.

Recanted witness, corrupt DEA agent won't sway Harris prosecutors on innocence claims
Especially in the context of the drug war, but also high-profile murders and violent crimes, the reliance of the justice system on self-interested testimony by confidential informants is one of the most significant causes of wrongful convictions. It's also among the hardest causes to prevent, and one for which the courts are loathe to provide redress. The Houston Chronicle's Keri Blakinger describes a case in which a DEA informant, who has since recanted his testimony, accused Lamar Burks of murdering someone at a dice game. But the Harris County Conviction Integrity Unit wouldn't budge. Now, one of the agents centrally involved with the investigation has been indicted in an unrelated case in New Orleans for perjury and falsifying evidence, evincing a similar fact pattern to what Burks' attorneys allege.

In The Dark shines light on amazing, terrible case
At Pam Colloff's recommendation, I've been listening to Season 2 of the podcast, In the Dark, focused on an apparent false conviction for a quadruple murder in Mississippi. This investigative tour de force is taking the form to new levels. Awesome work, as detailed in this Longform podcast interview about how the story was put together. When I interviewed her for the August episode of Reasonably Suspicious, Pam also recommended the second season of the Missing and Murdered podcast, and the podcast After Effect from WNYC, dissecting the aftermath of a tragic SWAT team raid. Just for fun, I excerpted her recommendations into a short, 2.5 minute clip, for anyone interested:


Sandra Bland documentary premiers on HBO Monday
Last, but definitely no least, on Monday, a documentary titled, "Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland," premieres on HBO. Grits simultaneously cannot wait to see it and dreads the broadcast. It's such a terrible, heart breaking story! Here's a review from the SA Express News, and the trailer:

Say Her Name: The Life and Death of Sandra Bland Promo Cutdown

Heat-litigation settlement adds pressure on Texas to decarcerate

In response to federal heat litigation, reported Gaby Banks at the Houston Chronicle, "Bryan Collier, executive director of the Texas prison system, is planning to relocate at-risk prisoners at 75 uncooled units to 29 prisons already equipped with air conditioning, according to two lawmakers briefed on the plan." A settlement will be reached this week over cooling inmates at the Pack Unit, Banks reported, but:

Other inmates could also benefit. Even before negotiating a deal, Texas prison officials began looking to move tens of thousands of vulnerable inmates into cooler quarters, perhaps to avert a swarm of additional lawsuits from other prisons.

“I’m not sure it would have happened without a federal lawsuit,” said state Sen. John Whitmire, D-Houston, chair of the Texas Senate's corrections committee. “It’s an attitude among the public and the Legislature, which speaks for the public, that we don’t want to spend money on people who are murderers and rapists.”

The 2014 suit filed by the Pack inmates challenged the deadly hot conditions inside the rural prison, saying they violated constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment. U.S. District Judge Keith P. Ellison has already concluded the state showed “deliberate indifference” to inmate conditions.

Sen. Whitmire has been making remarks like that for years on this topic, which probably didn't hurt the plaintiff's case that the indifference toward heat-related deaths was "deliberate."

But now, the federal courts have mooted legislative and for that matter public opinions. The state just has to pay for A/C or other cooling measures for various, vulnerable prisoner populations including the aged and infirm.

All of this was predictable. After the 5th Circuit said TDCJ could be sued, I'd opined that, "Grits expects TDCJ to ultimately lose the pending heat litigation and for the Legislature to eventually find itself forced to implement significant mitigation measures to reduce heat exposure of inmates and guards. It won't be popular but, if the 5th Circuit rules like they did in Louisiana, they won't have a choice." Now, that's exactly what happened.

The Lege is already spending $3.4 billion per year to house Texas prisoners. And despite beginning the 86th session facing billions of dollars of red ink, they'll now have to spend more per prisoner to pay to cool so many of them.

This puts even greater pressure on the Legislature to reduce prisoner populations and close more units. With crime declining, and public support for decarceration reforms on the rise, the cost of continuing to incarcerate Texans in the same numbers we did when crime was high makes little sense on its face. That goes double if the state must now pay to air condition a significant proportion of its 104 prison units. And it must.

Stop the Train! An Epic Indigent Defense Fail in Travis County, execution scheduled without hearing on snitch recantation, new music from Just Liberty's decarceration campaign, and other stories

Here's the latest episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast for April 2018. You can subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, or SoundCloud, or listen to it here:


In this episode, we discussed:

Top Stories

• Travis County indigent defense system producing terrible outcomes. 
• Texas Supreme Court to consider whether prosecutors can be fired for refusing to break the law. 
• Listen to Just Liberty's new anti-incarceration/prison-closure jingle!  (~9:00 mark.)

Death and Texas

• Juan Castillo may be executed next month but courts haven't considered informant recantation. 

Fill in the Blank

• Litigation in Galveston County made national press after a judge refused to pay for defense-attorney investigation in misdemeanor case. 
• Two Tarrant County cases show how politicized elections-based criminal prosecutions can be. 
• Former Congressman Sylvestre Reyes authored a clueless column on Texas and the opiod crisis.

The Last Hurrah

• Houston limits zoning for offender services. 
• The Tyler Court of Appeals declared Texas' "revenge porn" statute unconstitutional. 
• The Harris County Sheriff fired the deputy who shot Danny Ray Thomas, an unarmed black killed man amidst a psychotic episode while his pants around his ankles when he was killed. 

Find a transcript of this episode below the jump.

Reasonably Suspicious: Police unions, collective bargaining, and accountability

Check out the latest episode of the Reasonably Suspicious podcast from Just Liberty. You can listen to it here or access it on all the usual channels: iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, or SoundCloud. 

If you haven't subscribed yet, take a moment to do so now. I'm enjoying the format and am hoping to do some interesting things in the coming months heading toward the 86th Texas Legislature. If the Wall Street Journal's right that the next billion internet users won't type, relying on voice and video, then it behooves an old dog to learn new tricks. And having cool, original music wrapped around the conversation - thanks to producer/guitar virtuoso Gabe Rhodes and some of the finest musicians in Texas (which is saying something) - makes it fun to put together.

This month's episode features three segments on police union politics, including one focused on Austin's "meet and confer" contract presently under negotiation (these highlights from the negotiating table recently made the rounds among city insiders), and a discussion of what Grits had dubbed the police union playbook on spinning to the press in the wake of police misconduct or high-profile "critical incidents." I'm perhaps most excited about the interview with Sam Sinyangwe, Campaign Zero's data specialist who has now twice visited Austin to support including accountability measures in the police union contract (or scuttling it if they're not included). I'll publish the full interview in a few days (in the meantime, you can also check out the speech he gave in Austin in September). But the segment in the podcast on why police unions too often get a political pass was worth the cost of admission.

Lots of other good stuff sprinkled throughout. As always, find a transcript of the podcast after the jump below.

Top Stories: 

• The Police Union Playbook on reacting to critical incidents

• If Harris County prosecutors are screening arrests, why are so many people arrested for Class C misdemeanors?

Interviews:

• Sukyi McMahon and Kathy Mitchell on the Austin police union contract

• Scott Henson interviews Campaign Zero's Sam Sinyangwe on why liberals and conservatives are both reluctant to criticize police union excesses

Game segment: Fill in the Blank

• Bexar and Dallas Counties cease arrests for misdemeanor marijuana possession

• Court of Criminal Appeals still denying DNA testing to capital defendants

• Real costs of incarceration top $1 trillion nationally

The Last Hurrah

• Unions now a minority at Dallas police pension board

• Time to make the Austin crime lab independent?

• Bipartisan push in Congress for asset forfeiture reform

Theory and praxis: use of force, deaths in custody

Here are a few odds and ends which merit Grits readers' attention this morning:

• Read this excellent investigative story by Cary Aspinwall at the Dallas Morning News, tracking a nebulous tip to discover an apparent incident of police misconduct involving a wrongful death. Law enforcement would go a long way toward building public trust if, in such situations, they prioritized transparency over CYA tactics.
• The Houston Chronicle has the story of a deadly no-knock SWAT raid in which a man who wasn't the target of the warrant was killed. Law enforcement accounts of the incident differ from those of the surviving residents.
• Grits enjoyed this back-and-forth discussion on the Heritage Foundation's recent report on policing. Related.
• Fivethirtyeight.com places rising murder rates in 2015 and 2016 in context.
• Added to the to-read list: "Reforming the Law on Police Use of Deadly Force: De-escalation, Pre-Seizure Conduct, and Imperfect Self Defense."

Snacks to tide you over ...

Here are a few odds and ends which merit Grits readers' attention while your correspondent's is focused elsewhere:

• San Antonio is the poster child for how "police contracts shield officers from scrutiny and discipline."
• The Statesman has an extensive feature about black families giving their kids "The Talk" in the era of Black Lives Matter.
• See an argument in The Baptist Standard for raising the age of criminal responsibility from 17 to 18, as well as an editorial in the SA Express-News.
• Police agencies which failed to comply with the new law on reporting of shootings by their officers are belatedly starting to get their paperwork in, though there remains no penalty for noncompliance.
• The attorney representing Harris County in federal bail litigation is taking flack for claiming some jail inmates want to be locked up.
• See more stories about conservatives responding to Donald Trump's denunciation of asset forfeiture reform by vocally supporting the idea. Also, Dallas Observer coverage.
• There were protests at the Harris County Jail this week surrounding another questionable inmate death ruled a suicide by authorities.

Quarter of Texas police shooting deaths unreported to AG despite mandate

About a quarter of Texas police shooting deaths over the last decade - more than 200 - went unreported to the state Attorney General despite criminal penalties on the books for noncompliance, our own Amanda Woog observed in a Houston Chronicle editorial.

Woog reported that, "Scott Bowman, Howard Williams and Jordan Taylor Jung, of Texas State University, have documented more than 200 police shootings that were not reported to the AG's office, but should have been. This is around 15 percent of the total deaths in police custody that were missing, and when looking at the subset of deaths by police shooting, more than 25 percent were unreported." See their analysis.

The academics discovered these undisclosed police shootings by using the media-analysis methodology pioneered by the Guardian and Washington Post in their national compilations of police shootings. They found more than 200 which had not been reported to the Attorney General in which it would have been required under state law.

The crux of Woog's op ed suggested a change to incentivize reporting of heretofore covert police shootings where criminal penalties have failed. Here's how the article concluded:

Right now, compliance with the custodial death reporting statute is tied to a criminal penalty for failing to report, a Class B misdemeanor. But actual enforcement of the law requires that local law enforcement investigate, and local prosecutors prosecute, local law enforcement violations.

Unsurprisingly, I could not find a single prosecution under this law in its 30-plus year history.

Instead of relying on an apparently never-been-used criminal penalty that depends on police policing the police, compliance should be tied to funding and enforced by state authorities.

Withholding funding for failing to report custodial deaths is currently being discussed on the federal level. In recent years, the Bureau of Justice Statistics in the U.S. Department of Justice has been under fire for state and local law enforcement agencies' underreporting in the federal custodial-death reporting program. In response to recent proposed rule changes by the BJS, a coalition of organizations led by the ACLU and NAACP wrote a letter to Attorney General Loretta Lynch calling on the DOJ to "condition federal criminal justice grants on data collection and reporting on police-civilian encounters."

Texas should do the same. In fact, there's precedent in our state for withholding grant funding from local authorities that fail to comply with criminal justice data-reporting requirements. In 2012, when counties were not adequately updating criminal history records as required by state law, the Criminal Justice Division under Gov. Rick Perry conditioned eligibility for CJD grants on counties' 90 percent or above compliance with the reporting law. Within eight months of the CJD's announcement, 172 counties became compliant with the minimum reporting standard.

Strengthening Texas' custodial death statute by withholding funding from counties not complying with the law could be accomplished by executive action through the governor's office, or by the Legislature amending the law to explicitly condition certain grants upon reporting compliance. Texas needs new incentives that encourage law enforcement to report in-custody deaths and deter agencies from concealing them.

One wonders whether these weren't reported because there were problems at the shoots agencies didn't want to reveal, or if the culture of noncompliance and disrespect for the statute has simply reached the point where law enforcement knows their colleagues will never hold them accountable and so just do what they please.

MORE (10/9): The Houston Chronicle's Lise Olsen has a story on these unreported police shootings. The Houston Police Department (16) and the Harris County Sheriff (12) were the Texas agencies with the most unreported shooting deaths.

Feds will begin closer tracking of deaths in police custody

Good news: The DOJ plans to begin comprehensively tracking shootings by local police. See their notice in the Federal Register. Find explanatory coverage here:

• NY Times: Justice Department to streamline tracking of police killings
• Vox: The federal government is finally making police report every time they kill someone
• The Guardian: Police will be required to report officer-involved deaths under new US system

Amanda Woog, who recently released her curated database of Texas deaths in custody since 2005,  spoke with Texas Public Radio about the development. Notably, Texas' new reporting requirement on police shootings helpfully includes non-fatal incidents, so the data she's gathering going forward is broader, even, than what the Justice Department has suggested.

Related:

• Podcast: New Texas death-in-custody data online
• Why the increase in number of Texans shot by police?
• Journalist's Resource: Deaths in police custody in the United States: Research review

Civil suit may force Reyna recusal on Twin Peaks, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends which merit Grits readers' attention:

• A proposed resolution this Thursday at the Austin City Council directs city staff to draft regulations for municipal court judges significantly limiting when people may be arrested for nonpayment of Class C fines.
• Whether Dallas can purchase the shuttered Dawson State Jail depends on the price.
• McLennan DA Abel Reyna may have to recuse himself from prosecuting the Twin Peaks biker cases because of a civil suit against him. Normally prosecutors have absolute immunity and can't be sued, but Reyna likely opened himself up by directing the police investigation on the ground and usurping the officers' role. 
• The Christian Science Monitor has a piece on the Laura and John Arnold Foundation's risk assessment model, for which Grits harbors high hopes. Related: From USA Today, "Justice system too costly for the unconvicted." Also: from the Houston Press, "If Mom doesn't pick up her phone, you might end up stuck in jail."
• The chairman-elect of the Texas Association of Business had a column in the El Paso Times urging the Lege to raise the age of adult criminal culpability in Texas from 17-18.
• Amanda Woog's Texas Justice Initiative data project continues to receive attention. See a lengthy Huntsville Item story on the topic.
• For the first time, proposals for criminal justice reform made it into both national party platforms, noted the Brennan Center.
• Out of New Mexico, read what happens when a long-time District Attorney decides to prosecute police officers over bad shootings.
• How traffic tickets can destroy indigent people's lives. See also this essay from the Boston Review on the history of debtors prisons in American jurisprudence.
• SCOTUS last term continued the decades-long trend toward gutting the Fourth Amendment like a fish.
• The jury trial is dead. You're shocked, I know.
• Your correspondent last week made some LED-lettering signs for our friends at the Austin Justice Coalition to use at protests and events. I thought they turned out pretty well:

 

Podcast: New Texas death-in-custody data online

Grits contributing writer Amanda Woog, who is a postdoctoral fellow at the UT-Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis, has made a curated version of Texas' death-in-custody database available for the first time online. See her fancy new website, somewhat blandly dubbed the Texas Justice Initiative. There's nothing dull about its contents, however.

Last year, the Texas Legislature mandated that police departments report all police shootings to the Attorney General, whether or not the victim dies. But for years, police, jails and prisons in Texas already had to report deaths in custody, though scarce few people were aware of it and the information wasn't widely available. The AG publishes a master list of names, but nearly all of the voluminous detail until now was kept offline, available only to those who knew enough to file an open records request. Since just a few reporters even knew the database existed (besides Grits, Brandi Grissom of the Dallas News, Tanya Eiserer at WFAA, and John Tedesco at the SA Express-News are the only writers I've seen use it in years), most of the detail here is being revealed publicly for the first time, including on cases from up to a decade ago.

See the press release announcing the new site launch and a 22-page report detailing her initial findings from eleven years of data.  And congratulations, Amanda! This has long been needed; it was a tremendous accomplishment. (MORE: See coverage from The Atlantic and the Texas Tribune.)

To give a better sense of the project, Grits sat down last week with Ms. Woog for a recorded interview. You can listen to it below, or find a transcript of our conversation below the jump.

Greater scrutiny coming for Texas police shootings

The stories of Texans shot by police will receive a lot more scrutiny soon.

The Texas Tribune has launched a crowdfunding campaign to pay for "a massive open records effort that will track fatal and nonfatal police shootings from 2010 to 2015 in Texas’ largest cities. Through this investigative project, we want to provide context on when and why officers use lethal force. We're gaining access to records from police departments across Texas; we'll supplement that information with original reporting and explore trends that emerge in these shootings." If you're able, give them some love. That's a worthwhile project.

Notably, they plan to include "nonfatal police shootings" which were not compiled anywhere before September 2015. It's hard to see how that list could ever be comprehensive. Those records simply were not kept. (Fatal shootings were recorded in the Attorney General's death in custody database.) But they'll find enough through open records requests to paint a representative picture.

In addition, our pal Eva Ruth Moravec revealed recently that she'll be "undertaking a year-long reporting project thanks to a grant that will allow me to write while I continue chipping away at my Master’s degree. In general, I’ll be researching and reporting on officer-involved shootings in the Lone Star State – but I’ll explain more in detail later." She'll be taking a deep dive into individual police shooting cases around the state. I'm excited about her project, though I'll leave it to her to announce the details.

These two journalism initiatives promise to focus a lot more attention on the issues surrounding police shootings in the coming year - a happy and welcome side effect of the new reports being compiled by Amanda Woog that the Texas Legislature mandated last session.

On a related note, I recently ran across this Prawfsblawg post from our man John Pfaff last year suggesting a novel approach to prosecuting police misconduct: Allowing public defender offices to prosecute the cases. There's a perspective from which that makes a lot of sense. One is reminded of practices in the UK where attorneys may serve as either a prosecutor or  defense attorney in any given case and those categories are not such narrow specializations. Ex-prosecutors become defense attorneys all the time and vice versa; a lawyers skills are fungible in that regard. Of course, we don't have PD offices in most of Texas, using appointed counsel in most counties. But it was an interesting idea.

Here in Texas, we've seen more traditional suggestions for having such cases prosecuted by special prosecutors or a division at the AG, though those bills never got out of committee in the 2015 session. Paul Cassell has suggested AG's could take on those responsibilities of their own accord, but in Texas they can only step in to prosecute a case if the local DA invites them. And on police shootings and/or misconduct cases, none of them do.

An unnecessary death: Disabled vet killed by vehicle extraction technique

Grits has been spending  time lately learning to edit video and, for practice, put together this little 2.5 minute segment on the death of Slade Sullivan in 2014 at the hands of the Round Rock PD, mainly because the missus had recently acquired footage and related documents under the Public Information Act. Amanda Woog narrated the piece.

Sullivan, a disabled veteran, was subjected to a "double arm bar takedown" face down from his truck to the pavement, breaking his back in multiple places. He was paralyzed and ultimately died from his injuries five months after the incident. Check out this short video Grits prepared about the episode.


The Austin Chronicle reported that "Sullivan's death highlights how an officer's cavalier use of force can turn fatal when used on a person with health problems." The Statesman had earlier published an excerpt of the dashcam video.

Here's a story from the Killeen Daily Herald about the episode and a lawsuit Sullivan filed against RRPD before his death. The Killeen paper also reported on his death. In his obituary, it was mentioned that his military service had been cut short by a back injury.

Check out a RRPD police report which indicated that officers were trained in this vehicle extraction technique, referred to in the report as "Points of Domination" training. Points of Domination is a term developed in a military context in Iraq and Afghanistan for clearing buildings in urban warfare settings. The report also indicates that Sullivan told the arresting officer his back was injured before they pulled him from the vehicle.

Here's the autopsy and another report from the Texas Rangers.

This episode was a needless tragedy. Sullivan's death points to how quickly law enforcement tends to resort to violent tactics in situations where deescalation is possible.

Jailers claim immunity for Webb County Jail beating death

Sandra Bland's death in the Waller County Jail was remarkable mainly for the massive attention it has received compared to scores of other inmates who perished in anonymity. Most deaths in county jails are glossed over almost immediately and never aggressively investigated by the press. Unless family members can afford to investigate, hire attorneys and sue, at most a one-time small announcement in veiled language is all the public will ever hear of in-jail deaths. The UK Guardian published an op ed this month by the mother of Rafael Solis about his 2009 death in the Webb County Jail for which the family has aggressively sought redress. Here's a notable excerpt:

The truth, we now know from official reports, was that Rafael was put in handcuffs and shackles, held face down against the floor of his cell, stomped on and beaten until he died.

He had two fractured ribs, diaphragm contusions, hemorrhages on his back and chest and bruises and abrasions all over his body. A subsequent report from the Texas Rangers even noted there were cross-patterns on his body that matched the laces from a jailor’s boot and a bruise on his face that matched the pattern of the drain on the floor of his cell.

The jailers claim that Rafael was experiencing alcohol withdrawal, and jailors were just trying help by putting his pants on him so he could be transported to the hospital. But broken ribs aren’t a symptom of alcohol withdrawal. And bruises all over your body, or boot prints on your chest, don’t usually result from trying to get someone get dressed.

According to the coroner, the jailors’ “help” asphyxiated Rafael, and he died.

Yet when a court recently ruled that seven jailors implicated in Rafael’s death should stand trial in a case saying their excessive force killed my son, all seven appealed. Each now claims they have immunity from prosecution because, well, they were just doing their jobs, in their official capacity, at the Webb County jail. The appeal is pending as my family and I continue to wait for justice.

We may never know for sure what “doing their jobs” included, because the jailhouse cameras were – for a reason we still have not been told – not recording on the day Rafael died.

A group called Public Justice is spearheading the litigation. See more background here and here.

Counties seek to reduce risk from law-enforcement shootings, in-custody deaths

My grandfather, W.D. Henson, happened to be the first president of the Texas Association of Counties, so I enjoy checking in on the TAC once in a while, if only out of familial nostalgia, and this morning was rewarded with these timely articles from their County magazine which merit Grits readers' attention:

• Looking through the lens of body-worn cameras
• New law aims to prevent truancy, decriminalize students
• Indigent Defense Update
• Dickens, Lubbock Counties earn Gideon awards

Moreover, check out these breakout sessions at an upcoming Texas Association of Counties risk management conference in Galveston:

Use of Force and Legal Issues
Speakers: Mr. Todd Brown, TI Training LE, LLC
Mr. Jack Ryan, Public Agency Training Council
Moderator: Mr. Darren Jackson, Law Enforcement Consultant, TAC
Community disturbances and allegations of excessive use of force by law enforcement personnel are a constant risk exposure for all law enforcement agencies. Two of the best forms of defense against these allegations include strong policies and training. During this session the participants will learn about available resources to TAC RMP members participating in the Law Enforcement Liability Program to help mitigate the risk exposure. These include the model policy service offered by the Public Agency Training Council and a new Resistance Response Training Simulator.

The Ferguson Effect: Law Enforcement Use of Force in a Post-Ferguson World
Speaker: Mr. Tom Brandt, Director, Fanning Harper Martinson Brandt & Kutchin, P.C.
Moderator: Mr. Stan Lewiecki, Claims Attorney, TAC
On Aug. 9, 2014, a 28-year-old police officer made a decision that would forever change his life and would soon become a watershed event for the entire country – he shot and killed an unarmed black teenager. The officer was Darren Wilson. The teenager was Michael Brown. The town was Ferguson, Mo. This session will explore the climate that surrounds the use of force by law enforcement since that tragic day in Ferguson. This session will focus on practical approaches to defending law enforcement officers who are accused of violating the 4th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Body-Worn Cameras
Speaker: Mr. Jack Ryan, Public Agency Training Council
Moderator: Mr. Darren Jackson, Law Enforcement Consultant, TAC
This training will review the current Texas state law (Senate Bill 158) pertaining to body-worn cameras. The presentation will cover how this law affects policies and procedures, and how custom and practices must follow policy, procedures and training.

Defending In-Custody Deaths – Litigation Under the New Media Microscope
Speakers: Mr. Larry Simmons, Principal, Germer Attorneys at Law
Mr. Stan Lewiecki, Claims Attorney, TAC
Ms. Debbie Bonner, Claims Attorney, TAC
This session aims to educate TAC RMP members on recent developments regarding county jails and jail staff in-custody legal duties, managing in-custody risks and liabilities, media scrutiny and defending in-custody medical care and death claims.  

Handling Our Mentally Ill in Our Texas County Jails
Speakers: Mr. Robert Davis, Attorney, Flowers & Davis, PLLC
Hon. Maxey Cerliano, Gregg County Sheriff
Hon. Dennis Wilson, Limestone County Sheriff
Moderator: Mr. James MacMillan, Law Enforcement Consultant, TAC
The speakers will discuss the issue of handling the mentally ill in our county jails throughout Texas. This session will focus, in part, on the liability and exposure that counties across the state face in dealing with mentally ill offenders. The presenters will also discuss the best methods to try to avoid liability, the present status of the law, the relationships between state and county agencies in dealing with the mentally ill and possible legislative actions during the next legislative session. The presenters will also highlight the need to develop close working relationships between sheriffs, county judges, prosecutors, health care providers, and mental health and mental retardation organizations. The presenters will give a short synopsis of each of these areas and plan to devote half the session to answering attendees’ questions.

Grits can't afford to attend, regrettably, but I wish somebody would cover it. How local governments can mitigate the risk of police shootings, in-custody deaths and violating  the rights of the mentally ill are significant areas of interest for your correspondent. I know the conference is really about mitigating LIABILITY, not necessarily reducing the frequency of those problems. But the interests of insurance carriers coincide with reformers on many of these questions more than is frequently realized.

Grits was also interested to learn about the "model policy service offered by the Public Agency Training Council" for TAC " members participating in the Law Enforcement Liability Program." If the function of the policies are "to help mitigate the risk exposure," then they have an incentive to be promoting best practices to minimize the likelihood of unnecessary use of force. There have been recent suggestions from the Black Lives Matter movement and the Police Executive Research Forum on use of force policy best practices, so the content of such policies is presently disputed territory. It would be a particularly clever and potentially effective twist if reformers were able to enlist insurance carriers and risk managers as allies on that score.

Texas jail deaths continue despite 'zero tolerance'

Our friends at the Texas Jail Project have been busy lately. Last week, Emily Ling and Rebecca Larsen published an op ed in the Houston Chronicle titled, "Stop jail suicides and deaths: Here's how."

They begin by quoting Senate Criminal Justice Committee Chairman John Whitmire from a hearing in September declaring he would "have zero tolerance for jail suicides and deaths."

And yet since the hearing on Sept. 22, there have been at least 13 more deaths in Texas county jails, seven of which are apparent suicides.

In reviewing the recent deaths, several issues stand out.

First, seven of the deaths in recent months have come from just three counties - Webb, McLennan and Fort Bend. The Texas Commission on Jail Standards found McLennan and Fort Bend to be out of compliance with minimum jail standards.

Those findings came only after inspections prompted by people dying. Webb County has yet to be found out-of-compliance with any state standards, despite the fact that three people died in the jail in the month of November alone.

Increased scrutiny has also revealed systemic disregard of safety by jail staff. Last month, following the suicide of Michael Angelo Martinez, three McLennan County correctional officers were arrested for falsifying records after an inspection revealed they tried to hide their failure to make mandated checks on those in their care.

Jailers must be trained and required to prioritize safe and humane care.

Additionally, all but one of the 13 people who died in county jails had not yet been convicted; they were awaiting the disposition of their cases.

On average, more than 60 percent of people in county jails are in a pretrial status, many in custody for court hearings simply because they cannot afford to post bail.

In related news, on Facebook, Emily Ling posted these data for 2015 jail deaths in Texas:

2015 Inmate Deaths in Texas County Jails:

1. Harris County - 16 deaths
2. Travis County - 8 deaths
3. Bexar County - 7 deaths
4. Dallas County - 5 deaths

Brazos, Fort Bend, Liberty, Webb, & Williamson Counties all had 3 people die in each of their jails within this past year.

Bowie, Comal, El Paso, Nueces, Walker, & Wharton Counties all had 2 people die in each of their jails.

And another 28 county jails had at least 1 inmate die in their custody, including the death of ‪#‎SandraBland‬ in Waller County Jail.

In total we know at least 99 people died this past year while in the custody of a Texas county jail. The majority of them had not been convicted of any crime. But there is no guarantee that "innocent until proven guilty" doesn't mean you won't lose your life in our criminal justice system. The Texas Jail Project is working to change that.

Wooginator police shootings database recognized

Kudos to Grits contributing writer Amanda Woog; the Houston Chronicle picked up her story from this post about cities in Texas with the most police shootings, which itself elaborated on this excellent article from the UK Guardian.

Let me repeat for the record that Grits couldn't be more proud of the Wooginator's work on the Texas police shootings database. Because many shootings aren't reported in the press, and some which are reported in the press aren't reported to the Attorney General, we wouldn't have a clear picture of this new data and what it means if Amanda's hadn't picked up the slack.

Going forward, police shootings promise to become an increasingly important flashpoint in local and national criminal-justice politics. The New York Times yesterday ran a story titled, "Police chiefs say scrutiny over videos has radically changed their work"  which related how, "in an age of widely disseminated video footage of fatal police shootings as well as other accusations of abusive police behavior, some chiefs say the heightened level of scrutiny has radically changed their work — making jobs more difficult, far more political and much less secure. Being fired by a mayor on live television now comes with the territory." The article included this quote from the Houston chief:

“Police chiefs definitely have a shorter shelf life post-Ferguson, and they are more scrutinized and criticized for things they weren’t held responsible for before,” said Charles McClelland, Houston’s police chief, who said he agreed with the change in focus. “Pre-Ferguson, you were held responsible only for the crime rate — now it is community relations. One egregious act of misconduct by a police officer can get a police chief fired. It wasn’t like that before.”

Closer tracking of police shootings - including some which no one outside of the involved parties knew occurred before new Lege-mandated reporting began in September - adds data to anecdote in these debates. IMO it's a meaningful and significant contribution. Great job, Amanda.

Three Texas counties make the list of America's deadliest for police killings

Texas has the dubious distinction of being the second-most represented state (after California) on the Guardian’s list of “America’s deadliest counties for police killings this year.” The three Texas counties that made the 14-county list of counties with 10 or more deaths are Dallas County (.5 deaths per 100,000 residents), Tarrant County (.5) and Harris County (.4).

These three counties also account for just less than half of the officer-involved shootings I’ve been tracking since the new reporting law went live in September. Since reporting began, 43 incidents have been reported, with ten of those out of Harris County, six out of Dallas County and three out of Tarrant County. As a point of comparison, I looked at the list of the most dangerous cities in Texas, which was compiled from the FBI’s 2013 Uniform Crime Reports. Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land (which Harris County is part of) comes in at number 3 on that list, and Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (which Dallas and Tarrant Counties are part of) is down at number 17.

The most dangerous city in Texas, Odessa, has not reported a single officer-involved shooting since September. But this might be because they’re not complying with the new law. When I recently compared the Guardian and Washington Post databases of people killed by the police with the reports posted on the Office of the Attorney General’s website, the one death in Texas in October that was not reported to the OAG happened in West Odessa: police there shot and killed Robert Humberto Medellin after he allegedly charged at them with a knife.

Which brings me to a point I’ve made here before: law enforcement needs to comply with the law! In the coming months, I hope to start looking at the counties and departments with the most officer-involved shootings and asking how to account for differences between jurisdictions. But those comparisons will be only as reliable as the information they’re based on.

MORE (12/8): From the Houston Chronicle, which cites to this post as its source.

Dead in Jail: A Texas Story

When Sandra Bland died this summer in the Waller County Jail, generating international outrage at her unnecessary arrest and the failures of jailers to monitor properly for suicide, the main thing that surprised Grits was that the media and public paid attention, for once. After all, if you watch the local press, folks die needlessly all the time in Texas jails. For example, just recently I've noticed these headlines:

• Inmate dies in West Texas jail
• Inmate dies in Central Texas jail, Texas Rangers investigating
• Man dies days after hanging self in Travis County jail

And then there's this case in Waco where three jailers at a privately run county facility have been charged with evidence tampering after they changed records to make it appear they'd conducted suicide checks which had never been performed.  Reported the Waco Tribune-Herald (Nov. 13):

Three correctional officers at the Jack Harwell Detention Center were arrested Thursday after allegedly changing documents to make it appear they conducted headcounts following the investigation of a suicide that occurred in the jail.

Michael Crittenden, 24; Milton Walker, 33; and Christopher Simpson, 24, were each arrested on a charge of tampering with government documents, legal documents filed in the case show.

All three are employees of LaSalle Corrections, which operates the Harwell Center.

Surveillance video showed that Crittenden, Walker and Simpson all lied about conducting headcounts in N-Wing in the early morning hours of Nov. 1, according to affidavits filed in the case.

So, if you watch, folks are dying in Texas' jails under questionable circumstances with regularity and for the most part, it seldom makes more than a blip on the local news.

By contrast, on Sunday, the Houston Chronicle published an investigative feature detailing deaths at the states largest county jail (and, for that matter, its largest mental health facility), many of which may be attributed to inadequate health care:

The Department of Justice targeted inadequate medical care at the jail in a 2009 report, finding that poor care and failures by jail medical staff to treat chronic conditions, including diabetes, tuberculosis and mental illness, had been factors in 20 deaths.

Six years later, a Houston Chronicle investigation has found that serious issues remain related to inmate care. Despite reforms in staffing and procedures that have improved medical care in key areas, the Justice Department continues to focus on shortfalls in mental health treatment and on jailers' use of force against disruptive prisoners, according to John Odam, general counsel for the Harris County attorney.

Moreover:

Records show at least 75 inmates have died in jail custody since the Justice Department report, about three-quarters of whom were awaiting adjudication. The number of deaths decreased about 11 percent during [former Sheriff Adrian] Garcia's administration compared to the last five years under Garcia's predecessor, Tommy Thomas.

Most of the deaths since 2009 were attributed to natural causes. Ten died of hepatitis B or C. Ten were suicides. Eight had HIV or AIDS. Five died from the deadly "superbug" staph infection MRSA. Three were ruled homicides.

The Chronicle identified at least 19 cases in which inmates died of illnesses that were either treatable or preventable, or in which delays in care, or staff misconduct, could have played a role in their deaths.

Also:

Over the past nine months, the Chronicle also reviewed more than 1,000 disciplinary reports provided by the Sheriff's Office and found 35 failures to complete cell checks, sometimes for inmates in solitary confinement. Additionally, jailers were disciplined more than 120 times for misconduct involving abuse of authority or misuse of force since 2009, including 13 instances in which jailers failed to seek medical attention for inmates.

Tuberculosis, in particular, is a chronic problem:

"For sure I wouldn't want to be in that jail, because I have major concerns about how they are doing TB skin tests," said professor Edward A. Graviss, director of the molecular tuberculosis laboratory at the Methodist Hospital Research Institute. "It's like being in a Third World country; you have to assume everyone is infected with TB. I would screen them a little bit differently, but again, it's your tax dollars at work. Do you screen them faster, or do you put fewer people in jail?"

Deaths at smaller jails may be treated as isolated incidents, though that's really a misnomer when the same things happen at jail after state-regulated jail. But in enormous Harris County, the high volume makes patterns more easily identifiable.

The Chronicle reported that, in January, the Texas Senate Criminal Justice Committee will take a deeper dive into some of these issues in an interim hearing. So these topics will get their turn in the sun next year, and likely at the 85th Legislature in 2017.

RELATED: Dozens of inmates die in Texas jails each year.

Compiling new data on Texas police shootings

This year, Texas became among the only states to systematically track peace officer-involved shootings, with agencies filling out a one-page report about each one and sending them to the state Attorney General for publication on the web. (See prior Grits coverage.)

Now, that information has been made available via a new online spreadsheet compiled by Amanda Woog, a super-smart young attorney who clerked for Judge Cheryl Johnson at the Court of Criminal Appeals before working as a policy analyst for the Texas House Criminal Jurisprudence Committee, where Grits first met her this spring. This fall, she took a post as a postdoctoral fellow at the UT-Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis; this database represents her first project in that new role.

Ms. Woog graciously agreed to sit down for a podcast to discuss in detail what information is included in these new reports and the other source she's drawn upon for the database, as well as how this information might influence public discussions surrounding police shootings. (See a brief analysis she prepared regarding the new law and its implementation.)

Some of the incidents Woog catalogs have never been publicly reported in the media. And even though the new statute doesn't require departments to report either the name of the officer of the person he or she shot, in many cases she has been able to find that information from other sources. So she's adding a lot of value here for journalists and other researchers. You can listen to our conversation here:

Or else find a transcript of our discussion appended below the jump.