Forensic fails, and other stories

As your correspondent prepares for today's Exoneration Commission hearing, here are a number of items which likely won't make it into individual blog posts but which merit Grits readers' attention:

No clear way to track down junky bite-mark cases
The Dallas News has a high-powered team - Brandi Grissom and Jennifer Emily - covering the Steven Chaney bite mark case and the Forensic Science Commission review of bite mark cases. They reported Monday that "Tracking down dozens — maybe hundreds — of other potentially innocent victims of junk science won’t be ... easy. There is no central repository of cases in which bite-mark testimony was key. There’s no database of dentists who testified about bite marks. And the cases are mostly decades old, and experts, defense lawyers and prosecutors have moved on or died."

Bad Ballistics?
The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals ordered an examination into overstated ballistics testimony from an expert in Arthur Brown, Jr.'s 22-year old capital murder trial, in which he was prosecuted along with an already-executed accomplice for a quadruple killing in a botched drug transaction. Reported the Houston Chronicle:

Brown was scheduled for execution in October 2013 but received a stay to allow for forensic testing of evidence. An accomplice, Marion Dudley, 33, was executed in 2006.

On Wednesday, the appeals court judges acted on Brown's November 2014 appeal in which he asserted that Houston Police Department ballistics expert C.E. Anderson "testified falsely or in a materially misleading manner" in his case. Judges held that the claim met state standards warranting review.

See the court's order.

Paging Antonin Scalia: On the right to confront the boss of your accuser
The Court of Criminal Appeals also ruled that the requirements of the Sixth Amendment's "Confrontation Clause" may be met for "batch DNA testing" by a crime lab supervisor testifying based on computer printouts instead of the lab workers who conducted the analysis. Judge David Newell is of course correct that neither the CCA nor SCOTUS have ever "squarely answered this question." SCOTUS said that sworn affidavits are insufficient, but not whether a supervisor can testify based on the work of her subordinates. But one certainly wonders what Antonin Scalia might say about it. It's hard for this non-attorney to understand why relying on data generated by non-testifying lab analysts is different from relying on an affidavit to which they did not testify.

Are black-box calculations problematic for DNA mixtures?
Next year, the Department of Public Safety and most other Texas labs will shift to "probabilistic genotyping" to analyze DNA mixture evidence, a method which supposedly is superior even to the adjusted calculations which are currently available. However, that method relies on proprietary programs with black-box systems for which the makers will not release their code, similar to the situation surrounding proprietary breathalyzer algorithms which accuse defendants based on computer code which their attorneys and the court cannot see nor evaluate. See good discussions of the topic from Slate and Ars Technica. Moreover, as Grits reported earlier, because of the nature of the calculations, results based on probabilistic genotyping will be different every time - they're not replicable, in addition to not being transparent. So, while the fact that the DWI equipment is still in use makes me think Texas courts would ultimately find a way to allow this sort of proprietary opacity, Grits continues to wonder if probabilistic genotyping is the best tool for the job when it comes to providing courtroom testimony, given that there are other methods available where the calculations are both transparent and replicable.

Finding housing with a felony record
There's a good article in the Houston Chronicle on the struggles poor people have renting an apartment with a felony record. Houston is closing a dangerous low-income apartment run by a slumlord who they've sued over "atrocious living conditions." Reporter Emma Henchliffe decided to pay attention to what happened to the ousted tenants, finding that the ones with a felony record had a terrible time locating new places that would take them. "Individual owners have the right to accept and reject applications as they choose, but the lack of alternatives for tenants who do not meet owners' standards causes many former offenders to end up at places like Crestmont," she wrote. "Some apartments where [one tenant] applied took her application fee and never got back to her." When you consider the volume of felons Texas produces - we release more than 70,000 prisoners from TDCJ every year - this is a much more important issue than one would think from the amount of coverage it receives. I was glad to see this article.

No surprise: 'Stingrays' really do intercept content
Turns out, contrary to public assertions by law enforcement, Stingrays are indeed able to intercept calls as well as cell-phone metadata, it's now been proven. This was obvious to anyone who thought about it: The devices trick your phone into routing through a fake cell phone tower; clearly they were intercepting the whole call, not just metadata. And experts have been telling us this for a while. Still, nice to see it confirmed, it's one less thing to argue about.

NOTE: A brief item about a murder case in Denton was removed from this roundup after a commenter informed me that the underlying news article improperly attributed a court action to DNA mixture protocols when the real issue was unrelated. Grits apologizes for the error and will perhaps revisit the topic when more accurate information is available.

Huge savings from supportive housing for chronic homeless

Grits was interested to see a report out of California about a supportive housing program created for the 30 most expensive, chronic homeless people in San Diego, which reportedly has about 9,800 homeless folks citywide. What struck me is how a) a small number of homeless people account for a disproportionate share of cost to the taxpayers, and b) targeting services to a relatively small number of people resulted in significant savings. Reported the local NBC affiliate:

The initiative housed 30 homeless people in San Diego who were estimated to be costing taxpayers over $11 million in public resources, according to data from the project.

The participants on average absorbed nearly $318,000 before entering the program, estimated in emergency room visits, ambulance transports, in-patient medical stays, arrests and jail days. Those who enrolled were often disabled and continuously homeless for over a year.

After almost a year of being in the program, analysts estimated that the cost of supporting the average participant was about $97,400.

Overall, the project resulted in a nearly 70 percent reduction in costs to taxpayers, the analysts said.

Not every homeless person needs long-term supportive housing. Most homelessness is temporary and transitional, so for them, short-term supports are adequate. But for a small number of chronic homeless - particularly frequent flyers in local jails who may be arrested dozens of times on petty charges - the cost-benefit analysis of business as usual often reaches absurdist proportions.

The problem with such programs is that the costs of homelessness are spread out among many entities - the city, county, state, Medicaid, local hospitals, etc. - and not all those will pay into supportive housing. So the societal cost is tremendous but there is a free-rider problem among institutions that would see costs reduced. On paper, taxpayers overall benefit tremendously. But in practice, when one arm of government pays the freight, the savings are so spread out that that entity may not see a reduction in their own bottom line.

That's why I think it's smart to target a handful of the most expensive, chronic homeless folks for a pilot, identifying people for whom the economics of supportive housing come out positive even for the government entity ponying up the bucks. This is not a problem which may be resolved with a snap of a finger. I'd like to see more Texas cities and counties take on this topic in the same way San Diego did: Start small, demonstrate the concept, and build on success. (Fort Worth has begun to embrace supportive housing, but in Texas they're an outlier.) Often government does nothing on homelessness - or relegates the issue to law enforcement - because doing everything needed would be so expensive that policymakers become paralyzed. In that context, chipping away at the issue around the edges is preferable to throwing up one's hands and simply declaring nothing can be done, or worse, criminalizing homelessness instead of focusing on reducing it.

A tale of two cities' reaction to homelessness

When it comes to homelessness, the public and policymakers must pick their poison: No matter what is done, somebody is going to complain. A pair of stories caught my eye portraying homeless problems in Dallas and San Francisco, respectively. (The last time I was in SF a few years back they had a tremendous homelessness problem; I can recall literally having to step over folks walking down the sidewalk, along with all the other passersby.)

In Dallas, reports a local TV station, "Main Street Gardens Park in downtown Dallas has become a bit of a homeless haven during the overnight hours.  Residents heading to the park for an early morning dog walk are met by homeless people sleeping on benches, playground equipment, or whatever else may be in the park." The response to the story: "residents should start to see an increase in police presence around Main Street Gardens park almost immediately." Even in Big D, though, officials realize there's a limit to how effective a law eforcement response can be (particularly when the jail is already expensive and full):

For Dallas police, it's not just about enforcing the law anymore-- it's about getting the homeless in downtown Dallas the help they really need, so they won't feel they have to sleep in the park.

"We realize that just writing them tickets for just sleeping in pubic is not the answer," said Janse.

So now, officers will work with Crisis Intervention personnel. They'll even take take those found sleeping in public to shelters like The Bridge in downtown Dallas. 

Jay Dunn, Managing Director of The Bridge said the shelter has 300 beds for adults, and once those beds are filled, the facility has buses to transport people to other shelters in the Dallas area that have room. He said there are some homeless people they have had trouble engaging, but they are working to reach out to the homeless in the downtown area each day.

Residents who live near Main Street Gardens park say they just hope to see results soon, before the park's new tenants start driving folks away.

So the problem is homeless people laying around in public with not enough shelters to house them without busing them off somewhere else, which in any event many resist. For that matter, some people understandably prefer fending for themselves on the streets to a homeless shelter with hundreds of others. A subset of homeless folks, many suffering from severe mental illnesses, cycle in and out of the jail near constantly - sometimes dozens of times a year. (The slang term for such folks in the Harris County Jail, which is today the largest mental health facility in Texas, is "frequent flyers.") So what's the longer term solution?

The most effective response I've heard of - something being tried out in Fort Worth, actually - is supportive long-term housing for the chronically homeless. But somebody's inevitably going to complain about that, too. There's a story out of San Francisco titled "Supportive housing: Cure for homelessness or community burden," where neighborhood residents also have complaints about that program. Neighborhood activists complain bitterly when such facilities are opened in their area. However, upon implementing its supportive housing program, "In its first year and a half, the number of homeless in San Francisco dropped by 28%."

One of the SF program critics declared: "It's a containment zone, it's absolutely a containment zone for crime and for the poor." Continued Mark Ellinger, "They're all containment zones, each one of these master lease hotels. They all have huge, huge crack problems. It's not like nobody knows about it - of course the city knows about it. Is there anything done about it to change it, to improve the situation? No, never. Never.  Because it's contained."

Even granting all the speakers' presumptions about what's going on behind closed doors, isn't "contained" better than not contained? Would you rather have the problem of the Dallas neighbors, with homeless folks laying around the local park, or that described in San Francisco where the problem is "contained" through supportive housing? Containment may be the best we get on homelessness: It's not like there's an obvious solution to hand.

So the question becomes: Do cities want to manage the problem as a criminal justice issue, with homeless people either outdoors in the street or locked up the jail, or are urban neighborhoods better off when the homeless have a place to go? It may not be great for property values to have low-or-no rent housing on your block, but isn't that better than people lying on sidewalks and park benches? Supportive housing keeps those it serves off the street at night, as well as creating one-stop-shopping venues to provide mental-health, addiction, employment and other services to help folks get back on their feet. It's expensive, but so is dispatching police, taking people to jail, treating mental illness through the justice system, trying to process Class C tickets on people with no address, or busing people to far away shelters.

These are difficult problems, with every "solution" bringing its own, new complaints. But the whole "trail 'em, nail 'em and jail 'em" approach is particularly ill-suited to the situation, and to me it makes a lot more sense, whenever possible, to address homelessness with homes instead of cops.

NIMBYism biggest barrier to supportive housing for homeless, mentally ill

This blog frequently laments the extent to which the justice system has become the primary delivery vehicle for mental health services, so I was interested to see a couple of stories out of the Austin Statesman focused on community-based solutions. "Helping the homeless on their own terms" details the activities of a nonprofit doing field work and case management among the mentally-ill homeless, while another story describes the dearth of supportive housing options to keep such folks from cycling in and out of jail.

Supportive housing — low-income housing that offers social services to its residents — is crucial for keeping people off the streets, said Walter Moreau , executive director of Foundation Communities, a nonprofit agency that provides low-cost housing to needy people.

Those services can include on-site programs such as money management classes and social workers to connect people to Social Security, food stamps and other public benefits.

"You need a variety of ways to help people where they're at," Moreau said.

Advocates for homeless people say Austin doesn't have nearly enough supportive housing units.

According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development , Travis County has 540 permanent supportive housing beds. The Corporation for Supportive Housing recently concluded that Austin needs about 1,900 more such units.

Part of the reason for the dearth of supportive housing is a persistent, NIMBY-driven backlash against any new facility aimed at this population - an incredibly short-sighted position considering the lack of housing makes it more likely they'll commit new crimes. Describing opposition to supportive housing for the homeless in Dallas' Lake Highlands neighborhood, the Dallas News reported:

It has been difficult to find neighborhood support for this type of housing, even beyond Lake Highlands and north Oak Cliff. Deep Ellum residents objected to a proposal to build 100 units there. Plans for similar housing have fallen through in South Dallas, the Cedars and at another Lake Highlands site. Meanwhile, several more projects are in the pipeline.

Advocates for the housing say that resident opposition is making it difficult to achieve the City Council-approved goal of creating 700 units of permanent supportive housing by 2014. Experts say that this type of housing, which includes treatment services, is key to ending chronic homelessness. 

Relatedly, see this sadly typical story out of Mesquite of a family struggling with the behavior of a mentally ill teen. He's been in and out of jail and his family is at their wits end, fearing he'll end up dead or in prison. According to the Dallas News:

The Mesquite couple's ordeal illustrates the complications that can surface for families trying to care for a loved one with serious mental illnesses: There's not enough treatment available, the person with the illness often rejects help, and problems boil to a crisis point – often leading back to shelters or jail.

"The system to help these kids stinks to high heaven because there is none," Susan Koshar said.

Officials who work in the criminal justice system say they see people like Brown all the time. And there aren't enough services to help them, said Ron Stretcher, director of Dallas County's criminal justice department. Texas ranks 48th in the nation in per capita spending on mental health, according to a Mental Health America survey.

"In Texas, we just don't provide for this population," Stretcher said. "There's nothing out there."

If the public want the City to address homelessness, mental illness and petty crime, they must be willing to provide community-based services in addition to only jails. Supportive housing for the most resource-intensive people - particularly those who are essentially "frequent flyers' at the county jail - is among the most promising approaches toward reducing crime among this group, but those services must actually be physically delivered somewhere.

Housing tax credits support landlords that discriminate against ex-inmates

State Rep. Harold Dutton relayed the story on Wednesday of an 80 year old man in his district who had committed a violent offense 50 years ago and was recently released after a long sentence. Now, as an elderly person, the fellow can't find housing because of his prior conviction. "I don't know if they think he's going to play loud music or throw big parties," said Dutton, but the man couldn't find a private apartment complex that would rent to him.

The House Corrections Committee heard related testimony that the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs does not prevent discrimination against felons by entities receiving affordable housing tax credits, and doesn't even track the issue. All their programs are strictly income based, said Kate Moore from TDHCA. What's more, there are 400 local public housing authorities with no uniform standards or screening for criminal backgrounds among them. Nationally, said Moore, one in five ex-inmates becomes homeless at some point following their release, often crashing with friends and family.

Committee members questioned whether tax-credit recipients could/should be required by agency rule or statute to rent to ex-offenders, and I wouldn't be surprised to see legislation along those lines filed in the 82nd session.