Austin should freeze police hiring until pension problem resolved

Since the local press has ignored the topic, let's delve a bit deeper into the pension crisis at the Austin Police Department. As Grits reported yesterday, an audit released in July found that the city will never cover its police pension liabilities at current contribution rates.

Bizarrely, in response to this news, some at city hall have claimed they need to hire MORE police officers with exorbitant pension promises so they can pay for the retiring officers. This argument fundamentally misunderstands how pensions work, imagining the fund as some sort of Ponzi scheme. It is not. Instead, employees and employers make contributions for each officer into a long-term investment fund. More officers, the greater the required contributions. Moreover, Austin officers contribute far less than the city. So every new officer increases the city's cost and liability substantially (they become 100% vested after just ten years).

The confusion perhaps is somewhat understandable. Social Security works that way: Money which people pay into Social Security today is directly used to cover benefits for current retirees. There's no long-term investment fund tied to individuals' contributions. Pension benefits, by contrast, are paid from the investment fund, not from current employee contributions.

I don't know who's spreading this misinformation at city hall, but hiring more officers when the city can't afford pension costs for the current ones amounts to dousing a fire by tossing kindling on top. Will Rogers' advice Grits quoted yesterday remains apropos: "When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

The largest cohort of former police officers receiving pension benefits are under 60 years old, with an average annual benefit of more than $70,000! By contrast, retired Austin officers in their 80s receive about $47k per year. (All this on top of social security, any military benefits, etc..)

At present, Austin has 345 former officers in their 50s drawing more than 70k per year in benefits each, and more are added to their number all the time. (Median income in this city is only $63k!*) So things are about to get very expensive, very quickly. It's not sustainable to add more officers until that problem is fixed.

Calendar year 2018 was when the Austin police pension went from a status of problematic-but-salvageable to essentially broken. Unfunded liabilities ballooned from $415.5 million to $671 million. Exacerbating the problem, the pension fund is carrying about $89 million in losses on its books that will eventually require a downward adjustment.

Those combined trends are why actuaries say APD's pension plan will never cover liabilities at current contribution levels.

And let me say it first: The city can't and shouldn't cover all of the shortfall. City Council should open the contract back up and adjust these lavish commitments downward, or else have police officers themselves contribute more.

One final thought: Grits suspects there's an untold story behind the $89 million in un-recognized losses that deserves additional scrutiny, assuming any local reporters ever discover the story. According to the table in this 2017 MarketWatch story, Austin's police pension fund had 40% of its investments in "non-traditional" asset classes, which is the category that got the Dallas police fund in trouble. Are those the investments that are going south?

Further, a few years ago, the Statesman ran a story about the fund investing in several projects brought to them by two board members who were marketing themselves as consultants to companies seeking pension investments. They disclosed the relationships and abstained from voting, but the board had no rules barring such conflicts of interest and board members defended the practice.

Between the fund making relatively large investments in non-traditional assets, board members out hawking themselves to potential investment clients, and $89 million in un-recognized losses sitting on the books, my Spidey-sense tells me there may be a significant story behind how the fund went from (ultimately) solvent to not in calendar-year 2018.

*Underlying link changed after publication, amount corrected upward from $55k to reflect most recent available Census Bureau data.

Austin police pension obligations will swamp city budget if City Council doesn't change course

One of the most important, least-covered stories in the Texas criminal-justice arena must be the failure of Texas municipalities to fund police-officer pensions. For the most part, the issue only indirectly affects #cjreform efforts, so Grits has mostly discussed the topic as an aside, the way one remarks on a multi-car auto wreck occurring on the other side of the highway as one drives by.

But one place where the issue does come up is police staffing. In Austin this year, the city manager has requested thirty (30) new officers for Austin PD.

So far, the decision to hire new officers has been de-coupled from assessments of the city's obligations to pay officers' pensions when they retire. An audit report which came out last month shows why that must change.

Austin under-funds police officer retirement to such a degree, according to the report, that current contribution levels simply "are not sufficient to support the benefit structure of the System." Indeed, here's an eye-popping auditor's observation: "The City’s current contribution rate of 21.313% is not expected to amortize the unfunded liability over any amortization period."

In other words, at current contribution rates, the City will never cover its police pension costs. If the contribution rate was raised from 21.313% to 37.302%, the fund could become solvent 20 years from now! Make the contribution 29.5%, and it would take 40 years to set the books straight.

These are big, expensive, long-term problems. Austin cannot afford to pay for its police force right now, or at least they're not presently paying sufficient contributions into their pensions. And with new Legislature-dictated caps on how much cities can raise taxes, it's difficult to imagine how the problem can be fixed. Indeed, in this budget cycle, it cannot be.

So what can Austin do? Grits thinks of Will Rogers' excellent advice: "If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging."

Adding 30 new staff positions to the force when the city cannot pay for the ones it already employs makes no sense. Instead, City Council should be looking for ways to offload non-crime-related duties performed by police to other, more effective and less expensive staff.

They have just such an opportunity on the mental-health front. The Meadows Foundation has proposed an approach to mental-health first response that would put medical personnel on the front lines instead of armed police officers. A pilot program in Dallas implementing the idea found large reductions in arrests and use of force.

The Austin City Council should divert the resources proposed for those 30 new officers to fund a similar program in Austin.

Anyway, as a practical matter, it's doubtful Austin PD can fill 30 new positions, even if they are included in the budget. They are 102 officers short right now, a number which will grow to 125 by the end of the year due to normal retirement rates. Taking into account predictable attrition at the police academy (an average of 31% of recruits dropped out of the last five classes), plus the schedule supplied to the City Council for more recruit classes, it's pretty easy to calculate that APD will still have 75 vacancies, give or take, when budget season rolls around in 2020.

In other words, whether or not the City Council approve 30 new officers, the money will have no impact on staffing in the coming fiscal year.

By contrast, funding the mental-health crisis-intervention proposal with that money would reduce the demand for officers at the margins and avoid worsening the police-pension problem. That's definitely the smarter, and more fiscally responsible, approach.

No MSM coverage of this pension report so far, but IMO it's quite a big deal; it came out while Grits was on vacation last month. Long-time readers will recall that Ron DeLord, founder of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas and the lead negotiator of Austin's police contract, predicted in a Reasonably Suspicious podcast interview that cities would eventually reduce these lavish pension benefits. He argued that unions must prepare for the coming retrenchment. Those observations seem more prescient than ever, after reading this report.

Interview: Ron DeLord on the Ferguson Effect, police pensions, and why he considers Saul Alinsky a major influence

Recently, Grits interviewed Ron DeLord, the founder of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas and a lion of the Texas police union movement. An excerpt from our conversation (about pensions) was included in the latest Reasonably Suspicious podcast, but I wanted to post the full interview here.

We discussed whether the "Ferguson Effect" really exists, the ongoing fiscal crisis surrounding police pensions, and DeLord's lifelong promotion of the teachings of Saul Alinsky, whose philosophies and tactics have overtly animated his writing and political strategies for decades. Give it a listen:


Find a transcript of our conversation below the jump.

Reasonably Suspicious Podcast: Why Mein Kampf is okay but The Color Purple is banned at TDCJ

Check out the January edition of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast, covering Texas criminal justice policy and politics. You can listen to the latest episode here, or subscribe on iTunes, Google Play, YouTube, or SoundCloud.

If you haven't subscribed yet, take a moment to do so now to make sure you won't miss an episode. Topics this month include:

Top Stories

• Banned books in TDCJ (featuring Lauren McGaughy): Why Mein Kampf is okay but The Color Purple is banned.
• Alleged interference at State Counsel for Offenders: Did TDCJ board dictate defense strategies?

Interview

• Ron DeLord, founder of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas on police pensions, predicts defined benefit pensions for police will vanish within the next couple of decades.

Errors and Updates

• Harris County magistrate judges sanctioned for bail SNAFU
• Austin police union declines to re-enter negotiations after contract rejected

Interview

• Richard Whitaker: Father of a death row inmate, who is also one of his victims, asks the governor, parole board to spare his son's life.

The Last Hurrah

• Latest Dallas exonerations based on prosecutor misconduct
• Quick results from drug-law change in Oklahoma
• Twin Peaks biker cases soon headed to trial

Find a transcript of the podcast 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

Police accountability bills bottled up by House leadership, and other stories

Here are a few odds and ends that merit Grits readers attention while mine is focused elsewhere:

Tragic shooting colors legislative debates
A Balch Springs cop who shot a fleeing 15-year old with a rifle has been fired from his job and faces murder charges. See the Dallas Morning News coverage. This news spurred the black caucus in the Texas Legislature to issue a stern complaint that none of the important police accountability legislation proposed this session has received a vote on the House floor. Their frustration surely contributed in part to the death of HB 2050, which expanded secrecy provisions related to police misconduct cases.

Sandra Bland Act gutted in senate
The Senate Criminal Justice Committee this week passed out a radically stripped down version of the Sandra Bland Act, but quite frankly it's hard to get too excited about the minimalist items left in the bill. Wrote the Texas Tribune's Jonathan Silver:

Whitmire's version most notably removes language that would ban arresting people for offenses that generally only have fines as a punishment. Earlier versions of the bill also tried to make it easier for nonviolent people in jail to receive personal bonds. Whitmire said fine-only offenses would be addressed in a separate bill, as the Sandra Bland Act is "primarily a mental health, accountability" bill.

The problem with that bit of reportage is that the "separate bill" was SB 271, which had earlier that day appeared on the same agenda with the Sandra Bland Act. But Chairman Whitmire pulled that bill off the agenda hours before the hearing, much to the consternation of the bill author and supporters who believed they had sufficient bipartisan support to pass it out of committee. So Whitmire was pledging to address a problem in a bill which he had already killed just hours before. SB 271's companion, HB 574, is in the Calendars Committee and has yet to be posted for a floor vote. Unless leadership adds the bill to a Major State calendar, it's probably too late for it to be heard.

Remembering (the real) Sandra Bland
Meanwhile, as Grits has pointed out before, it's a bit anomalous to pass a "mental health accountability" bill in response to the Sandra Bland story because she was not, in fact, mentally ill.

Pensions and bill killing
Governing magazine has a nice feature on Houston billionaire John Arnold's efforts to reform public-employee pension plans. Meanwhile, the House debate over Houston pensions ramps up Monday, and every minute it goes on, legislation on the other side of that bill on the calendar dies. The lower chamber, which yesterday ended their workday at 3 p.m., has mapped out a leisurely, care-free stroll toward the Thursday deadline for the House to consider House Bills, not the frenzied pace of work one would expect as hundreds of bills approach a very final deadline. At this point, the House doesn't seem to have much appetite for passing any more legislation and everybody just seems to want it to be over.

Who can settle Harris County bail litigation?
A newly elected Democratic District Judge in Houston has asked the commissioners court whether he can settle with plaintiffs in civil rights litigation against the county's money-based bail system. The commissioners courrt replied that they don't control whether or not he settles, but his lawyer was appointed from the county attorney's office and told the judge she could not settle without permission from higher ups. It's an interesting question: If individual judges start to settle, how long can the county's oppositional approach remain viable?

Of trees, ropes, race, judges and capital punishment
A decidedly un-woke judge faces retraining for lynching suggestion.

Coda to Willingham saga: Did prosecutor commit misconduct?
Jordan Smith at the Intercept has a story from a trial in Corsicana to determine whether the prosecutor in the Todd Willingham case engaged in misconduct when he concealed a deal with a jailhouse snitch who testified against the defendant.

Tyler mayor to run B&B for racially profiled black men, and other stories

Blogging was slow last week but that doesn't mean there weren't quite a few items in the news which merited Grits readers' attention. Here are a few of them:

Medical neglect at TDCJ espied after prisoner death

Alton Rogers died of head trauma in an Amarillo prison unit about a year ago after his cellmate slammed his head into the concrete. But autopsy results and medical records revealed he was extremely malnourished and significant medical problems had long been neglected by TDCJ which also contributed to his death. The Intercept has excellent coverage of this story. 

Tyler mayor to run B&B for racially profiled black men

Heisman trophy winning running back Ricky Williams was stopped by cops in my hometown of Tyler earlier this month and questioned in an exchange caught on police dashcam. He'd been taking a walk around his hotel, where he was staying in order to attend an awards dinner for Earl Campbell's foundation, when a homeowner called the cops to report a black man had been standing near his back fence. In Tyler, this apparently will get three cops sent to the scene ASAP. Two of the officers recognized Williams before they stopped him. But the third did not and began to aggressively question him, even lying to him to try to get him to confess to a crime. He told Williams he knew "more than you think I know," including that Williams had been in a neighbor's backyard, not just walking past it. Williams didn't bite, but he did question whether this was a racially motivated stop. This spurred the other two officers, who by this time probably knew the encounter was about to end up online, to interject that this is how they'd treat anyone in this circumstance and try to defuse the situation. Later, Tyler's mayor Martin Hines reached out to the former Miami Dolphns star, offering to let Williams stay in his personal family home the next time he's in town. (“I even invited him to stay with my family when he’s here. We have a guest room he’s welcome to.”) Grits imagines the mayor similarly extends this offer to all black men in Tyler who feel they've been racially profiled by police, don't you think? No chance Williams only got that offer from a starstruck mayor because he's a celebrity and a famous Texas football player. Nah! That can't be it.

Expunge this

For those in and around Austin, the UT law school's Expunction Project will hold a couple of intake sessions next month. Go here for more information.

Austin gets new police monitor

I don't know the new Austin Police Monitor, but the last one, Margo Frasier, was the best we ever had. She made the most of what, on paper and in practice, is a weak and ineffectual office. But it possesses a bully-pulpit function that only works if the Monitor uses it. She did. Will her successor? That's the question lingering in my mind. We'll know soon enough.

Dallas pension fight further devolves

Talks over a pension deal in Dallas have completely broken down and the city may soon pull out of the pension fund and create a new one going forward. Police unions' scorched earth tactics probably will preclude additional negotiations (anybody who questions their demand for a bailout is immediately dubbed a liar, said to have "conned" officers, accused of hating the retirees, etc.), setting the stage for years of litigation that's in the best interest neither of taxpayers nor retirees. The likelihood that police pensions drive the state's second largest city into bankruptcy increased this week.

'New breed of prosecutors'

Freshly minted DAs in Austin and Houston were among those profiled in the Marshall Project item about reformer prosecutors elected on the same day as Donald Trump. I'm kind of surprised they didn't mention Nueces County, which was truly a race decided on reform issues. In Harris, the flip was more rooted in partisan shifts that also impacted the judiciary and other countywide offices.

Death decline

This item from Houstonia magazine credits better-quality lawyering for Texas having the lowest number of executions last year in two decades. And that's certainly part of it. Unmentioned, though, was a change in the law from 2015 which required prosecutors to notify the defense when they request an execution date from a judge. This additional notice has given the defense heretofore unavailable opportunities to challenge execution dates at the time they're requested, rather than find out later only when the judge issues an order based on an ex parte request. Some of those whose dates were delayed will still eventually be executed, but the change prevents some of the last-minute wrangling and postponements that historically surround such events, While the effect likely is short-term, that new law probably explains the dip in executions in 2016 better than broader macro factors like attorney quality.

Harris DA accused of withholding snitch deal, conflicting testimony

Attorneys from Baker Botts have alleged in filings to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals that Harris County prosecutors engaged in misconduct in a capital murder case, failing to disclose that a key witness "had provided two separate and conflicting statements to police," as well as failing to "disclose a deal not to prosecute another prosecution witness in exchange for his testimony."

Reduce drug penalties, expand treatment, opportunities for addicts

Treatment, not incarceration, is key to reducing drug-related crime, wrote the executive director of Austin Recovery in a column calling for reducing penalties for low-level drug possession from a state-jail felony to a misdemeanor. "Lowering penalties for minor possession can save Texas more than $60 million – funds that can be used to decrease the waiting list for treatment and overdose prevention. Decreased penalties also mean that people with addiction still have the opportunities to achieve their full potential," she concluded.

Cowtown cop's disciplinary file secret

See an update from AP on the episode out of Fort Worth in which an officer arrested a black mother and daughter while verbally defending the white man who had allegedly assaulted her son. The story noted that disciplinary records for past incidents involving the officer are secret unless they resulted in a firing or suspension. That's a problem not just for public accountability but also for prosecutors. In cities which have adopted the state police and fire civil service code, prosecutors similarly lack access to "impeachment" information in disciplinary files of officers they put on the stand as witnesses, although they have a duty under the Michael Morton Act to disclose such information. The Legislature needs to plug this gap in the MMA, which puts prosecutors in a particularly rough spot.

Crime by the numbers

Vox took a deep dive into the new FBI crime statistics providing important context to the "American carnage" demagoguery emerging from the White House these days.

Underfunded police pensions plague big Texas cities

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few things, while I've got you:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Water outages, unreasonable court fees, pension and forensic follies, and other stories

In an ongoing effort to clear Grits' browswer tabs, here are a few items which merit readers' attention but may not make it into independent posts:

CCA 'patently unreasonable' in court costs opinion, says appellate justice
Texas First Court of Appeals Justice Terry Jennings issued a strongly worded 22-page concurrence declaring that Jani Maselli Wood was right about court fees, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals was "patently unreasonable," and the high court should revisit the issue, reported Texas Lawyer. See related Grits coverage of fee litigation by Wood, herself a candidate for CCA judge in the 2014 GOP primary. She was quoted agreeing with the opinion, declaring, "They had to change decades of law to make me lose … The courts should not be revenue centers or tax collectors for the state."

Water outage ends at two TDCJ units
Nearly 2,000 prisoners and 400 staff at two Texas women's prison units, Hobby and Marlin, were without running water from Thanksgiving until Dec. 9, according to news reports. At the Hobby unit, for a while 1,400 people shared 27 portable toilets; 732 people shared 16 portables at the Marlin unit.

New juvie diversion programs starting up
Texas counties will soon begin diverting more juvenile defendants "from problem-plagued remote, state-run lockups into less costly community-based treatment and rehabilitation programs" closer to home which "produce better outcomes," reported Mike Ward at the Houston Chronicle. The plan amounts to "giving counties additional money to take care of youths in community-based treatment and rehabilitation programs instead of sending them to state lockups." Texas has already cut its youth prison population from more than 5,000 to around 1,000 now. But the reductions will be less than were initially advertised: "The state's five juvenile lockups hold just over 1,000 youths, down from more than 5,000 in state custody just seven years ago. The new plan would mean that at least 30 more youths would stay in local programs this year and 150 more next year." At one point, estimates were that hundreds more youth may be diverted, nearly depopulating Texas youth prisons entirely. That's not quite what's happening.

Why Argue? Stop arresting for minor pot possession
Dallas Police Chief David Brown says giving tickets for marijuana possession is "hard to argue with," but frets that people busted for pot might not be as easily coerced into becoming informants, and made some inexplicable noise about Timothy McVeigh. If that's all he's got, he really shouldn't argue. The full Dallas City Council will soon consider the issue. In 2015, how is this not a no-brainer?

Explaining Texas' prison boom and slicing the incarceration pie
Grits doesn't pay enough attention to the Prison Policy Initiative, which always produces useful, interesting work. Check out this post explaining the '90s Texas prison boom and another attempting to delineate the entire "incarceration pie" - i.e., a pie chart showing all forms of incarceration in the U.S. and their relative proportions. Notably, the thesis that more restrictive parole decisions caused the dramatic 5-year boost incarceration rates also works in the other direction. Slightly boosted parole rates primarily explain why Texas' prison population lowered enough in recent years to close three prison units.

Wishful thinking won't solve Dallas pension follies
What happens if pension obligations for Dallas police officers can't be covered by their failing investments?, wonders the Dallas Observer. The money shortfall begins 15 years from now but he budget-hole is so big, they must plan for a solution now.

Accreditation won't solve forensic follies
PBS Frontline had a good story in terms of articulating the scope of the national, indeed global crisis facing many traditional fields of forensic science. But it perhaps oversells the extent to which accreditation will solve the problem. It hasn't in Texas, though along with the Forensic Science Commission it's helped make the problems more transparent.

Summary: 2015 TX juvie and crimjust legislation
See a summary published in November of Texas legislative action on juvenile and criminal justice reform from the UT-Austin Institute for Urban Policy Research and Analysis.

Texas Voices v. small towns; CLEAT v. Governor, Lawyers v. client, and other stories

Here are a few short tidbits while your correspondent's attention is focused elsewhere:

Texas Voices may litigate to overturn illegal small-town sex-offender residency restrictions
See bloggerly coverage of possible litigation by Texas Voices for Reason and Justice to repeal municipal sex offender residency restrictions in 46 small municipalities which are not legally authorized to impose them. See an announcement from Texas Voices leader Mary Sue Molnar, who's done a great job with her team building the group from scratch and giving it a credible presence at the Legislature. Legal action would kick their work up a few notches. Good for them. I'm proud of you, Mary Sue, keep up the great work!

Wrong question about lawyers refusing to help death-row client
At the American Constitution Society blog, Brandon Garrett poses the question, "Can a Lawyer Oppose His Client's Plea to Live?" In Texas, we know the answer to that question is clearly, obviously, and incontrovertibly, "Yes." The real questions are, "Does that make said lawyer an asshole?," and "Will the lawyers' peers at the state bar tolerate such behavior as acceptable?" Grits believes the answers to those questions are also "Yes," and "Yes." I'm kind of pissed at the defense bar right now. They're not very good at policing their own, Mark Bennett's on-point blog screeds notwithstanding. See the latest on the case from the Texas Tribune and coverage from The New Yorker.

CLEAT adopting Alinskyite attack tactics vs. governor
Fascinating. Our Alinskyite friends at the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT) are mad at Governor Greg Abbott, reported the Dallas News' Brandi Grissom, because he "appointed Josh McGee, a vice president at the Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation, to the State Pension Review Board this week.The review board, created by the state legislature, is charged with overseeing state and local government retirement systems. McGee has penned articles warning of financial ruin cities could face because of mismanaged pensions." CLEAT, naturally, has adopted a Chicken Little stance, pronouncing that the end of the world is nigh and the Governor has sold them out. That didn't take long!

Anthony Graves hagiography
Check out a sweet little profile of exoneree and Houston crime-lab board member Anthony Graves at Houstonia. I'd vote for him. What's he running for, again?

Well, probably not the only one
"The Real Problem With Police Video" Should police control the footage?

Apologia obscures accountability on Sandra Bland death
Read the Austin Statesman's Ken Herman on "What white people think about Sandra Bland" "Cops hands not bloodless but Sandra Bland not murdered." For the record, Grits never thought she was murdered. But I do think, as Herman finally acknowledged near the end of his column, that "Law enforcement’s mishandling of this case led directly to Bland’s death." And I wish law enforcement and their apologists spent as much time focusing on that fact as they do debunking an emotional statement to the media by Bland's family in the immediate aftermath of her passing. Sandra Bland wasn't murdered. So what? If "Law enforcement’s mishandling of this case led directly to Bland’s death," what will be done to impose accountability and ensure similar "mishandling" won't recur in the future? Why isn't that the focus of MSM opiners?

On the consequences of locking up Mom
Researchers at Sam Houston State are studying whether having an incarcerated mother contributes to criminality among adult offspring. The not-shocking answer from a longitudinal study is "yes."

Public safety pensions a looming budget issue

I'm a little late out of the gate on this, but here's an issue most large Texas municipalities will have to struggle with over the next decade, via the SA Express-News (Dec. 31):

Health care benefits for San Antonio's police officers and firefighters are “richer by a large margin” than those of their peers in Texas' other largest cities, so the City Council should consider adjusting them to align more closely, a city task force is expected to recommend.

Among the group's recommendations is that the City Council establish policies that ensure the overall police and fire budgets are managed in a way that their expenses don't crowd out other portions of the city's general fund — such as libraries and parks. The deepest thrust of the task force's efforts addresses the growing expenses in active-duty health care for rank-and-file members of the police and fire departments.

The task force, which concluded its work Monday, was charged with studying the health care and retirement benefits of San Antonio's rank-and-file uniform personnel and their families.

Last August, City Manager Sheryl Sculley proclaimed that the overall public safety budget would consume the entire general fund, which currently is about $1 billion, by 2031 if left unchecked.

I'd like to see the data showing SA cops and firefighters pensions are more generous "by a large margin" than other Texas cities; from what I've heard, Austin and Houston, at least, face similar dilemmas.

RELATED: From the Dallas Observer, "Mixing politics and pensions." Also, Houston is suing the firefighters pension fund in that city in an effort to contain costs, and experts are predicting the Houston police pension fund may fall short sooner than expected.