Most 'contraband' found at Texas traffic stops results in no arrest; nearly 50k arrests for Class C misdemeanors in 2023

I had cause this morning to dig around in Texas' 2023 traffic-stop data, so decided to post a few high/lowlights.

This data, published annually in a cumbersome, user-unfriendly spreadsheet by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (see here), only includes arrests, searches, etc. at traffic stops.

After Sandra Bland's death, Texas changed its laws in 2017 to require greatly expanded reporting about police activitiy at traffic stops. Framing this as "racial profiling" data, as the press does, really undersells this dataset: IRL, it's a vast window onto traffic-stop activity with race as only one of many variables.

For starters, it's the only way we even know how many traffic stops are made, since most do not involve citations. Total stops increased nearly 200,000 from 2022 (196,252, or a 2.66% increase), with 7,387,419 stops last year overall. The number of citations written, though, declined by about 12,000 to 2,769,610. So statewide, Texas saw more traffic stops but fewer citations per stop, with officers ending the stop without a citation nearly two thirds of the time.

In 2023, 49,796 people were arrested at Texas traffic stops solely for Class C misdemeanors -- the lowest level criminal offense for which the maximum punishment is only a fine, not jail time. These arrests occurred either for violation of local ordinances or, more commonly, for the underlying traffic violation for which they drivers were stopped. People of course can be and are arrested for other Class Cs -- e.g., "camping" ordinances aimed at homeless people -- outside of the traffic-stop setting.

The number of Class C arrests at traffic stops has been declining (>64k in 2019), but this still represents nearly 50,000 Texans taken to jail for offenses for which the maximum punishment under law does not include jail time. (Before the Sandra Bland Act, police routinely contended this almost never happened -- now we know it's quite common.)

Drivers were searched at about 4.7% of 2023 traffic stops -- 346,846 times. Of these, 23% (80,348) were instances when officers asked for consent to search because they had no probable cause. 

Cops arrested suspects at traffic stops 201,149 times, or at about 2.7% of stops. Taking away the Class C arrests mentioned above and another 54,540 arrested for outstanding warrants (mostly related to unpaid traffic tickets), the rest (96,813) were for alleged violations of Texas' penal code.

But things get squirrelier when we look at contraband discovered. Out of those searches, officers supposedly found "contraband" of some sort 151,123 times, which would give them an impressive "hit rate" of 43.6%.

However, drilling down, we discover that in the overwhelming majority of circumstances when contraband is discovered, the driver is not arrested! That means the "contraband" either wasn't illegal or was an extremely trivial item. Sufficient contraband was found to justify an arrest only 54,422 times, for a hit rate of 15.7%.

Three quarters of the time arrests were made, it was for reasons besides finding contraband -- warrants, Class C violations, or other alleged crimes discovered during the stop.

Use of force in this data set has a few problems, with a couple of departments (Nolanville and Palm Valley PDs, for example) reporting use of force at every traffic stop, which is clearly an error. And the Galveston County Sheriff reported an extraordinary use of force rate -- 574 incidents out of only 12,840 traffic stops -- or 4.4%, which seems either highly unlikely (my guess) or hair-on-fire alarming, if true.

Among larger agencies with more consistent reporting, Houston PD continued to be the big outlier on use of force, recording 3,358 incidents out of 339,715 stops, or nearly 1% of the time (0.99%). That's a lot! The Department of Public Safety used force 2nd most often -- 1,318 times, but made more than 1.375 million traffic stops. So the RATE at which they used force was 1/10th that of the Houston PD. Even so, DPS only reported use of force at 473 stops in 2022, so that's nearly a 200% year over year increase!

While not at HPD levels, use of force rates at the Tarrant County Sheriff (at 0.52% of stops), Midland (0.35%) and Austin PD (0.26%) were also notably high.

Complaints were filed by motorists 4,077 times in 2023, which seems remarkably low. But people probably don't complain because it's pointless. Out of those 4,077, only 4 resulted in sustained complaints that resulted in officer discipline. Out of 7.4 million stops.

Austin PD failed to define 'resistance' that justifies use of force, made up 'unique' category of force vs. suspects who're 'fixing to' resist

In 2008, Austin PD changed its "use of force" policy to  a "response to resistance" policy, enacting a "Dynamic Resistance Response Model" (DRRM) developed by national experts with the aim of "helping officers to prevail against allegations of excessive use of force," according to a new report from Austin's Office of Police Oversight.

But unlike other agencies that use a "response to resistance" model, the Austin Police Department's General Orders do not define "resistance," much less outline what force may be used by officers in response.

Instead, resistance is used as a catch all and defined as anything that would justify use of force by a "reasonable" officer. This is language from a US Supreme Court case, Graham v. Connor. 

Grits should mention here: I've been reading technical, bureaucratic, legal, and academic writing on police use-of-force issues for about 25 years. Part One of this memo vis a vis response to resistance, providing both legal and conceptual frameworks for understanding the issue, may be the single most clear, cogent, well-written discussion of the topic I've ever seen. Good job, Farah Muscadin!

She outlines how American police department policies broadly regulate police use of force in one of two ways: the "just be reasonable" approach or the "continuum" approach. The DRRM purports to employ a continuum and APD touts the various resistance categories frequently in its rhetoric surrounding use of force. But Muscadin revealed that the actual APD General Orders do not employ a use-of-force continuum. Instead, they merely say officers' actions will be judged based on whether they're "reasonable," but give no guidance as to details.

Muscadin recommended defining "resistance" and detailing a use-of-force continuum similar to other departments which have adopted the DRRM.

Perhaps most remarkably, though, Muscadin revealed that Austin PD has created an additional type of "resistance" - "preparatory resistance" - which appears to be unique among US policing agencies. 

Most agencies that use DRRM use four categories of resistance: Passive, Defensive, Active, and Aggressive. Some use different language, but the concept is the same: Passive resistance is being non-responsive; defensive is trying to get away; active is engaging in combat with the officer; aggressive are situations putting life and limb at risk.

The threshold between when it's acceptable to use force against a suspect more or less falls between "passive" and "defensive."

But Austin has inserted a fifth category between those two: "Preparatory resistance," defined as when the suspect is "preparing to" offer greater resistance but hasn't yet. (Think of it as "fixing-to" resistance, as in, "the suspect was fixing to resist, so I tazed him.") The OPO reviewed 15 other agencies' use of force policies, including nine that used DRRM, plus state of Texas standards and the original research on which the approach is based, and Austin's use of this "preparatory resistance" category appears to be both "unique" and unjustified. Muscadin recommended getting rid of it entirely. 

This analysis raises two, immediate questions: First, will the City launch a community-driven process, as Muscadin suggested, to "finalize definitions" for various "resistance" categories and to debate the appropriate police responses and policies for each? It's been nearly a month since her report came out and we haven't heard a peep from city or police officials about it. They've all been too busy pushing to relaunch the police academy.

Which brings us to the second issue: If APD hasn't even defined "resistance" in their "response to resistance" policy, and it turns out the policy is a hodge podge that makes up terminology and conflates differing approaches to police use of force standards, is the agency really ready to begin training on it three weeks from now? What do they train on if they haven't even defined "resistance"? When do they tell officers to respond with force?

I don't know. I'm pretty sure they don't know. (Before Muscadin's report, nobody was raising these issues.) But it's another reason to think the city was premature to relaunch the police academy without finishing the publicly accountable makeover reformers were promised last year.

The #TexasGeorgeFloydAct: What component bills are still moving in the #txlege homestretch?

Over the weekend, your correspondent put together an update on the status of all the various bills that make up the Texas George Floyd Act for the 65-group coalition promoting them, so let's re-post it here for Grits readers who may be interested. There are four weeks to go in the legislative session, so all these bills are in the make-or-break home stretch.

The Texas George Floyd Act, as distinct from federal legislation by the same name, fundamentally has eight component parts. These have also been broken up into individual, stand-alone legislation, and six of the eight have passed at least one chamber in the Texas Legislature and still have a chance to pass in 2021:

GFA Components:

Ban arrests for traffic offenses ☑

Ban chokeholds ☑

Improve use-of-force standards ☒

Duty to render aid ☑

Duty to intervene ☑

Qualified immunity ☒

Disciplinary matrix ☑

Corroboration in drug cases ☑

Here’s a list of individual bills still moving as of May 2, 2021, along with a summation of what’s not:

HB 830: Banning Class C arrests. This bill was scaled back in committee to ban arrests only for traffic offenses in the Transportation Code. Still, this change would have eliminated roughly 95% of the 64,000 arrests at Texas traffic stops in 2019. The bill passed the Texas House with a bipartisan vote of 113-18, including 57 Democrats and 56 Republicans. It has yet to be referred to committee in the senate.

SB 69: Banning chokeholds and neck restraints by police unless it “is necessary to prevent serious bodily injury to or the death of the officer or another person.” The bill passed the Senate unanimously and is not yet scheduled for a hearing in the House.

HB 833: Improving use of force standards to require an imminent threat. This legislation did not make it out of the Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee and probably can no longer pass this session.

SB 2212: Duty to render aid. This legislation passed out of the senate unanimously, but could be improved to clear up some ambiguity around when the duty is triggered. Officers should render aid unless there’s an “imminent threat.” Alternatively, their duty to render aid to injured members of the public should be the same as when a police officer is injured. It has been referred to the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee and there will be a public hearing May 5th.

SB 68: Duty to intervene. This legislation requires law enforcement to intervene when they witness excessive force when a list of four qualifying factors are met. We believe meeting any of these factors justifies intervention and the bill need modest amendment to achieve its goals. The bill is scheduled for a hearing in the House Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee on May 5th.

HB 614: Qualified Immunity: Creating a new cause of action for civil rights violations that bypasses qualified immunity was one of the most prominent demands in the original Texas George Floyd Act. But it has received the most pushback of all and has not moved in either chamber.

HB 829: Creating a disciplinary matrix to ensure fair punishment. In civil service cities, a common excuse for arbitrators overturning police-officer discipline is punishment that differs from other cases. This bill requires those departments to have a disciplinary matrix specifying presumed punishments, and tells arbitrators punishments within those ranges must be presumed reasonable. This will make it easier for chiefs to fire bad cops and make it stick. This bill has yet to be referred to committee in the senate.

HB 834: Corroboration of police testimony in drug cases. This legislation reacts to George Floyd’s conviction based on the testimony of corrupt Houston narcotics officer Gerald Goines in a case with a fabricated informant. This is another bill that passed out of the Texas House with solid bipartisan support, this legislation enjoyed support in the lower chamber from the Sheriffs Association of Texas and the Texas Police Chiefs Association. This bill has yet to be referred to committee in the senate.

***

For more background, check out the special, two-part podcast from Just Liberty on the Texas George Floyd Act: Here's Part One and Part Two.

UPDATE (5/5): The three senate bills discussed above all passed out of the Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee today (SB 69 was added via a rules suspension) with support from the police unions but tepid backing from police-reform advocates, several of whom testified "on" rather than "for" the legislation. The duty to render aid bill lets officers delay assistance until the scene is fully secured, whatever that means. (For my money, Grits thinks they should be taught to "render aid" with the same alacrity and preconditions as if it were an officer who's wounded.) Meanwhile the duty to intervene applies only to excessive force, not other types of misconduct (e.g., fabricating informants, as allegedly happened in George Floyd's Houston drug case). The original Texas-George-Floyd-Act versions were broader. These are probably still an improvement over current law, barely, but the lowest-possible-impact versions of such improvements. With that said, the same committee earlier passed a governor-and-police-union-backed mandate for training on duties to render aid and intervene that the Attorney General says don't currently exist (the police unions disagree). So putting these duties formally on the books is important. But the versions passed by the senate are pretty weak tea.

Committee that will hear the #TexasGeorgeFloydAct has seen concerning police episodes in their districts

Art by Nia Palmer

On Thursday in the Texas House, the Homeland Security and Public Safety Committee will consider the Texas George Floyd Act (HB 88 by Senfronia Thompson). Because state and federal roles in regulating law enforcement are so different, this is a radically, almost completely different piece of legislation than the federal George Floyd Act (banning chokeholds is the main crossover) and must be evaluated on its own merits. (Mandy Marzullo and I are doing a 2-part podcast explaining its components; here's part one.)

Grits is aware of people coming in from all over the state, including dozens of groups and several family members of police brutality victims. In an era of COVID-driven minimalism at most Texas legislative hearings, this is shaping up to be one of the biggest events of the session, on criminal justice or any other topic.

This is an interesting committee to be hearing the bill. All of the members have witnessed recent, significant incidents in their districts that should pique their interest in proposed police reforms.

For example, Sam Harless, a Republican from Spring, is strongly pro-police. But one of the most egregious TX cases of cops killing a man by constricting his breathing is out of his district. A jury awarded the family of Jamail Amron $11 million but last year judges took it away.

Republican Matt Schaefer out of Tyler represents Bullard where, last fall, cell-phone video captured police officers violently hurling a handcuffed teen to the ground in an episode that went viral.

Another Republican on the committee, Tony Tinderholt, represents Arlington where, last September, a police officer shot at an unleashed dog and killed the owner instead. Arlington witnessed anti-police brutality protests for the first time last year in many years.

Speaking of dogs another Republican on the committee, Cole Hefner, represents Rains County where a deputy shot a resident's dog in an episode that adamantly riled his district and resulted in legislation mandating additional police training.

Although Marvin Scott died in the Collin County Jail, he was a resident of Frisco which makes him a constituent of committee member Jared Patterson.

Art by Nia Palmer

Freshman Democrat Eddie Morales represents Maverick County, where last fall deputies assaulted, pepper sprayed and handcuffed Ernesto Flores for filming them with his phone, reminiscent of Marco Puente's Keller, TX case discussed in the podcast.

Democrat Rhetta Bowers represents part of Balch Springs, which has been fighting in court to avoid responsibility after one if its police officers shot Jordan Edwards in the back of the head. (The officer, Roy Oliver, was later convicted of murder.)

And the committee chairman, James White, is a black Republican US Army veteran whose grandfather was murdered by a white deputy constable after a fender bender in Houston during Jim Crow. Before now he chaired the Corrections Committee and he's probably as well-versed in criminal-justice topics as anyone in the House.

Each of these committee members also have extensive ties to law enforcement, so these stories don't guarantee support for the #TexasGeorgeFloydAct. But if they're paying attention to their districts, these are issues that matter a lot to their constituents.

This post was adapted from a Twitter thread. Correction: An earlier version of this stated Chairman White is an ex-marine. He is a former soldier in the US Army. Grits regrets the error.

Why the #txlege should add point-and-report to statewide police shooting data

In a roundup a few weeks ago, Grits pointed to a new academic study analyzing Dallas police shootings which associated a "point and report" policy with a reduced number of people shot because the officer falsely thought they were armed. Now, the authors have written an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News about their findings. Here's a notable excerpt:

According to the Policing Project at NYU School of Law, police reform falls into two categories: front-end vs. back-end accountability measures. The former includes strong policies and practices to create a culture of organizational accountability before things go wrong, while the latter reflect after-the-fact, methods for holding individual officers responsible for their misdeeds.

Back-end accountability mechanisms are important and they deservedly receive much attention. Yet they are not enough to produce real change. Police reform requires more of the often-neglected front-end mechanisms that target institutional and organizational issues that lead to unnecessary and excessive use of force. A prime example of front-end accountability is implementing stricter departmental policies that limit the circumstances when officers can use force, coupled with documentation and review protocols. There is a rich history of more restrictive administrative policies effectively reducing officer-involved shootings and other types of less lethal force, such as the use of Tasers and pepper spray.

Starting in the 1970s and following the lead of the New York City Police Department, agencies began amending their deadly force policies to only allow officers to shoot in “defense of life” situations, when there is a risk of death or serious bodily injury to themselves or others. Additionally, departments began requiring officers to report when they discharged their firearms, and some departments created review boards to investigate such shootings. These policy changes not only led to significant declines in officer-involved shootings (especially of unarmed citizens), they also reduced racial disparities in police shootings.

Point-and-report policies are front-end accountability efforts that require officers to document all instances of pointing their guns at citizens. This kind of policy is not new. For example, the Charleston, S.C., and La Grange, Georgia, police departments incorporated such a policy in the 1990s. The Baltimore, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas and New Orleans police departments have all adopted similar policies in recent years.

However, these departments are more the exception that the rule, as many police officers in the U.S. are not subject to point-and-report policies. Moreover, there’s been little research on the impact of a point-and-report policy. Does such a policy reduce police shootings? In a new article published in Injury Prevention, we tested the impact of the Dallas Police Department’s point-and-report policy on police shootings of citizens. It took effect on Jan. 1, 2013, and we used publicly available shooting data from DPD to investigate. We examined the total number of shootings as well as specific characteristics of those shootings before (2003 through 2012) and after (2013 through 2018) the policy change.

Before the policy, DPD averaged 15.3 shootings per year. That average dropped to 13.0 post-policy change (a 15% decline). Our statistical analysis showed that the policy was associated with a significant, gradual reduction in police shootings of citizens that began in late 2015 and continued through the end of 2018.

Perhaps more importantly, the policy was also associated with a decline in the shootings of unarmed citizens (that is, they had no weapon such as a gun or knife), especially citizens who the officers thought were armed when they were not — a “threat perception failure”). Such a failure occurs when officers mistake an item in a person’s hands, such as a cellphone, for a gun. The proportion of threat perception failure shootings declined by nearly 80% after DPD adopted the point-and-report policy (from 18% of all gun or perceived gun cases before the policy change to 4% after).

Last, we also found no increase in the proportion of these incidents in which an officer was injured. Officer injuries actually declined slightly.

These findings are very promising, though we can only speculate on the mechanisms driving those effects. Perhaps the policy adds another layer of organizational accountability. It might also limit the occasions when officers draw and point their weapons, prompting them to take more time to differentiate real threats from threat perception failures.

It may also reduce the potential for officers to escalate a situation unnecessarily, or it might lead them to consider more options for resolving the encounter peacefully (rather than painting themselves into a corner once the gun is drawn). Five decades of research tell us that administrative policy is an important front-end mechanism for controlling police officer use of force. Clear, detailed use of force policies that are enforced shape officer decisions to use their firearms. Our study suggests that a point-and-report policy can do the same.

In 2015, Texas passed legislation to require departments report police shootings - fatal or otherwise - to the Attorney General, giving us a dataset helpfully gathered and organized by our friends at the Texas Justice Initiative. It would be simple to add a provision requiring reports whenever officers point their weapon but don't fire, and if this study from Dallas is any indication, the measure could save lives.

Houston cops use force at traffic stops at 18x San Antonio's rate: #SandraBland data provides new insights into roadside police violence

You'd have to be naïve to think police should never use force when doing their job, and traffic stops can be a dangerous setting. But training and supervision matter. How frequently and how aggressively police use force at traffic stops varies widely from department to department. 

While preparing some testimony for the Texas House County Affairs Committee, your correspondent pulled data from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement's website regarding use of force at traffic stops, which agencies had to start reporting thanks to County Affairs Chairman Garnet Coleman's 2017 Sandra Bland Act.

Looking at the 50 agencies reporting the most force incidents at traffic stops, ten agencies reported using force at every stop; these were clearly errors and Grits discounted them. The 40 remaining collectively reported 5,951 use-of-force incidents out of more than 4.4 million stops in 2019, the majority of them by Houston PD and Texas DPS.

However, the difference between those two agencies was remarkable. DPS troopers make vastly more traffic stops than HPD, using force at only 5.2 per 10,000 stops. By contrast, Houston PD for the second year running topped the list of larger jurisdictions, using force at 71 out of every 10,000 stops. Other agencies with high rates included Texarkana PD (62.2), Eagle Pass (60.1), and New Braunfels (52.8).

Use of force rates in Dallas were high, though not as bad as in Houston: Dallas PD reported using force at 32.4 stops per 10,000; the Dallas Sheriff's rate was 38.1 per 10,000.

By contrast, the Harris County Sheriff reported using force at 5.2 per 10,000 stops; San Antonio police used force at 3.9 out of 10,000 stops; at Austin PD, the rate was 6.8 per 10,000. So clearly Houston's high rate isn't inevitable; other agencies perform traffic enforcement without using violence as often.

Among the rest, two agencies that make relatively few stops - the Lubbock County Sheriff and the Kemah PD in Galveston County - had the highest use-of-force rates (278.9 and 113.5 incidents per 10,000 stops, respectively). But both those agencies accounted for fewer than 4,000 stops each.

Why do cops in Houston use force against motorists at more than 13x the rate as DPS troopers and 18x the rate of cops in San Antonio? You'd have to ask their Chief Hubert A. Acevedo (as he's listed in the racial-profiling database). 

Regardless of his answer, it's unlikely that large differences in use-of-force rates can be accounted for by the inherent dangers posed by drivers in one jurisdiction compared to another. More likely, that's a function of agencies' differing policies, culture, and supervision priorities.

Houston is about 1.5 times the size of San Antonio, but its cops use force at traffic stops on average six times per day; in San Antonio, that happens about once per week.

This is new data and the implications of gathering it have yet to filter into the political process. Eventually, the goal should be to identify agencies that are consistent outliers - and so far, Houston PD fits the bill - then seek to change policies, procedures and practices to drive those numbers down. Before the Sandra Bland Act, Texans couldn't know which agencies used force against motorists most frequently. Now that we do, the question becomes, what do we do about it?

Police Monitor: Austin police commanders ignore misconduct when they disagree with department policy

In public, previously un-reported recommendations, Austin's Office of Police Oversight earlier this month found it necessary to remind APD commanders that, "When presented with incontrovertible evidence of a policy violation, an accused employee’s chain of command should sustain the allegation related to that policy violation." Further, they declared, "This is especially true for policies that are not open to interpretation, such as those related to report writing."

Although we don't know the specific referent (the OPO can see confidential investigative files the public cannot), to me, this implies that APD brass are ignoring demonstrable police misconduct. It's not the first time.

In this instance, the context was an alleged excessive force incident from Christmas Day 2019 resulting in an arrest for "Pedestrian in the Roadway" and sustained allegations against Officers Christopher Williams and Jeffrey Hutchison, for which they received an oral reprimand.

It sounds like commanders substituted their own personal judgments for policy in issuing such a light sentence: "Should an officer’s commander disagree with any section of [APD policy] ... In no scenario should anyone in an officer’s chain of command impart their opinions about policy through the disciplinary process," the OPO advised.

One wonders with what policy commanders disagreed so much that they felt compelled to "impart their opinions ... through the disciplinary process"? That says to me that there's some policy one or more commanders disagree with so they failed to punish violations seriously. How tantalizing! I wonder what it is?

The OPO also expressed concerns about how investigators treated civilian witnesses, finding it necessary to warn that Internal Affairs investigators "should use caution with both the tone and subject matter of their questions and avoid questions that could discourage civilians from participating in current or future investigations."

The OPO further warned against IAD using "leading questions" with civilian witnesses and said their use threatened the "integrity of investigations."

They also pinpointed a pattern of manipulative questioning: "Interviewees should not be asked whether they believe that certain conduct meets a word's definition, especially when that word has a particular meaning in APD policy, without first having the word defined for them."

I'd sure like to know the backstory behind that recommendation!

Taken as a whole, even without a full explication of the basis for each of them, these recommendations seem telling: IAD investigators appear to be pushing civilian witnesses with leading questions and manipulative language, while commanders ignore clear policy violations when they disagree with the department's written policies.

Thank heavens for the OPO! Without that agency (and the police-contract adjustments in 2018 allowing for greater transparency), the public, and for that matter the Austin City Council and city manager, couldn't know about such problems.

Manley exonerates Mike Ramos' shooter in report to Ken Paxton filled with false statements

The killing of Mike Ramos by the Austin PD has been an instructive moment. Chief Brian Manley's reaction to the shooting of yet another unarmed man tells us definitively that he has no intention of changing his stripes, and justifies the increasingly widespread calls for him and the APD leadership team to all lose their jobs.

If there was any doubt of this, the death-in-custody report Chief Manley filed with the Texas Attorney General demonstrates that he intends to continue time-worn patterns of racist policing from which Austin has suffered for many decades. The report essentially exonerates the shooter, Officer Christopher Taylor, making phony excuses to legally justify his actions.

Regular readers know Grits doesn't throw around the term "racist" lightly, but it's simply inconceivable that the methods and attitudes evinced in this report would be applied if the episode had involved a white person in the Zilker, Windsor, or Mt. Bonnell neighborhoods. 

Before getting into the details, if you haven't seen it, or need a refresher, watch the video. Ramos was standing beside his car with his hands up talking to the officers when a rookie three months out of the academy fired on him with a shotgun loaded with a bean bag round while bystanders screamed "don't shoot." Ramos got into his car and drove away from officers down a dead end to keep from being killed. It didn't work. Another officer, who just ten months before had killed a university professor suffering from a mental health crisis in another dubious shooting, shot Ramos multiple times with a rifle.

So how does Chief Manley describe the episode in the death in custody report?

Asked what were the reasons for the contact, Manley wrote "Alcohol/drug offense." No drugs or alcohol were found at the scene, so this is pure victim blaming which frankly is reprehensible. Whatever the 911 caller said, Ramos had committed no offense when officers surrounded him with guns drawn and began screaming at him. Why is the chief still pretending otherwise?

Another question asked, "At any time during the incident and/or entry into the law enforcement facility, did the decedent display or use a weapon?" Manley replied, "Unknown." Again, this is a flat-out lie. Manley admitted at a press conference that Ramos had no weapon, which is also quite clear from the bystander video.

Next, the form asked, "At any time during the incident and/or entry into the law enforcement facility did the decedent attempt to injure others?" Once again, Manley simply lied, declaring "Unknown." This is, in fact, known. Ramos attempted to injure no one, and was driving away from officers when he was shot. The only "unknown" here is what the hell the chief is thinking by answering these questions in such a disingenuous way.

Similarly, Manley declared it is "unknown" whether Ramos assaulted a police officer during this incident. From the video, clearly he didn't, and if he had, it would have been listed at the top of the report as the most serious charge against him.

Manley claimed Ramos "barricaded himself or initiated a standoff." This is, at best, a stretch. I suppose, since he ducked back into his car and tried to get away once police began firing at him, one could claim Ramos "barricaded" himself, even if it was in response to a deadly threat against his life. If someone fired a shotgun at you, who in their right mind would just stand there and wait for them to do it again?

Manley's officers were the ones who "initiated the standoff," surrounding the unarmed man with guns drawn and screaming at him from a distance while Ramos stood there with his hands up and showed them he had no weapon. As in the recent episode in Midland where officers stood 10 yards from a 21-year old boy laying on the ground surrendering himself, APD officers could have approached Ramos and ended the "standoff" any time they wanted. They were in complete control. But, as they were trained to do, Austin PD escalated violence instead, and in a totally unnecessary way.

Regrettably, Mr. Ramos didn't have a 90-year old grandmother immediately available to intervene and save his life, as happened in Midland.

The narrative description in the death-in-custody report makes clear that Ramos initially complied but, like the guy in Midland, feared approaching officers while they were pointing their weapons at him because he thought they'd shoot him. Let's face it: Given how many black folks get shot by police under dubious circumstances, these are reasonable concerns.

These men were in no-win situations. If Ramos stood still and officers opened fire, he is called "non-compliant." If he'd walked toward the officers and they shot him, this report would almost assuredly say he made a "furtive movement." Given the misinformation included in this death-in-custody report, there's no doubt in my mind that Chief Manley would have justified killing Mike Ramos either way. 

Officers must be trained to understand that many black people justifiably fear them. And not just fear of false arrest. Fear for their very lives, from the moment they encounter a police officer till well after the officers leave. These fears are reasonable, not irrational, and ignoring them makes worst-case scenarios like this one much more likely. Ramos and the guy in Midland both feared that, if they approached officers or did anything but stay still and surrender, they risked being shot. They were 100% correct. 

It's particularly telling that the cop who fired the bean-bag round at Ramos was a rookie just three months out of the academy, because it speaks directly to Austin PD's approach to training cadets. Readers may recall that ten former cadets have sued the city over training methods at the police academy which were demeaning to cadets and promoted violence. According to the cadets, instructors told them "they would 'punch you in the face' if you said you wanted to be an officer to help people," and "also told students that a suspect who resists arrest or who fights with an officer 'just earned a legal ass-whooping.'" Cadets complained that "instructors repeatedly degraded homeless people and prostitutes, referring to them as 'cockroaches' and encouraging cadets to 'find a transient' if they were bored and wanted an easy felony arrest."

Cadet training at Austin PD explicitly promotes unnecessary violence. According to the cadets suing the city, “An instructor told them they needed to achieve a 'winning warrior mentality' by picking out a person in their daily lives — preferably not an older woman or child — and visualizing themselves 'shooting that person in the face.'”

This is the training this rookie cop had undergone just months before he initiated the events that ended Mike Ramos' life. Honestly, this is why I think APD leadership must be held to account. They're the ones responsible for that training, the rookie cop did what he'd been taught to do.

Incidentally, as part of the City Council's demand for an audit of Austin PD training practices, a panel has been appointed to review all the videos used by the department. Unfortunately, APD is rushing the process. The panel has been asked to review 112 videos, in 13 marathon sessions, by July 1st, which some panelists have said is an unrealistic time frame and setting the group up to do an inadequate job.

To me, bystander video of the Ramos shooting and the episode in Midland would make excellent training videos on what NOT to do. These situations were mishandled from the beginning and demonstrate that many Texas police officers seemingly don't have a clue how reasonable black folks react in the 21st century when police officers threaten to kill them for no good reason. In both instances, the background commentary from average people watching should be required listening as part of the curriculum. The fears bystanders express in both are commonplace and reasonable, particularly in the black community. Someone who wants to do that job should be required to understand those perceptions.

After answering the specific questions in the death-in-custody report, APD included this narrative description of the incident. Reading it, it's clear to me this episode is something that could only ever occur in a poor, predominantly minority neighborhood. It's inconceivable that police would have approached white folks in a middle-class part of town in the manner described here:

On April 24th, 2020, at approximately 6:31 pm, Austin Police Communications received a 911 call indicating a male and female were sitting in a gold Toyota Prius at 2601 South Pleasant Valley Road. According to the caller, the subjects appeared to be using narcotics. As officers responded to the area, an update to the call indicated the male subject had a gun. Officers requested the assistance of Air 1 (helicopter) and K-9, but they were not immediately available. Before arriving at the scene, officers stopped briefly to discuss their response to the area and create a plan before attempting to approach the subjects in the vehicle. After formulating a course of action, officers approached the area in marked patrol units. Officers strategically parked their patrol vehicles, effectively blocking the exit and mitigating the risk of flight. Officers observed the Toyota Prius backed into a parking spot in the apartment complex parking lot near the one-way entrance/exit. Officers immediately commanded both subjects to show their hands as police communications identified the nature of the call as "gun urgent." Officers continued to give verbal commands as both the male and female exited the vehicle. Officers commanded the male subject to lift his shirt and turn around in a circle. The male subject initially complied with commands but eventually became non-compliant and verbally confrontational. The male subject began asking why officers had guns pointed at him and asked officers to put their weapons away. The male subject walked back toward the driver’s door of the Toyota Prius and remained non-compliant and verbally confrontational. The male refused verbal commands from officers to step forward and away from the driver's door. Due to the nature of the call and the 911 caller’s information, officers had reason to believe the Toyota Prius could contain a gun. Due to the male subject’s noncompliance and ability to possibly access a gun inside the vehicle or on his person, officers decided to deploy a less-lethal munition to gain compliance. The less-lethal munition struck the front of the male subject on the left side of his body but did not prove to be effective as the male subject quickly entered the driver's door of the Toyota Prius. The male subject closed the driver door and started the vehicle. Officers commanded the driver to turn off the vehicle but he did not comply. Approximately nine seconds later, the male subject drove forward out of the parking spot. Fearing the male subject intended to use the Toyota Prius as a deadly weapon, one patrol officer fired his patrol rifle,  striking the male driver. The Toyota Prius collided with another parked vehicle in the parking lot and came to a stop. Officers approached the driver, extracted him from the Toyota Prius, and began to apply medical aid. Officers summoned EMS to the scene. EMS responded and transported the male subject to a local hospital where he was pronounced deceased at 7:26 pm.

Notably, Manley claimed that Christopher Taylor feared that Ramos "intended to use the Toyota Prius as a deadly weapon." If true, that would be a legal justification for the shooting, which is why I said the report "exonerated" the shooter. But this is another bald-faced lie. Ramos was driving away from officers down a short dead end, not toward them. From the video and even cursory observation of the scene, that's simply an unreasonable inference. It's an excuse being offered to legally justify the shooting post hoc, not a reasonable interpretation of what the officer was thinking in the moment.

Let's also ask ourselves if police would have called for dogs and helicopters if they got the same call in West Austin? I've never heard of that happening in predominantly white neighborhoods; this is something they do to black people.

Clearly, even from APD's own, biased narrative, Ramos complied with officers' commands so far as they were reasonable. He kept his hands up until they began shooting at him, and raised his shirt and turned around when he was told to do so. But he didn't want to move toward officers while they were pointing their weapons at him because he's a black man in Texas and feared he would be shot. He wanted them to deescalate the situation before he abandoned his hands-up-I-surrender position, and Grits doesn't blame him one bit. Ramos had already demonstrated he wasn't a threat. There was simply no reason for officers to keep threatening to shoot him, except that that's what they're trained to do.

The death in custody report reveals more about Chief Manley than it does the details of the shooting. It shows us Manley believes what happened was what should have happened. And it's an indication he has no intention of changing how Austin police handle such situations; to him, this was all by the book. Finally, it demonstrates Chief Manley will lie, obfuscate, and mislead in order to justify the worst outcomes.

The report also shows why everyone should be careful when interpreting data points from these death-in-custody reports. This is far from the first one I've seen that flat-out misrepresents facts in order to justify police officers killing someone.

UPDATE (5/29): Chief Manley is telling people he didn't see this document before it was filed, despite his being one of two names listed as its source. If true, he should immediately issue an amended version correcting all the smears and falsehoods. And it speaks to his management priorities that he considered his department's official, public portrayal of the details of the Ramos shooting unworthy of his interest. 

Police shooting triggers calls for widespread culture change among Austin PD leadership

"Off with their heads," the Queen of Hearts famously declared in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass."

Yesterday the Austin Justice Coalition, more than two dozen other community groups including Just Liberty, and numerous other community leaders (many of them appointees to city boards and commissions) made that same declaration, calling for the firing of Austin police chief Brian Manley, his chief of staff, the assistant city manager in charge of public safety, and for the reassignment of city legal staff advising the department.

See the letter here, and some initial press coverage. I'd encourage anyone interested in the topic to read the whole thing, it conveys quite a compelling indictment of policing in this town, including a litany of specific complaints against the Austin PD leadership team.

The letter was issued in the wake of Austin PD killing a man named Mike Ramos on Friday evening, although the critique of the department was much more wide ranging than just that incident.

Ramos was standing next to his car with his hands up when Mitchell Pieper, a rookie officer three months out of the academy, fired a shotgun at him using a bean bag round. Ramos retreated into his car and tried to drive away when another officer, Christopher Taylor, fired three shots with a rifle, killing him. Taylor, who had been on the force for five years was involved in another questionable shooting at a downtown Austin condo in 2019.

Notably, former Chief Art Acevedo had forbidden officers from shooting at moving vehicles in 2012 unless they were part of a unit specially trained to stop vehicles. But Chief Manley reversed that policy, one of a series of regressive policy changes he's made in recent years. As a result, Mike Ramos is dead and, if there's any justice in the world, Manley should lose his job.

The fact that a fresh-out-of-the-academy officer fired the first round speaks directly to critiques in the letter of Austin PD training at the academy. Advocates, the city's Public Safety Commission, a clutch of former cadets suing the department, and even city council members have suggested APD should cease holding new academies until they revamp their "warrior cop," command-and-control approach, shifting cadet training toward a more service-oriented model that emphasizes deescalation techniques as a central aspect of the use-of-force continuum.

Couple that with the fact that the officer who fired the lethal round has now killed two people in five years on the force, and it's hard to escape the impression that Austin is churning out new officers who are ill-equipped to handle the job. Most officers go their entire careers without ever firing their guns in the line of duty.

As is his typical approach, Manley attempted to blame the victim in the Ramos incident, refusing to say whether a search of the car revealed a firearm (it didn't) and claiming with no evidence or justification that the car had been involved in other criminal incidents.

None of that changes the facts on the ground. You can view bystander video of the incident here. Austin PD policy does not make bodycam footage public, taking advantage of a terrible law passed at the Legislature on the topic, although the District Attorney and others have called for its release in this incident. So far, all we have is cell phone footage shot by neighbors.

Officers had approached Ramos and his girlfriend after someone reported them allegedly doing drugs and claiming to have seen a firearm. As it turns out, the pair were smoking cigarettes in the car outside his girlfriend's home. Police found no drugs or guns, Grits can say with absolute confidence, or there's no question they'd have touted those facts from the rooftops by now. His girlfriend was taken into custody, held almost 48 hours without ever being booked into the jail, but ultimately was released.

These advocates weren't the only one finally fed up with Austin PD and their mealy-mouthed approach to dealing with the community. Also yesterday, several local groups (Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, Texas Harm Reduction Alliance, Grassroots Leadership, and the Immigrant Legal Resource Center) and a UT law prof backed out of a proposed grant application aimed at pre-arrest diversion in drug cases, claiming Austin PD was acting in bad faith. Here's a notable excerpt from their email:

In 2018, our organizations began a two-year project to better understand why Austin/Travis County produced a 66% increase in new felony drug possession cases within a five-year period despite no discernible increase in the drug prevalence rate. Our intention was to identify the locations and circumstances where pre-arrest deflection programming would have the greatest impact on reducing arrests and connecting people with meaningful harm reduction services. We remain committed to that goal, and we are grateful to have had the opportunity to work with city/county officials on a new vision for addressing substance use within our community.

What our study demonstrated, however, was that the increase in drug arrests was generated through police practices long believed to exacerbate racial disparities. Moreover, the arrests resulted in lengthy periods of detention, loss of income, increased homelessness, loss of immigration status, and collateral consequences that create lifelong barriers to employment and housing. In short, our study showed very clearly that the criminal legal system actors were doing harm.

Yet, the tone and content of the grant application shifts the responsibility entirely to the individual at risk of arrest for drug possession, not to the system actors who have done such harm to people suffering from substance use disorder. We provided lengthy comment on the current draft, but we simply do not see how these issues can be addressed satisfactorily before the grant application is due.

We believe that it is time to press reset. We urge the Austin City Council and City Manager to take decisive action to change the culture of law enforcement in this city.

The Greater Austin Crime Commission issued a statement cautioning against a "rush to judgment" after the Ramos shooting, but that misapprehends the situation. Elements of this episode speak directly to known problems at the department that should have been addressed long ago. Those include deescalation training that's disconnected from use-of-force policy, a lack of transparency around body cameras, the chief's misguided approval of officers shooting at moving cars, not to mention issues of bias raised in the Tatum report. Again, read the full letter. The list goes on and on.

It's become clear in the span of just a few days that Brian Manley and the entire city leadership team over public safety has lost the public's confidence. So what happens next?

Under the city charter, the city council cannot fire the chief, or even publicly declare they support his termination. Only City Manager Spencer Cronk can do that, and he should.

In the meantime, though, the charter does authorize city council to launch their own investigation into the chief and others criticized in the AJC letter. And they could also issue a "no confidence" vote exclaiming their dissatisfaction. We've reached the point where, if the city manager won't immediately act, it's absolutely time for them to embrace such tactics.

Manley, his chief of staff, assistant city manager Rey Arrellano - all these folks have entirely lost the faith of the community. It's time for them to go.

Podcast: New evidence of Rodney Reed's innocence, first thoughts on the Atatiana Jefferson shooting, and the Mystery of the Disappearing Misdemeanor Arrests

Here's the latest Reasonably Suspicious podcast from Just Liberty:


This is the October 2019 episode of Just Liberty's Reasonably Suspicious podcast covering Texas criminal-justice policy and politics. This month, my cohost Amanda Marzullo and I interviewed attorneys for Rodney Reed, who is on death row with an execution date of November 20th. We plumbed unknowable but interesting questions about misdemeanor arrests, discussed the sad, grim, story of Atatiana Jefferson's shooting in Fort Worth, and complained that the moments spent reading and talking about a new ACLU report on how to end mass incarceration are time we'll never get back. :)

Intro

Okay, it's probably a crime for a former justice of the peace to pimp slap a Yankees fan at an ALCS game in Houston and make him cry, but it's also pretty funny.

Top Stories

• First takes on the Atatiana Jefferson shooting in Fort Worth (2:34)
• Evaluating ACLU decarceration recommendations for Texas (8:34)

Interview

This month, Mandy and I spoke to Bryce Benjet of the national Innocence Project and Quinncy McNeal of Mayer Brown in Houston on the Rodney Reed case. Reed is scheduled to be executed on November 20th. (14:38) This is excerpted from a longer conversation. I'll publish the full interview, which goes into more detail about debunked forensic testimony in the case, separately in a couple of days.

Suspicious Mysteries

Why have misdemeanor arrests declined? Why didn't they decline earlier when crime first dropped? What do we really know about why crime dropped or the relationship between crime and arrests? Mandy and I discuss some known unknowns. (27:15)

The Last Hurrah (36:40)

• Hard to reprimand Texas judges
• Years-long backlogs at crime labs
• Message sent by jury in prison-guard murder trial

As always, I've ordered a transcript and will add it below the jump when it comes back. Enjoy!

Scaredy Cops: Fear-based training of police officers makes them more likely to shoot

Amber Guyger and Aaron Dean, the cops who shot and killed Botham Jean and Atatiana Jefferson, respectively, had something in common: Both shot an innocent person for no good reason because they were scared.

Maybe that's because they were trained to be.

Guyger testified that she killed Botham Jean because she feared for her life. And clearly Dean, who had snuck into Jefferson's backyard instead of announcing himself at the open front door, considered himself in grave danger just from seeing a woman's silhouette in the window. But neither faced an actual threat. The greater threat in both cases stemmed from their own fear.

Cop culture brims with fearful rhetoric about the dangers they face, even though most cops never fire their service weapon over the course of their careers. A former Baltimore cop writing in Medium last year worried that "police are trained to fear." "Cops are supposed to be heroes and first responders and run toward danger," he wrote, "but it sure seemed like our training was teaching us to be afraid of everyone."

The most important thing for a police officer is to be sure they "go home at the end of the day," they tell themselves repeatedly, including in police trainings on use of force. "It's better to be judged by twelve than carried by six," is a common refrain every police officer has heard repeatedly throughout their careers. Officers and their union representatives have said it to me dozens of times over the years.

In reality, though, the people who pick up your garbage are significantly more likely to die on the job than police officers. That doesn't mean police don't have difficult jobs, that they aren't subject to lesser assaults, or that they are never justified in using force. But in terms of going home to their families at night, construction workers, truck drivers, farmers, and fishermen all have more dangerous occupations.

Much of this exaggerated fear stems from how officers are trained. Amber Guyger had received deescalation training as mandated under Texas' "Sandra Bland Act," but she said she never considered following it over the course of her encounter with Botham Jean. And Dean had just completed 40 hours of CIT training aimed at dealing with people with mental illness; in essence, CIT courses are a version of deescalation training.

However, deescalation tactics are not typically included in the general use-of-force curriculum officers take at the academy. They're treated as an extra, an add-on, not as a fundamental philosophy that should infuse every encounter where force is used. In addition, there is a sizable cottage industry of fear mongering cop trainers teaching officers to adopt a "warrior" mentality.

In Minneapolis, anti-police-brutality advocates have pushed back against such "fear-based training" and the Mayor earlier this year pledged to get rid of it, declaring, “Fear-based trainings violate the values at the very heart of community policing. When you’re conditioned to believe that every person encountered poses a threat to your existence, you simply cannot be expected to build meaningful relationships with those same people.”

Police officers who shoot people have other things in common. They are more likely to be white, much more likely to be male (even controlling for job assignments), and more likely to have NRA-friendly views on gun rights, found a Pew Research Center survey in 2017.

But those effects are relatively small compared to the impact of repeated trainings which teach police to value their own safety above all else. That notion has become deeply embedded in police officer culture and underlies many of the incidents that most inflame the public.

None of this is intended to diminish real-life tragedies like that which befell Harris County Sheriff's Deputy Sandeep Dhaliwal - who recently was shot to death by a mentally ill parolee at a traffic stop - only to put the relative risks in context. Such incidents are far more rare than most people believe. (Pew found that three in ten Americans estimate police fire their weapons several times per year, whereas in fact most never fire them.)

There are more than three-quarters of a million police officers in the United States, but the number who are feloniously killed in the line of duty typically never exceeds double digits (with the terrorist attacks of 9-11 being an important, notable exception). This chart, compiled from FBI data, depicts the number of officers who die each year including both accidents and felonious deaths

Data

By contrast, police shoot and kill nearly 1,000 people per year across America.

Grits believes it will take a generation to change police culture surrounding use of force and end the "warrior cop" mentality that's become de jure in modern law enforcement. But it will take longer than that if officer trainings continue the scaredy-cop approach.

Deescalation can't just be tacked on in addition to use-of-force training - it must BECOME the use-of-force training. And it needs to happen soon.

Initial thoughts on the Amber Guyger verdict

Former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger's murder conviction and ten year prison sentence raises so many conflicted emotions! Here are Grits' initial thoughts on the trial and the outcome:

Abuse of power by police union prez should be punished, forbidden going forward
Maybe what stood out to me most was the role of Dallas police union president Mike Mata. He showed up at the scene of the shooting, sequestered Guyger from police investigators, and gave orders to cops on the scene to turn off cameras and mics in the police car where she was sitting - which they followed! Mata is a police sergeant, not an attorney, and had no legal authority to keep Guyger from being questioned or recorded. His actions corrupted the process from the beginning. Outside of a defendant's attorney, no other third party would be allowed to do this, but Mata misused his sergeant's rank to protect her. He should be disciplined or fired for this abuse of authority, and the department should establish rules to prevent it from happening again.

Racist social media posts by cops not harmless
Guyger's racist social media postings, and those of her colleagues, also deserve more scrutiny. As the Plain View Project revealed earlier this year, this is not a one-off but part of a broader departmental problem that has been tolerated by management and encouraged by a flat-out racist subculture within the agency. Now that an officer engaging in this behavior has been convicted of murdering a black man, we see the issue of racist "personal" opinions of Dallas PD officers quite clearly has policy implications. IMO, this episode shows officers holding such views are a clear and present public-safety threat.

Deescalation training clearly insufficient; Guyger said she never considered it
Just months before the shooting, Guyger had received 8 hours of deescalation training which was mandated in 2017 by the Sandra Bland Act. But Guyger testified using those deescalation tactics never entered her mind. So was her training insufficient? Should it be expanded? Required more frequently? Do departmental policies reflect that training and require officers to use deescalation where possible? Are there professional consequences for failing to deescalate when possible, and if not, why not? DPD and the public should be concerned that its training was so ineffective that a uniformed police officer never even considered it before firing her service weapon at an unarmed man.

So we don't prosecute evidence tampering anymore?
Guyger and her married partner with whom she was having an affair both deleted texts from the night of the murder on their phones, although investigators later recovered them. Why wasn't her partner charged with evidence tampering, as any civilian would have been if they tried to destroy evidence in a murder case? Should a cop who tried to destroy evidence in a murder case even still be on the force?

Flaws in Castle-Doctrine law exposed in case
Some folks on social media blamed the judge for allowing Guyger to use the Castle Doctrine defense. But the judge isn't to blame; Texas legislators are. Most people think the Castle Doctrine means people defending their own home, as in "a man's home is his castle." But Guyger was a home invader entering another person's apartment! So there's a perception among those who haven't dug into the details of the law that there is now some sort of Castle-Doctrine bubble that white cops get to carry around with them and apply wherever they are. That impression is understandable. It sure looks that way from the outside! But in reality, the judge had no choice but to give a jury instruction on the Castle Doctrine. Texas' law says the shooter must only have a "belief" that they're protecting their home, they are not required to factually be protecting their home. So Guyger triggered the defense when she claimed she thought she was entering her own apartment. That's WAY too broad and should be scaled back when the Legislature meets next.

The verdict, and the hug(s)
Grits was not among those who believed a super-long sentence was required in this case, and I was glad Botham Jean's brother forgave Guyger from the stand and even stepped down to hug her. He's modeling excellent, Christian behavior and society would be better off if more victim families embraced forgiveness as a primary value. However, I feel differently about the judge hugging Guyger afterward. The judge didn't initiate it, but the photo of the embrace gave an appearance of special treatment in a situation that already was rife with them. It appears from a distance - obviously I wasn't there for the blow-by-blow - that the judge, an African-American woman, did a good job. But that photo coupled with a below-average murder sentence will be seen to contradict that.

***

There are many more issues coming out of this tragedy that will be debated going forward, these are just first-cut considerations in the immediate aftermath. While civil verdicts are more common in Dallas, a criminal conviction of a police officer is a rare and stunning result. Out of more than 50 officer-involved shootings in Dallas this year, only one officer has been indicted, and it's even more rare for indicted officers to be convicted and sent to prison. So by any measure, the verdict is big news. But Guyger's conviction won't in and of itself change a departmental culture that protects bad cops, tolerates their racist views and online postings, and fails to punish evidence tampering by its officers. That will require local officials to step up. And the public will be watching.

Humpty Dumpty, the Castle Doctrine, and other stories

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

Humpty Dumpty and the Castle Doctrine

The judge in former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger's murder trial for the shooting of Botham Jean gave the jury instructions on the Castle Doctrine defense, despite the fact that Guyger entered Jean's home and shot him, and wasn't defending her "castle." Her lawyers employed this argument as their primary defense (that it wasn't her home was a "mistake of fact," they said) so the judge had no choice but to address it, but Humpty Dumpty would be proud! The claim didn't help Guyger, however. She was convicted, anyway. UPDATE: Guyger was sentenced to ten years.

Death of trailblazing deputy raises difficult, familiar questions
The tragic shooting death of a Harris County Sheriff's deputy - a trail blazing figure who was the first Sikh to work in Harris County law enforcement - raises familiar questions with no satisfying answers. The alleged killer is a severely schizophrenic parolee who had gone off his meds and heard voices telling him to kill people. Is the criminal-justice system the best way to deal with people whose offenses are rooted in severe mental illness? How did this convicted felon and parolee get a firearm? He already was the subject of a warrant for violating his parole, should more resources be allocated to search for high-risk parole violators? His family had told officials he was dangerous and off his meds: Are there "red flag" laws that could have allowed them to act sooner? The circumstances surrounding this awful episode will provide fodder for these and many other debates in coming years. The public dialogue would have been easier, in a sense, if this had turned out to be a hate crime. The issues surrounding mental illness and the politics of gun proliferation are much more complex and difficult to deal with.

Private jail operator keeps screwing up
At the Liberty County Jail, which is operated by the Geo Group, "In the last 60 days, there have been two felony escapes, one of their correctional officers was arrested for stealing from inmates while on duty, and most recently, there are questions surrounding the death of a prisoner who hanged himself while in their custody. Apart from those instances, they have also flunked two jail inspections this year, one on April 22 and the second on June 28," the Houston Chronicle reported. Local officials are considering whether to terminate ties with the private prison contractor.

The economics of high probation fees
Check out a new article from our friend Todd Jermstad, probation director in Bell County, on the history and future of court-imposed fees at Texas probation departments. Especially interesting was his thesis that policymakers should take into account reduced means of Gen X and Millenial defendants, whose economic prospects remain less robust than earlier generations. Grits may delve more deeply into this soon, but for now, here's the link.

Bail litigation roundup
See a write-up from The Appeal of recent bail-litigation news, including from Houston and Galveston. See also related Grits coverage and our discussion of the topic in Just Liberty's most recent Reasonably Suspicious podcast.

Over friggin' pot?
In Hutto, a police officer responding to a call that someone was smoking marijuana beat up a man in his driveway and made false accusations in official documents to justify it. The victim had no marijuana in his possession, and bodycam video proved the cop was lying about the victim pushing the officer before he was attacked. The officer was fired, was indicted in May, and the victim has filed a civil rights suit, reported KXAN-TV.

Homelessness problems and solutions
In the wake of Austin's tendentious debate over homeless policy, I was interested to see this excellent New Republic article on "housing insecurity in the nation's richest cities." When, in the 1990s, my wife and I could rent a dilapidated three-bedroom house in East Austin for $190, homelessness wasn't such a big problem. Now that rents in my neighborhood for similar homes approach $3k per month, it's little wonder more people are on the streets. Meanwhile, Bloomberg News had an informative piece a couple of months back on how Finland all but eliminated people sleeping on the streets by investing in preventive strategies like rent subsidies.

How police misconduct gets covered up by plea bargaining
Here's an excellent analysis from Brooklyn public defender Scott Hechinger of how mandatory minimums and the threat of long sentences help cover up police misconduct that would otherwise come out in court. That's because "victims of police abuse — illegal stops and frisks, car stops and searches, home raids, manufactured charges and excessive force — routinely forgo their constitutional right to challenge police abuse in a pretrial hearing in exchange for plea deals." This is undeniably true. It's only in cases like the episode in Hutto, described above, where victims face no charges that officers can be held accountable through regular court processes.

Financial motive not only reason prosecutors oppose actual-innocence claims
The New York Times published a feature on falsely convicted people who've been exonerated by the evidence but cannot secure an "actual innocence" ruling because prosecutors fear the financial consequences of civil rights lawsuits against local jurisdictions. All of the examples are from other states, but Texas' situation casts additional light on this topic. I was policy director at the Innocence Project of Texas when the Legislature passed the best-in-the-nation compensation package for exonerees in 2009. We hoped to avoid this dynamic by having the state compensate innocent convicts instead of the locals. Indeed, the bill was sold as a form of "tort reform," eliminating local liability for what were seen as systemic flaws causing false convictions. But it turned out, the real, underlying complaints weren't financial. Many prosecutors and some judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals simply don't want to see falsely convicted people compensated, ever, and go to great lengths to oppose actual-innocence claims, despite the fact that locals weren't on the hook. So Grits is skeptical of the article's thesis that the motive behind opposing actual-innocence claims is financial. I think it's more pernicious than that.

Sheriffs and #cjreform
Our pal Jessica Pishko published a New York Times op ed on Sheriff's offices, declaring "The problem of sheriffs is particularly acute in the South and Southwest, where the office has more power and was historically used to prop up white supremacy." She calls for Sheriffs to undertake what amounts to a truth-and-reconciliation process for past wrongs. That sanguine suggestion to me seems unlikely. Texas alone has 254 counties, after all - a few might do that, under the right political circumstances, but most will not. And abolishing the office, as some have called for, doesn't change the fact that someone has to perform those functions. Grits has often thought that sheriffs' jail-management duties should be separated from their responsibilities to patrol unincorporated areas. These are distinct functions involving very different skill sets, and typically those elected to the office only have knowledge of one or the other. Whether Sheriffs should be an elected position is a question for another day.

Deep thinking on sex-offender policies
A recent NY Times piece examined emerging research on people who are sexually attracted to minors, finding that its roots are not genetic, but are "prenatal," and "can be traced to specific periods of development in the womb." And this Marshall Project story looks at evidence-based anti-recidivism programs aimed at people convicted of violent, sexual crimes once their sentence is complete. I found both articles to be thoughtful contributions to the discussion.

Most crime dropping nationally, but look at those rape numbers!
New Uniform Crime Report data is out, and most categories of crime have continued to fall, except rape, which has risen precipitously since 2014. See first-cut analyses from the Brennan Center and the Marshall Project. No one knows for sure what's behind the rise in rape numbers. The feds began using a more expansive definition of sexual assault in 2014, but the numbers increased even using the "legacy" definition. The question arises: Have there actually been more rapes committed over this period, or are we simply now getting a more complete picture of the scope of the problem in the wake of increased reporting thanks to the #MeToo movement? ¿Quien sabe? Regardless, the year-over-year decline in property crimes, murders, robberies, etc., is cause for celebration, while the sex-assault data should contribute to deeper conversations on the question.

The Art of Deflection: HPD chief shows how to blame judges for policing failures

Police chiefs in Harris County continue to attack bail reform - most recently Houston police chief Art Acevedo - but the examples given never seem to bear out their complaints. Acevedo yesterday went on local TV to blame judges for releasing a defendant who later ended up shooting a police officer with his own gun after a struggle.

His comments came at the scene of an unrelated police shooting near a school where the suspect was killed, and the chief attempted to conflate the cases. In the Fox26 news story, he succeeded in conflating them; the article was so poorly constructed, I had to go to other sources to figure out what the hell he was talking about. Reported Fox26:

Acevedo threatened to call out judges who grant bond to violent offenders while speaking at the scene of an officer involved shooting on South Gessner Monday. The shooting happened as one of his officer [sic] is recovering from being shot Thursday by a suspect who was out on bond. 

Court records show that suspect—Brandon Bell, 17—paid zero dollars to bond out of jail two weeks ago after allegedly carjacking a woman at gunpoint. 

"If you lived in a high crime area and you knew that these judges were gonna let a violent criminal go in one door and within a matter of hours or a day or two get out on a low bond, do you want to testify against them?" asked Acevedo.

Brandon Bell was NOT the shooter at the school where Acevedo gave the comments, but you really can't tell from the story until the final line, when the reporter finally named the deceased.

It turns out, however, there's more to Mr. Bell's story than the chief is letting on: "In Brandon Bell's case, records show he bonded out on a misdemeanor trespassing charge September 3, before investigators could collect enough evidence to charge him with felony aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon."

So think about what's being said: Acevedo crows to the media that Bell was let out on a personal bond for carjacking, and the reporter dutifully repeats the claim. But she already knows that's not exactly true, and buried the counterfactual at the bottom of the story. His officers hadn't filed the carjacking charges when he was released, only misdemeanor trespassing!

How long should courts hold misdemeanor defendants to let police investigate them for crimes with which they haven't been charged? On what basis should they have detained the 17-year old, who in most other states would have been charged as a juvenile?

In America, police don't get to arrest people and hold them in jail when they are unable to supply probable cause the person committed an offense. And if they'd presented evidence against Mr. Bell in the carjacking incident, he'd have been charged with a felony and remained in jail. The failure to do so is the only reason he wasn't held longer.

The judge who bonded the guy out told the reporter:

Judge Darrell Jordan who approved Bell's bond told Fox 26 he was just following Texas law. 

"If there is a trespassing case or something like that—then that person will be released on a general order bond," said Jordan. "The bond amount will say $100, but they pay nothing."

Even if Bell had been required to pay the $100, that's not going to keep anybody off the streets for long. The real issue is Houston PD and the DA's office hadn't charged him with anything more serious, even though he'd allegedly committed a carjacking. Two weeks later, the kid shot a police officer.

This is pure deflection, blaming judges for Houston PD's own failures.

MORE: For those interested in more detail, Don Hooper of the Houston Conservative Forum posted the police affidavit on Twitter alleging Mr. Bell engaged in carjacking, and proceeded to argue the details of the episode (contentiously) with a cop. The complainant recognized the carjacker at the scene, and a robbery detective conducted a photo array on the same day in which she identified him again. But police didn't file the affidavit alleging the carjacking charge until Sept. 9th, after Bell had already been released. How is this the judge's fault, again?

Police shootings, jailhouse snitches, and debunking anti-bail-reform arguments

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

Federal judge debunks anti-bail reform arguments from Harris DA
Federal District Judge Lee Rosenthal, a George W. Bush appointee, approved the bail-reform settlement in Harris County over objections from District Attorney Kim Ogg. See coverage from The Appeal  and Houston Public Media. The judge's order address the DA's objections specifically, and IMO decisively.

Bail-reform injunction issued in Galveston
Another federal judge issued an injunction against Galveston County requiring reform of their bail system. The judge would  require the county to provide counsel for indigent felony defendants at their initial bail hearing. By contrast, the Harris County case only involved misdemeanor cases. See the Texas Tribune's coverage.

Speaking for the defense: The only time prosecution theories are excluded from crime stories is when police officers are accused
I have never seen a major newspaper run an article promoting ONLY defense-attorney theories prior to the trial of a murder defendant, except when the defendant is a police officer. Then, we get stories like this one from the Dallas Morning News explaining why a jury should acquit former Dallas police officer Amber Guyger for killing Botham Jean in his home.

'Excited delirium' is still not a real thing
Speaking of Big D cops, Dallas DA John Creuzot told an audience last week that his office chose not to indict the cops who killed Tony Timpa because one of them patted him on the back and tried to comfort him after kneeing him in the back and mocking him as he lay dying. Creuzot said Timpa died of "excited delirium," which he apparently thinks is a real condition that can be treated with Xanax. But regular readers know that's a fake diagnosis that is only ever assigned to people who die in police custody. The Washington Post has reported that the diagnosis appears in no medical textbooks outside of training materials for medical examiners.

Gap in TX jailhouse snitch reporting system cited
Texas' 2017 statute requiring Texas prosecutors to keep records on their use of jailhouse snitches and report snitch's history to the defense made an appearance in this Washington Post story on jailhouse informants. However, the article noted, "Although Texas and other states are now tracking the use of informants, county prosecutors are keeping the records and only Connecticut will be keeping a statewide system, Innocence Project lawyers said. One problem, they said, is prosecutors in one county may not know about an informant’s testimony in other counties." In addition to the 2017 statute, Texas in 2009 required corroboration to secure a conviction based on jailhouse informant testimony, and in 201 the Lege required corroboration for informants in drug cases.

Reminder: Lying snitches need prosecutor collaborators to do harm
Speaking of informants, prosecutors failing to disclose a deal with a snitch in George Powell's prosecution for armed robbery - along with flawed and unproven forensic evidence - contributed to his conviction being recently overturned. The informant lied on the stand and prosecutors failed to correct the misstatements, the courts found. Now, the Bell County DA wants to retry Powell, and defense attorneys want his office removed from the case because of the alleged misconduct.

Lessons on policing, poverty, and racial discrimination
This analysis of policing, poverty and racial discrimination at the Tulsa (OK) PD includes lessons applicable in virtually every American police department.