Even arresting 'kingpins' won't reduce US drug demand

Arresting drug dealers was never a winning Drug War strategy because, as long as demand existed, there was always a willing supplier ready to replace anyone who was arrested, prosecuted, jailed, or even killed. As it turns out, that's true at the highest echelons of the international drug trade.

These changes arguably justify dismantling much of the federal drug enforcement infrastructure as we know it, argued an article in Foreign Affairs by Steven Dudley published this spring, declaring "the days of the monolithic, hegemonic criminal groups with all-powerful leaders are over." As a result, "For U.S. policymakers, it may be overkill to direct the resources of six federal law enforcement agencies toward dismantling these groups, especially in the era of synthetic drugs."

The author observed that today there are "a wide variety of American, Chinese, Dominican, Indian, and Mexican groups supplying the U.S. market, some that conduct almost all of their business online from within the United States."

The FA story linked to a detailed report on Fentanyl smuggling via Mexico and China that's worth a look for those interested in either addiction or drug enforcement. Texas largely has been spared a huge fentanyl problem essentially by chance: the cartels that supply Texas sell "black tar" heroin which doesn't mix well with fentanyl, while heroin that comes to the northeast and midwest from Dominican suppliers or from the Sinaloa cartel on the west coast is more easily mixed. Check out the spike in national overdose deaths associated with the rise of fentanyl:

None of this is to say Texas has no overdose problem. We do, and it's worsening. But it's so far been focused more on meth and cocaine than opiods.

Regardless, the death total was heightened by the Governor's veto of and continued opposition to Good Samaritan legislation. Moreover, the state's failure to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act keeps drug treatment out of reach for nearly all low-income people except through the justice system. Jails and prisons are a poor and ineffective substitute for free-world healthcare, for addiction as much as for mental illness.

Notice, none of the things that would actually save lives involve chasing down drug suppliers in other countries. That has shown to be fruitless. What Americans refer to as "cartels" are really vast hydra-like webs of interconnected companies and criminal organizations that readily reproduce the function of any and every severed limb. Many, many billions of US taxpayer dollars have been spent trying to slay these beasts and for every head severed, two grow in its place.

This isn't new, by the way, it's always been true. It was easy for anyone paying attention to the world of drug smuggling to see that shooting Pablo Escobar solved nothing. Only reducing US-side demand can scale back the scope of the drug trade.

American law enforcement largely has failed, or more aptly, refused to accept this reality. As Upton Sinclair famously put it, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”

The "kingpin" model justified numerous law-enforcement strategies - e.g., expanded use of asset forfeiture, reduced Fourth Amendment protections, abetting the rise of SWAT teams and execution search warrants via SWAT-like "dynamic entry" -  that in practice mostly empower law enforcement in petty, workaday cases. For many years, the drug war was also a reliable source of federal pork.

All this was justified by the idea that trolling for "little fish" could lead to catching "big fish." But even the big fish turned out to be parts of massive schools and were easily replaced. We have decades of evidence that catching, jailing, or even killing "kingpins" does nothing to reduce addiction in the United States.

So if supply-side interdiction has proved pointless, what might affect the demand side? The best way to reduce demand would be to expand Medicaid to access treatment funds to fight addiction. Another recently proven method is to encourage legal, domestic sourcing. Pot legalization in many states has bolstered domestic supply and substantially reduced, but not eliminated, demand for illegal imported marijuana, as demonstrated in this data from the fentanyl report mentioned above:

One final thought: The myopic focus of US drug policy on Latin America is an odd thing, because Afghanistan is overwhelmingly the most important source of illicit opiods coming into the US, according to the Department of State (p. 29 of the pdf):

But drugs are almost exclusively portrayed in the press as a Mexico problem. (China's role was particularly highlighted in the fentanyl report.) In fact, the international illicit drug trade is a global problem, one fueled almost entirely by an insatiable US demand. As long as demand, and prices, remain high, no supply-side intervention will ever "solve" it. As the Foreign Affairs story colorfully concluded:

El Chapo was a powerful and wealthy drug lord, and bringing him down was an undeniably important step in curtailing the reach of Mexico’s cartels. But burnishing his status as a kingpin perpetuates a false narrative that destroying him—and those like him—will solve the problems posed by the drug trade. In fact, convicting one drug lord is more akin to plucking a single bee from the hive.

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!

Digesting new Daubert opinion on DNA mixtures

Grits earlier referenced the opinion from federal District Judge Janet Neff, in Michigan's western district, who directly evaluated the most common, commercial DNA-mixture software using probabilistic genotyping under the Daubert standard for whether to allow expert testimony. Texas courts heretofore have let in such evidence but avoided a direct Daubert evaluation.

There was a Texas connection in the case. Dr. Michael Coble, of the University of North Texas Health Science Center, was the expert employed by the prosecution. He has been one of several key advisers to the Texas Forensic Science Commission and the legal system in general as the state has struggled with this DNA-mixture issue. The expert for the defense, whose arguments more frequently prevailed in Neff's opinion, was Dr. Dan Krane, from Wright State in Ohio.

Judge Neff evaluated each prong of the Daubert standard as it related to the STR-Mix DNA mixture-analysis software. This program employs high-end math that few DNA-lab practitioners can actually reproduce called "probabilistic genotyping." But programs are only as good as the assumptions that guide their work, and some of the assumptions in each case - e.g., the number of contributing samples - are inputted by the user. There are subjective judgment calls throughout the process. Further, because the math results from tens of thousands of randomized guesses, the results aren't replicable test to test.

Judge Neff was disquieted that, unlike for one-to-one DNA matching or two-source mixtures, as with a rape kit, there are no controlling standards for interpreting DNA mixtures, especially for samples with very small amounts of DNA - maybe only a few scattered cells.

The judge also made the interesting point that, even if the math behind the STR-Mix software is impeccable, there were international standards for coding such high-end math projects and the STR-Mix software didn't meet them all. Coble was dismissive that other fields might have standards to contribute, but the product in question is so obviously an intersection of an array of multidisciplinary work, the judge didn't buy it.

Further, the judge echoed concern that most validation studies on the software so far have been conducted by company principals. And while there was peer-reviewed support for STR-Mix (again, mostly for studies by people with a financial stake in the project), none of that peer-reviewed work focused on low-level samples as in this case, where just a few cells were found that were said to belong to the defendant.

One point that's always bugged me was raised in an expository section of the opinion but not included in her reasons for her Daubert denial: “[D]ue to the methodologies used in STRMix, '[t]he results of no two analyses will be completely the same',” she wrote. Elsewhere, she quoted an academic article noting that, "for a technique to be broadly applicable, it must be based on measurements that can be replicated." Supporters of the software, however, say replicability isn't necessary and it should be good enough if the results were all in some acceptable range. Regardless, while Judge Neff clearly observed this incongruity, it wasn't included in her final reasons for her ruling.

Clearly the most persuasive piece of evidence for Judge Neff was the 2016 PCAST report which expressly stated that STR-Mix was validated for up to three sources if the sample to be identified is at least 20 percent of the total. She did not find further validation regarding smaller samples, and the very small sample in this case, she believed, merited even greater caution. She essentially treated the threshold cited by PCAST as a bright line regarding the current state of the science. STR-Mix can be used for traditional one or two-source DNA matching, she ruled, and for three-source mixtures if the sample to be matched made up 20 percent or more of the whole. But otherwise, the estimates would be inadmissible.

One small upside for backlogged crime labs using STR-Mix: This would make it easier to screen DNA mixture submissions. Samples with more than 3 contributors should probably be rejected up front as unanalyzable "crap," to use the words of a prominent DNA expert who advised Texas crime labs on the topic.

Errors in such cases can cause false convictions, so Grits is glad to see this increasingly dirt-common evidence more carefully vetted. From the time probabilistic genotyping was first introduced to Texas crime labs in 2015, experts were warning against stretching the limits of the math (i.e., trying to analyze "crap"). Judge Neff would set a bright-line threshold, and given the current state of the literature, it's not an unreasonable choice. In many ways, it's the most defensible (it would probably be easier to get past it by improving the tech than defeating her arguments). But whatever threshold one chooses, her decision highlights that one must exist, even if courts haven't heretofore required it.

I'd quoted it earlier, but I loved Judge Neff's conclusory analysis of current DNA-mixture-evidence practices, so let's give her the final word here:

The DNA evidence sought to be admitted in this case—in essence, that it is 49 million times more likely if Daniel Gissantaner is a contributor to the DNA on the gun than if he is not— is not really evidence at all. It is a combination of forensic DNA techniques, mathematical theory, statistical methods (including Monte Carlo-Markov Chain modeling, as in the Monte Carlo gambling venue), decisional theory, computer algorithms, interpretation, and subjective opinions that cannot in the circumstances of this case be said to be a reliable sum of its parts. Our system of justice requires more.

Anyone interested should definitely read the whole opinion. This summary hardly does it justice.

MORE: From Techdirt.

See prior, related Grits posts:

• Most crime labs accused innocent person in DNA mixture study
• A reluctant scoop: Changing interpretations of DNA mixtures vex legal system
• Labs must correct wrong DNA mixture analyses, learn when to recognize 'crap'
• Resources on DNA mixtures
• The challenge of notifying defendants in large-scale forensic error cases
• Courts punt on forensics surrounding DNA mixtures
• Black box DNA mixture analysis method used in NYC turned out to be flawed
• Changes to DNA mixture software raise questions about old versions
• News flash: 'Touch DNA' doesn't necessarily require touching
• DNA mixture SNAFU a mess but don't expect 'deluge' of innocence claims

State officials vs local pols on bail and policing, reinvigorating community service, why that weird brass-knuckles bill was really a thing, and other stories

Let's clear a few browser tabs with a roundup of stories that merit Grits readers' attention:

Texas AG insults federal judge's intelligence
Somewhat predictably, I suppose, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton weighed in against Harris County's proposed bail settlement, siding against the commissioners court and local judges who agreed to the compromise. Paxton's brief rehashes Houston Chief Art Acevedo's red herring arguments about the Brandon Bell case, engaging in the Willie-Horton-type tactics Judge Rosenthal already rejected from the bail bondsmen and the DA's office. And his brief states flat-out untrue things as facts, like claiming that people engaged in "Riot[ing]" or "Assault causing bodily injury" would automatically get out of jail on personal bonds. That's written for the sake of the media and the public: Judge Rosenthal already knows it's false.

Gov. Abbott's penchant for deploying troopers to patrol cities
Gov. Greg Abbott notoriously has threatened to send state troopers to Austin to roust homeless folks, or something. And earlier this year, at the Governor's command, DPS troopers patrolled the streets of Dallas, ostensibly to combat violent crime. They left in less than three months after complaints emerged from the city council. Grits had forgotten, however, that Abbott had done the same thing in Houston and San Antonio back in 2017. From the 2018 state Gang Threat Assessment:

In 2017, Governor Greg Abbott directed the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) to assist local law enforcement agencies experiencing increases in violent crime in their jurisdictions. Operation North Star in Harris County began in April 2017 and the San Antonio Violent Crime Task Force (Operation Alamo) in San Antonio and Bexar County began in January 2017, with DPS joining the operation in May 2017. Both operations integrate intelligence, patrol and investigations to prevent crime in these high threat areas, including gang-related crimes and violence. 

With so many troopers either deployed at the border or patrolling cities which already have their own police departments, one wonders who's out looking for drunks on the highways? That used to be DPS's job.

Change to brass knuckles law prevents hundreds of convictions per year
Texas decriminalized brass knuckles in 2019. According to this chart, there were 509 convictions in Texas for possessing them in 2018, the year before the law changed. That's a lot more than I would have suspected!

Community service options suffer from spotty implementation
The Center for Court Innovation has identified a notable gap in best practices for use of community service to satisfy low-level citation offenses. They suggest courts should diversify community service offerings, including allowing defendants to suggest options, and expand its use beyond just young people and first-time offenders, as is common in some jurisdictions.

On the politics of data, and its absence
When available data isn't quite on point to inform policy decisions, it's always worth asking not just what additional data might be probative, but also why it's not now being gathered.

DNA mixture software widely used in Texas disallowed by MI federal judge

For some time, Grits has been skeptical whether DNA-mixture software would hold up to "Daubert" scrutiny if judges were to directly evaluate it. In 2015, this blog reluctantly broke the story in Texas about errors and uncertainties regarding how to evaluate DNA mixture evidence. (They were being openly discussed by the Forensic Science Commission and the Court of Criminal Appeals' Criminal Justice Integrity Unit when I worked for the Innocence Project of Texas, but reporters weren't covering the complicated, math-heavy story.) After that, I've followed the issue from afar even after I stopped tracking forensics in any professional capacity.

STR-Mix is one of a handful of companies selling their product as a solution to the conundrum of how to evaluate DNA mixture evidence. Now, a federal district judge in Michigan, Janet Neff, after an exhaustive review of the science, has ruled directly on the Daubert-based admissibility questions surrounding this product that Texas courts punted on. In particular, Judge Neff ruled in favor of defendant David Gissantaner, concluding that

The DNA evidence sought to be admitted in this case—in essence, that it is 49 million times more likely if Daniel Gissantaner is a contributor to the DNA on the gun than if he is not— is not really evidence at all. It is a combination of forensic DNA techniques, mathematical theory, statistical methods (including Monte Carlo-Markov Chain modeling, as in the Monte Carlo gambling venue), decisional theory, computer algorithms, interpretation, and subjective opinions that cannot in the circumstances of this case be said to be a reliable sum of its parts. Our system of justice requires more. 

It is the Court’s hope that this decision brings to light the shortcomings or, at the very least, points of inquiry necessary in evaluating this advancing technology as a tool in forensic DNA analysis. There must be a dialogue among key players in the general interest of the development and refinement of the technology, the software and its application by the individuals charged with its use in the field, rather than post-hoc testing of its reliability in the context of a criminal prosecution where the ultimate question is the freedom and guilt or innocence of the person of interest. 

Here, because the sum of the parts simply does not add up to a reliable whole, the DNA analysis/likelihood ratio resulting from the use of the STRmix probabilistic genotyping software must be excluded. Defendant’s motion to exclude evidence is granted. An Order will enter consistent with this Opinion.

Wow! Obviously, this doesn't apply in Texas nor anywhere in the 5th Circuit. But it's the first time to my knowledge that a federal judge has taken a deep dive into the science behind proprietary DNA mixture software and rejected it based on the Daubert standard. Welcome to the party, Judge! Grits was beginning to feel a bit lonely in that view!

In one-to-one DNA matches, or two-source matches like a rape kit where the DNA of the victim is known, DNA evidence remains the gold standard of forensic science. But analyzing DNA mixture evidence - e.g., "touch DNA" on a doorknob or DNA from a blanket on a couch - remains a more subjective process that's sometimes more of a guess than a "match."

I want to delve into the judge's opinion more deeply before commenting further, but this seems like a big development. We know at least some Texas labs use the same proprietary DNA software the federal judge in Michigan disallowed.

Clarification: More on this soon, but having now more closely read the opinion, Grits should clarify that the court recognized STR-Mix software results could be considered valid for distinguishing up to three-sourced DNA mixture samples, but only if the DNA one is attempting to match makes up at least 20% of the sample; in this case it made up 7%. So saying STR-Mix software was "disallowed" in the headline was too broad. Under this ruling, STR-Mix results for one and two source DNA samples would remain admissible, and for three sources, if the sample one wanted to identify made up at least 20 percent of the total. But it couldn't be used when there were only trace amounts from the third DNA source, or when there are four or more sources. Here is a spot where user expectations for forensics exceed the capabilities of actual science. In many ways, the judge's advice corroborates what experts have said in Texas since this issue first arose: beyond a certain point, DNA mixtures become un-interpretable "crap." You can push the math further, but the evidence doesn't therefore improve.

The state of 'progressive prosecutors' in Texas

The article in The Atlantic titled "Texas prosecutor fights for reform" has a certain "Man Bites Dog" quality, which I suppose makes local news from Texas interesting enough for East and West coast media and muckety mucks to take notice. Not that John Creuzot's work in Dallas doesn't deserve attention. In Grits' view, he is the most confident, competent, and sure-footed of Texas' new crop of Democratic DAs. But at this point, the term "progressive district attorney" requires so many caveats that it should probably be discarded, at least in red states, until a few key benchmarks have been established and met.

When Kim Ogg of Houston, Mark Gonzalez in Corpus Christi, and Margaret Moore in Austin were elected DAs of their respective counties in 2016, there was a clutch of mostly national advocates and journalists, coupled with a few local electoral partisans, who pronounced them part of a new wave of "progressive prosecutors." Grits argued at the time that there was no such thing (and still largely thinks that's true).

Larry Krasner's election in Philadelphia changed things. His office produced a memo detailing new policies aimed at reducing incarceration rates that was much more daring and aggressively decarceral than any previous US prosecutor had ever suggested. (For a contemporary podcast discussion of Krasner's memo in context of Texas candidates, see here.) Soon, prosecutors in other states began running mimicking parts of Krasner's approach as well as expanding or exploring other decarceral programs.

In Texas, though, the decarceral efforts of our Democratic DAs have been much more modest.

Harris and Travis Counties have created special courts for state-jail felonies that have helped chip away at state-jail incarceration rates. Joe Gonzalez in San Antonio took a won't-prosecute stance on low-level pot possession (Ogg created a pretrial diversion program for pot.) And both Mark Gonzalez and Margaret Moore found themselves in the happy position to replace such embarrassingly bad prosecutors, they could look like an improvement just by avoiding overt misconduct and not drooling on themselves in public.

On bail reform, in particular, for the most part these prosecutors' positions are far from "progressive." And even if they are, as with Creuzot, judges, local criminal-defense attorneys, and other special interests have proven effective at throwing a monkey wrench into potential solutions.

Ogg in particular has chosen to pick fights with county commissioners, newly elected Democratic judges, reformers, journalists, and academics over every perceived slight, leaving herself ever-more frustrated and isolated. Most prominently, she attacked the pending bail-reform settlement and demanded the county radically increase her staff size without acknowledging how that would a) create disadvantages for underfunded indigent defense or b) run counter to decarceration goals. (Recently a group of scholars came out to criticize the methodology of a study her office promoted to justify the request for more staff.)

Creuzot was the first Texas DA to more comprehensively articulate his own decarceral agenda, sort of a Larry-Krasner-Lite, but whose pronouncements are peppered with "y'alls." His policies were more modest than, say, newly elected prosecutors in Philly, St. Louis, or Boston. Even so, there's no doubt Creuzot's positions were more concrete and his thinking about decarceration is the most-well-developed of any Lone-Star prosecutor. Indeed, his general election vs. a Republican incumbent essentially centered around which one of them would be more reform-minded.

By contrast, in Houston, some of the same reform voices who prematurely hailed Kim Ogg as a progressive in 2016 are calling for her replacement by Audia Jones. Margaret Moore last year asked local reformers to endorse her push to merge the District and County Attorney offices under her control, but refused to enact any of the reforms local advocates wanted in return. As a result, the merger didn't happen and she now faces a serious reform challenger in Jose Garza.

Going forward, if any of these insurgents win in the coming Democratic primaries, then the terrain will have shifted and "progressive" will no longer effectively serve as a synonym for "Democrat" in Texas when it comes to prosecutor elections, as seems to have been the case so far.

Interview: Parsing the civil-rights lawsuit demanding Hepatitis C treatment for Texas prisoners

In last month's Reasonably Suspicious podcast, co-host Mandy Marzullo and I interviewed Texas civil-rights attorney Scott Medlock about his new lawsuit against the Texas prison system over the state's failure to treat inmates suffering from Hepatitis C. (See the original complaint here, and coverage from the Houston Chronicle.) Medlock first learned of the issue in a Grits for Breakfast blog post and filed the suit over the summer. Listen to the excerpted segment here, and find a transcript of our conversation below the jump:

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.

Roundup: Oversight overlooked, the I-35 Fine Corridor, a last chance to end forensic hypnosis, and more

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

Agency regulating judges toothless and useless
Texas' State Commission on Judicial Conduct is a toothless agency. Its investigators appear to do a good job, but they're too cozy with the judges they regulate and the results just don't sufficiently protect the public. This Houston Chronicle editorial speaks to that point: "The State Commission on Judicial Conduct should be embarrassed by the wrist slap it gave three current and eight former Harris County judges who routinely denied no-cost bail to thousands of poor defendants between 2009 and 2017," their editorial board opined. I agree, but the biggest problems are embedded in the statute and would require the Legislature to fix them.

Crime lab delays grind justice to a halt
State Representative Terry Canales complained to Texas DPS that crime-lab delays fundamentally threaten the administration of justice:

“Defendants are frequently and unnecessarily spending years in jail waiting for forensic evidence to be processed so that they can have their day in court,” Canales wrote. “This gross reality threatens the very essence of our legal system and the fabric of our democracy, and it devalues the credibility of the state’s governing bodies and law enforcement agency.”

According to the McAllen Monitor:

For instance, the oldest firearms case pending is 1,187 days old while the average turnaround is 228 days. The oldest pending fingerprint testing case is 1,279 days old while the average turnaround is 255 days. Finally, the longest pending seized drug case is approximately 1,209 days old while the average case takes 90 days to complete.

Drug war a major contributor to attacks on Fourth Amendment
There's a meme out there spread by revisionist academics like John Pfaff that critics of the drug war have overstated its contribution to mass incarceration. While it's true that only 16.5% of Texas prison inmates are incarcerated for drug crimes, drug cases represent 34% of all new felony charges filed, so Grits finds that criticism overstated, at best. Criminalizing addiction accounts for a huge proportion of how the justice system spends its time. But focusing solely on prison population ignores the severe collateral consequences from the drug war in scaling back Fourth Amendment rights, as prosecutors are seeking to do in two cases pending before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals. The Austin Statesman's Chuck Lindell covered those here.

Qualified immunity claim overcome in case vs. Dallas transit cop
The Fifth Circuit declined to dismiss a case against a Dallas transit cop based on qualified immunity after the officer arrested a photographer expressly in violation of her agency's written policy. Grits doesn't believe qualified immunity should even exist. Maybe Justice Don Willett is having an influence; he's a critic of the qualified immunity doctrine.

Activists angry at first Dallas police oversight board meeting
The initial meeting of the new police oversight board in Dallas erupted in chaos when board members tried to adjourn the meeting without hearing from the public. Activists were upset that three appointees had opposed creation of the board and lacked commitment to its mission. Adding fuel to the fire, reportedly one of the officers attempting to push citizens forcibly out of the room was wearing a "Punisher" t-shirt.

Fine revenue and local budgets
Now that the state legislature has capped property tax increases for local governments, expect more of them to attempt to boost revenue from criminal fines. An analysis by Governing magazine found 90 Texas municipalities where 10% or more of revenue came from fines, 39 where fines made up more than 20% of the budget, 22 where fines were more than 30% of the budget, and 10 where they made up more than half. An accompanying map shows that many of these are clustered along I-35 between San Antonio and Dallas.

Jury acquits prison guard despite repeated brutality
A Brazoria County jury found a Texas prison guard not guilty of aggravated assault after he slammed a handcuffed prisoner to the floor and killed him. The same guard had already been disciplined for doing the same thing to the same prisoner several months prior.

Politicizing innocence compensation
Having been deeply involved in passing Texas' best-in-the-nation innocence compensation statute when I was Innocence Project of Texas policy director back in 2009, Grits is incredibly disappointed at the Comptroller and Attorney General going to irregular lengths to deny compensation to Alfred Brown. This was pointless, mean-spirited, and driven by pandering to the Houston police union.

Last chance to get rid of 'forensic hypnosis'
This Guardian story on forensic hypnosis correctly hones in a case pending before the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals as the best chance for the state to be rid of the practice. But it incorrectly suggested the Forensic Science Commission could deal with the issue (they say they don't have jurisdiction because the practice doesn't deal with physical evidence), and a bill filed to end the practice at the Texas Legislature last session couldn't even get a hearing in the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. As such, the author was a bit too sanguine the practice might be abolished here. If the CCA doesn't get rid of this junk science, in Grits' estimation it will remain with us in Texas courts for a long, long time.

Hug it out
The judge in the Amber Guyger case explained why she gave the defendant a hug. And an academic argues that the hug Botham Jean's brother gave Guyger turned the trial into a lesson in restorative justice.

Governor should address homelessness crisis for all of Texas

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." - Matthew 25:40

The Trumpian tropes trotted out by the Governor and local Travis County GOP figures in the Austin homelessness debates - all while President Trump and Fox News frenetically amp up anti-homeless sentiment as a national-election wedge issue - make Grits feel tired and sad. It looks to me like a lot of state leaders doubling down on the wrong side of history, as happened not so long ago when opposing gay marriage was the wedge-issue de jeur.

For all the weeping and gnashing of teeth over Austin's homelessness problems, in reality this is something faced by communities around Texas and beyond, some of which have confronted the situation more honorably than others.

In Dallas, local media say there are no solutions in sight for the local homeless problem. But the governor isn't threatening them, and the troopers he sent in to fight crime left quietly after three months.

Houston's no-sit/no-lie ordinance, implemented under Mayor Sylvester Turner, is just pushing the population around the city. But what did work were large federal grants to pay for tracking homeless and connecting them with services.

The folks dispensing much-ballyhooed homeless services in San Antonio openly admit their must-be-sober-and-take-drug-tests-to-receive-help approach leaves much to be desired and keeps many people on the streets who might be helped by a housing-first approach.

Even places like Plano, Frisco, Lubbock, Midland, Tyler, Longview, Nacogdoches, Corpus Christi, Galveston, Sugar Land, Victoria, and Montgomery County struggle with homeless problems they don't advertise but cannot ignore.

Anti-homeless activists have spuriously suggested that California cities may send their homeless to Austin. But if anybody's doing that, it's Waco, where they're forcibly clearing out homeless camps using police and Sheriff's deputies. Then they use forced labor from county jail inmates to clean up the aftermath, with local journalists tagging along for the poverty porn.

Amarillo started down that same path, but city leaders had a change of heart and issued housing vouchers to people in a local encampment instead. Abilene, similarly, has chosen to empty its homeless camps by finding their residents housing instead of chasing them out. These jurisdictions don't have to deal with the scale of big-city homeless problems, to be sure, but their example complicates what the governor, speaking from his walled compound in Austin, might reasonably portray as a "Texan" approach.

Governor Abbott appears to have singled out Austin for political purposes, tying local debates into a national GOP effort to use homelessness as a wedge issue in the culture wars and blaming this decidedly capitalist problem on political liberalism. In doing so, he trivializes a human-rights crisis faced by numerous Texas cities, including the ones still controlled by Republicans. He's missing an opportunity to exercise leadership that could demonstrate to swing voters the Texas GOP can govern as well as it campaigns.

Perhaps what jumped out to Grits most in Abbott's letter was the threat to use "quarantines" to ban the homeless from certain quadrants. Texas' quarantine laws haven't been used since the Ann Richards administration, and that time it was also a politicized abuse of power. She disingenuously declared a quarantine to keep away the press in the aftermath of the Branch Davidian catastrophe in Waco, which incidentally is the only known use of quarantine authority by a US governor in the last century. Richards' quarantine was done in secret, but Gov. Abbott has now openly threatened to use this same authority to coerce a local city council to reinstate a repealed ordinance. Really?

As Sir Thomas More asked of his accusers, "when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, ... the laws all being flat?"

Austin Mayor Steve Adler declared that he took Gov. Abbott's entreaties as evidence that state government wants to "help" - a reaction that could only be taken as tongue in cheek. But what if Gov. Abbott did want to help solve homelessness?

For starters, the governor could begin to prioritize grants for housing, directing available funds for that purpose and working with Texas' congressional delegation to champion the cause of more federal housing grants from HUD. But as Texas Monthly's Christopher Hooks lamented:

There’s a notable and telling omission among the list of agencies Abbott has said will “help” Austin with its problems: the Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs, the state agency that helps build affordable housing. There’s been no real effort from state government to actually aid the city here, just a demand that they “fix” things.

He could work with legislators heading into the 2021 legislative session to develop funding packages for housing, mental-health services and prisoner reentry to help mitigate the causes of the problem. The state could fund urban "rest stops" like those on the side of the highway where homeless folks could shower and use the restroom. The governor could use his bully pulpit and personal appearances to fundraise for housing programs like Austin's Community First (at least, in between campaign fundraising for a race that's three years out).

That's what state-government leadership would look like on this issue. What we're seeing, everyone will notice, looks very different.

Texas trends follow national decline in misdemeanor arrests

The Wall Street Journal on Sunday published an item reporting on a nationwide decline in misdemeanor arrests, a trend this blog has been documenting for several years. So Grits thought it worth comparing the national trends cited to Texas data.

The WSJ article focused on jurisdictions where misdemeanor arrests could be broken out by race, with arrests of black people accounting for a disproportionate share of  the decrease. Texas data don't immediately allow us to make similar, racially delineated analyses, but the overall trend of reduced misdemeanor cases holds for Texas.

Texas misdemeanor cases by the numbers
Looking at top-line stats from the Office of Court Administration's 2018 Annual Statistical Report (from which all graphs below are screenshots), the number of non-traffic misdemeanor cases in Texas peaked in 2007 at 585,499, declining to 404,001.

When you consider Texas' dramatic population growth over these years, the decline appears even more significant.

Texas witnessed especially large declines over the previous five years in misdemeanor theft (-47%), theft by check (-81%), and driving with an invalid license (-25%), with small increases (less than population growth) for family violence (5%), marijuana possession (4%), and 1st offense DWI (2%).

Grits finds especially interesting the decline in misdemeanor-property-theft cases. Texas raised property-theft thresholds in 2015, so that one must now steal $2,500 to be charged with a felony. Felony-theft cases predictably declined in response, but misdemeanor theft cases declined even more. Perhaps that's a function of cops being less willing to focus attention on low-level cases, the tuff-on-crime crowd will surely say. But both reported crime stats and the National Crime Victim Survey tell us property thefts declined throughout this period. So if police did de-prioritize them, then policing clearly wasn't having the crime deterring effect that traditional models might predict. In fact, if such "de-policing" occurred, it correlated with less theft, not more. This raises a counter-intuitive possibility: Maybe what police do after the fact doesn't have that much to do with crime rates in the first place?

The 2018 data don't capture the period after the Texas Legislature accidentally made pot cases more difficult to prosecute without a lab test, but before then, both misdemeanor drug cases (mostly pot) and felony drug cases (mostly harder drugs) were a big source of growth in prosecutions:

Here's how new Texas misdemeanor and felony cases broke out in FY 2018:

The biggest decline, however, has been in traffic cases and other Class C misdemeanors, a trend which this blog has documented in the past.

Delving more deeply into these Class Cs, every category except local traffic ordinances have declined over the last five years. (I'm curious if readers have any suggestions why enforcement of local traffic ordinances would increase by a third over the last five years while enforcement of state traffic laws declined?)

Moreover, juvenile Class C cases have plummeted, driven largely but not entirely by the state's decriminalization of truancy:

Reporters or policy makers who would like to replicate these data for their local area may use the OCA's data query tool to break them out by jurisdiction.

What's going on?
So why is this happening? Some of the trends cited in the WSJ article don't apply to Texas - e.g., marijuana legalization or decrim hasn't happened here, and Texas' car-patrol-based policing doesn't see as frequent use of "stop and frisk" tactics as do jurisdictions where officers walk a beat.

The WSJ cited FBI statistics to document "steady declines in disorderly conduct, drunkenness, prostitution and loitering violations," which arguably could be a function of the rise of smart phones, gaming, and internet culture. Much "disorderly conduct" now occurs online, much to the detriment of the political culture, while "loitering" these days may more frequently involve staring at a telephone. Similarly, prostitutes in 2019 are less likely to stand out on the street and more likely to respond to text messages or queries on a website.

IMO, researchers have probably understated significantly the impact of digital culture on (downward) crime trends. Indeed, Grits considers the incapacitative effects of video gaming so significant for young males, in the past I've pondered the idea of issuing gaming consoles to high-risk probationers to reduce recidivism.

Grits has written before about declines in DWI and public drunkenness arrests, which I suspect may also related to the rise of car sharing apps that can easily get drunks off the streets or out of their own cars.

On Twitter, Grits asked a couple of national experts their opinions on sources of declines in misdemeanor arrests. Megan Stevenson, an economist and legal scholar at George Mason Univesity, suggested, "Broken windows policing going out of vogue. Gentrifying cities means poor people no longer live where rich people work. Increased surveillance technology reduces willingness to shoplift/graffiti. Lower blood lead levels in children." She also wondered if the trend may be influenced by "Shifting law enforcement to private security companies who intimidate but don’t arrest?"

And our pal Alexandra Natapoff, now of UC Irvine and author of Punishment Without Crime, a book-length treatment of misdemeanor questions, suggested the trend might also relate to "changes in police arrest quota and promotion policies" or attempts to reduce "Jail costs."

Austin's recent brouhaha over decriminalizing sitting, lying and camping in public spaces makes Grits give extra credence to Professor Stevenson's hypothesis about gentrifying cities removing poor people from the places rich folks live and work. Austin has always had a significant homeless population during the 34 years I've lived here. But as long as they were sleeping in creek beds and behind dumpsters where no one could see them, for most of the city's more affluent population, "out of sight, out of mind," was good enough. As soon as middle and upper class folks began to see homeless people in their daily lives - mostly under highway overpasses and in tents on roadsides - the weeping and gnashing of teeth began (with GOP officials at the local, state and national levels fanning the flames of discontent as vigorously as they could muster).

Grits considers these interesting suggestions, but all of them beg the question, why were misdemeanor arrests going up before 2007? After all, both reported and unreported low-level crime (as judged by the National Crime Victim Survey) has declined dramatically since the 1990s, and we didn't see arrest reductions until relatively recently.

Since we don't know why arrests continued to rise as crime declined, it's equally hard to tell why arrests went down as crime declined even more. For that matter, no one knows for sure why crime has declined in the first place. There are many hypotheses.

In an era when economists have built out a sizable cottage industry developing Bayesian "causal inference" models that supposedly flesh out specific causal relations for crime trends, in reality, nobody really understand the whys and wherefores of even the most basic tendencies of the justice system. Your correspondent has come to believe that running ever-more regression analyses on the same, extremely limited datasets is unlikely to cast more light on the subject.

Regardless of the cause, the footprint of the Texas justice system has reduced dramatically over the last decade, even if prison populations remain stubbornly high. These misdemeanor data provide further evidence of that trend and arguably played a big part in creating that outcome.

For my part, Grits considers the decline in misdemeanor arrests and cases mainly a positive development, not a problem to solve. Others' mileage may vary.

Parole policies the key to substantial prisoner reductions in Texas

The goal of cutting prison populations by 50 percent has been poo pooed by some as a pipe dream, but for Texas it seems conceivable.

As Grits has previously pointed out, the overall footprint of Texas' criminal justice system has declined significantly in recent years, with the proportion of people in prison, jail, on probation and on parole declining by a whopping 46 percent. In 2008, one in 22 Texas adults were in prison, jail, on probation or on parole; by 2018, that had declined to one in 41.

However, the number of people incarcerated in prison has remained stubbornly high, even though TDCJ releases about 45 percent of inmates every year.

Releases declining in tandem with number of new inmates
State officials vociferously deny it, but from the outside it appears as though parole decisions are made based less on individuals' risk to society, but as a means to keep TDCJ full enough to justify existing prisons without becoming overcrowded.

Here's the data. Before 2012, more prisoners entered TDCJ each year than were released, though not by many. In 2012, releases increased for just that one year (see this analysis for why), afterward marching down in tandem with the number of new "receives."

That's why this blog and allies pushed for prison closures as soon as new receives dipped in 2009 and 2010 (the first Texas prisons were closed in 2011). If prisons can't hold more people, the theory went, parole rates would have to keep up with "receives" to keep from violating the longstanding terms of the Ruiz settlement, the dictates of which have dominated TDCJ policy and culture for nearly four decades.

When new receives bumped back up in 2011 and 2012 (see here for an analysis of why), the parole board boosted parole rates significantly to keep numbers low enough to come in under prison capacity.

Even though the parole board doesn't admit its release decisions are dictated by prison capacity, preferring to pretend they're assessing individuals' cases on the merits, it appears to be true on its face. Since 2012, the numbers of new inmates and releases have been so close every year that it's difficult to imagine it's a coincidence.

The potential for large-scale prison population reductions
As of the end of FY 2018, 79,552 Texas prison inmates were eligible to be paroled, out of about 145,000 total incarcerated at that time, or about 55 percent. (Source, p. 17) So most offenders could be released right now if the parole board decided to do so.

The average age of prisoners incarcerated in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice is 35. However, at the end of FY 2018, 9,900 prisoners were more than 60 years old, and another 18,564 were between 51-60. (p. 4) These prisoners are the fastest growing age group at TDCJ, and a big cost driver, particularly because their health costs are 100 percent paid by state government, even for prisoners who would otherwise be eligible for Medicare.

Since being in prison significantly shortens life expectancy, for many of these prisoners, TDCJ must pay for nursing-home like accommodations and eventually, end-of-life costs, as well. This is not just an issue in Texas, but a significant problem nationally. In Texas, however, the cost issue is exacerbated by the recent federal court ruling that vulnerable inmates like the sick and elderly must be housed in units with air conditioning. (Yes, I know, technically, A/C is not required, but how else can the agency keep units below 88 degrees during Texas summers?)

These rising healthcare costs for seniors are a big reason why TDCJ's budget has continued to increase even after eight prison units have been closed: A growing number of the prisoners who remain cost much more to incarcerate than the "average" 35 year old.

How to do it
The governor appoints parole board members, and the Legislature cannot directly force them to increase parole rates. (The 2007 prison reforms successfully encouraged them to decrease revocation rates for technical violations, but those gains have maxxed out.) But they can indirectly do so by changing the criteria on which parole decisions are made.

A good start would be to look to the so-called "objective parole" law passed in Michigan in 2018. That legislation mandated that parole decisions be based on forward looking risk factors instead of unchangeable criteria like "nature of the crime." The Texas Public Policy Foundation endorsed such a measure earlier this year; see my Reasonably Suspicious podcast interview with TPPF's Marc Levin on the topic from July.

Grits has recommended other, additional methods for reducing incarceration levels, but none would have the impact of boosting parole rates.

Texas has successfully reduced the footprint of the justice system more than most people - even most policy makers - understand. But significantly reducing prison populations has been the toughest nut to crack. Even so, given that most Texas prisoners are eligible to be paroled today, it's not impossible to imagine that right sizing the prison system could be accomplished sooner than later.

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.