Criminal-Justice Reformers Have a Murder Problem

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, May 30, 2021

 

Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg is not the stuff right-wing monsters are made of: She serves Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, and she is a progressive Democrat and “America’s Top Gay Cop,” as OutSmart magazine puts it.

 

But she is a special kind of Democrat: The kind who can count.

 

And here is the count: In 2015, Harris County tallied up 6,348 crimes committed by 3,200 accused criminals out on bond, and, by 2020, those numbers had trebled to 18,796 crimes attributed to 10,500 people out on bond. A significant number of them were murders.

 

While much of the rest of the country is pushing in the opposite direction, the Republican-dominated Texas legislature is considering a new law that would make it more difficult for some people accused of violent crimes to be released on bond. Ogg testified in favor of the bill, saying: “Judges are supposed to, under the law, consider two essential purposes of bond: the defendant’s return to court to answer the charges, and the community’s safety. And it’s this second public interest that is being failed in Houston under the current bail system.”

 

And not just in Houston. Texas has no city in the top tier when it comes to murder rates — Dallas, the state’s most dangerous city, has a murder rate that is one-fifth that of Saint Louis, while the border city of El Paso has a murder rate that is one-twentieth that of Baltimore. But with its 11.5 non-negligent homicides per 100,000 residents per year, Houston is more dangerous than Miami, while major cities such as San Antonio and Fort Worth are more dangerous than Seattle or Portland. Even gentle Austin has a higher murder rate than does San Diego. And Texas cities look worse when it comes to nonlethal violent crime: Houston has more robberies per capita than Philadelphia or Newark, and you’re more likely to suffer an assault in Dallas than in New York City, Las Vegas, or San Francisco.

 

(American cities are a Bacchic festival of murder by world standards: The 600,000 people of Baltimore commit a total of seven times as many murders a year as do the 8.6 million people of Switzerland, and the 2.7 million people of Chicago commit 85 times as many murders a year as do the 5.7 million people of Singapore.)

 

As anybody who has been through airport security knows, it is possible to simultaneously do too much and too little when it comes to public safety. The TSA is so bad at airport security that its failure rate on “red team” drills (in which government agents see what they can sneak through airport security) is something on the order of 70 percent — and while you can’t bring a full-size tube of toothpaste into the secured area, you can have a riot there.

 

The same principle holds true for the criminal-justice system. We have too many felonies and too many misdemeanors, and too many people in jail for them. We have police that are dangerously militarized, probation and parole systems that are disproportionately hard on poor people, a trial system that is equally stacked against them, and (probably most important) an economy that makes it very difficult for convicted felons to lead productive and dignified lives after prison even when their personal commitment to rehabilitation is very strong. The war on drugs has been to a considerable extent a war on poor people and poor neighborhoods. Policing for revenue is a real problem.

 

All that is true. But it also is true that there is no decent arrangement under which murder, assault, robbery, burglary, etc., are not treated as serious crimes. The reason we constitute governments is precisely to combat such abuses — not to pursue shared meaning or social equality or community improvement. There are many ways to deal with cocaine or people who are behind in their child-support payments, but there aren’t that many ways to deal with people who commit violent assaults, armed robberies, or similar crimes. This isn’t Saudi Arabia — incarceration is the main tool we have.

 

Of course we should make addiction treatment, mental-health care, job training, and other services available to incarcerated people — and, where possible, to troubled people who have not yet entered the criminal-justice system. But none of that solves the basic problem of how to protect the public from people who already have shown a propensity to commit violent crimes. This isn’t a problem that can be dreamt away.

 

There is a great deal of room between a “locking people up for being poor” regime — under which low-level, non-violent offenders are kept in custody because they can’t put up cash bail and won’t be released under personal recognizance — and the lax practices that put someone like Vernon Menifee on the street. Menifee was released on bond three times for felonies in 2019 and 2020 and had six felony convictions to his name when he was charged with the murder of Guy-Anthony Owen Allen in Houston. There are dozens and dozens of cases like his in Texas and hundreds or thousands of them each year across the country, in which violent offenders out on bond commit more violence, up to and including murder.

 

While “defund the police” hysteria mostly has been talk, the loosening of release practices has had real effects on communities around the country, from Texas cities to Albany County, N.Y., where a suspect recently was released without bond after his fourth bank-robbery arrest. In Memphis, a carjacking and attempted-robbery suspect has just been released on bond in spite of his having had 14 active warrants and 13 open criminal cases at the time of his arrest. The guy arrested over that tiger roaming around the Houston suburbs? Out on bond for murder. The list goes on.

 

There were more than 20,000 murders in the United States in 2020 — a 25 percent increase from the year before. That doesn’t mean “lock ’em up and throw away the key.” But it does mean operating in the knowledge that the people who have already committed violent crimes are the people who are most likely to commit more of them. Too many progressives act as though our violent-crime problem can be dealt with by having $10 per hour clerks at sporting-goods stores process a few more ATF forms. But those who can count understand that it’s a bigger and deeper problem than that.