Violent crime in Harris County

Last week, Houston Chronicle’s Jasper Scherer wrote a solid article on recent crime statistics in Harris County. It was a nuanced examination of the data, and he found a new Texas crime database I had not previously seen.

Building on Jasper’s article, I downloaded the data for 2016-2022. I picked this time frame so that there would be three base years of statistics when Republicans controlled Commissioners’ Court and most criminal courts and what has happened since Democrats took control of Commissioner’s Court and virtually all of the criminal courts. 

The bottom line is that since there 2018 have been sharp increases in murders and assaults, a small increase in rapes and a decline in robberies. Here is what the charts for each of those look like:

Clearly, the most concerning increase has been in murders (59%) and assaults (34%) since 2018. To put that in some perspective, if murders had continued at their 2018 level, about 450 Harris County residents would still be with us today instead of being murdered. That is about six times the number of people killed in all mass murders in Texas during the same period.

Trying to assign causation to a complex phenomenon like crime is always difficult and fraught with confusing correlation with causation. For example, I have heard many pundits attribute the increase in crime nationally to the pandemic since the two occurred roughly at the same time. But I have never heard any cogent explanation on why a pandemic should set off a crime wave. It is also rarely accurate to attribute a change in a complex phenomenon to a single cause.

However, in this case it is fairly evident that the dysfunction at the Harris County courthouse has been a significant contributing cause to the increase in violent crime. One way that we know that is that Crime Stoppers has identified 183 murders that have been committed after 2018 by individuals who had been released on bail after being accused of a violent crime. A number of those had been released after multiple offenses. 

Prior to 2019, felony bonds for violent crime were harder to come by. But the Democratic judges that swept into office in 2018 and 2020 took a much more lenient view of defendants being released on bond. It is unlikely that many of the 183 accused of murder while out on bond would have been released under the prior more restrictive bond practices. That does not leave much room to doubt that, at least, a third of the increases in murders can be directly attributed to the more lenient bond policies of the new judges.

The District Attorney has certainly laid the increase in crime at the feet of new felony bonding policies. In a September 2021 report, she said that the data shows a “dramatic increase in offenses committed by criminal defendants while free on bail . . .” She submitted several charts to show the increases. This one for number of offenses committed by a defendant while released on a felony bond shows a stunning 300% increase after the new judges began being elected in 2018.

The bond problem has been exacerbated by the unprecedented backlog of criminal cases now pending in Harris County courts, which have doubled since 2018. Kim Ogg recently estimated that with the current backlog it would take 3-4 years to get a murder case to trial.

The courts have certainly been faced with unique challenges over the last few years, with the pandemic being the most notable. And the blame for this backlog can be laid at the feet of many of our elected officials, including the Texas Legislature for not authorizing more courts for Harris County. But there is little evidence of any concerted effort by the current Harris County bench or Harris County Commissioners’ Court to resolve this backlog.

County Judge Lina Hidalgo recently claimed that violent crime has slightly declined so far in 2022. While there is some indication in the year-to-date preliminary reports from law enforcement agencies that may be case, some of those reports, including the one from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office, are several months behind. That delay alone may account for the small decline cited by Judge Hidalgo. Records from the Harris County Medical Examiner show no decrease in the number of homicides it has investigated so far in 2022 compared to the same time last year.

Also, HPD year-to-date reports show another dramatic increase so far this year in some property crimes, especially theft from a motor vehicle (+15%), theft of vehicle parts (+42%) and theft of a motor vehicle (+10%). According to HPD’s report, there are nearly 100 car break-ins every day in Houston.

Even if there has been a small decrease in 2022, the current crime levels are still dramatically higher than when this County administration took over in 2019. Alarmingly, the Commissioners' Court proposed budget for next year, which includes very minimal increases in law enforcement funding, indicates no sense of urgency in dealing with the problem. 

Candidly, there is no evidence that our current crime problem has been solved, or even that we have made significant progress toward getting it under control.