How bad is violent crime?
Experts: Picture in Harris County is complicated
Two months out from Election Day, the politically charged debate over crime and public safety in Harris County already has hit a boiling point.
The Rev. Ed Young of Houston’s Second Baptist Church recently called his hometown “the most dangerous city in America” as he urged congregants to oust “left-wing progressives” from local office. Democratic county leaders insist crime is down and they are pumping money into law enforcement. And their Republican challengers are staking their campaigns on the opposite assertion: Crime is out of control, and Democrats are to blame.
In reality, the situation is far more complicated.
While violent crime has spiked in Houston and Harris County, the same can be said of nearly every large city and county in the nation — many of which have far higher rates of murder and other violent crime. Criminologists also point to many possible factors underpinning the crime surge, making it impossible to sum up the situation by pointing
to a single statistic or policy decision.
“It’s not a Republican thing or a Democrat thing, especially with the increase over the last four years. It’s been a national increase, clearly,” said New Orleans-based criminologist Jeff Asher, who added that Houston’s murder rate is “middle of the pack” for major American cities.
Further complicating the debate are the myriad ways of interpreting Harris County’s public safety spending, a topic that has taken center stage since Texas Comptroller Glenn Hegar last month accused the county of “defunding” its constables, allegedly in violation of a newly enacted state law.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat who presides over Commissioners Court, repeatedly has said the sheriff, constables and district attorney have received funding boosts in each county budget since Democrats won a 3-2 court majority in 2018. The annual increases are comparable to those adopted under Republican control, relative to the size of the county’s overall general fund budget, with some caveats.
Critics argue the full picture must account for Democrats’ decision last year to scrap a policy that let departments retain unspent funds into future budget cycles. The change led to the county recouping a significant amount of “rollover funds” from law enforcement and other departments, some of which had accumulated millions of unspent dollars over the years.
Michael Adams, a political science professor at Texas Southern University, said this year’s Commissioners Court elections offer a stark choice between Republicans who are pitching a return to the county’s traditional focus on public safety and infrastructure, and Democrats who have pushed for a more expansive role, including social services, for county government.
The success of the GOP approach depends less on statistical trends and more on whether crime is “visible” to voters on the nightly news, Adams said.
“Certainly, the crime issue has been a staple for the Republican side,” said Adams, the director of TSU’s master of public administration program. “They feel that they can galvanize and gin up voter support by running on an anti-crime platform, and it’s nothing new for them. You can go back to Richard Nixon, in terms of being tough on crime, law and order.”
Violent crime rates
Contrary to Young’s claim, Houston is far from the most dangerous city in the country. In 2020, the first year of the homicide surge, Houston tallied about 17 murders per 100,000 people, less than half the rates recorded by several other large cities, including St. Louis, Baltimore, New Orleans, Detroit, Memphis and Cleveland.
Still, Houston has seen a sharp rise in homicides each of the last two years, starting with a 43 percent surge from 2019 to 2020 — similar to the increase measured across all of Harris County, including Houston and the other incorporated cities. Murders across the country spiked by 29 percent that year, as a number of large cities — including Chicago and New York — recorded increases north of 50 percent.
Counts of assault also rose about 30 percent across Harris County in 2020, while property crimes saw a slight decline, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s “index crimes report,” which collects data from local law enforcement.
Experts have offered a number of theories for why the country saw such a dramatic surge in homicides. Some of the leading theories include mental and financial stress of the COVID-19 pandemic; strained police-community relations; and officers taking a less proactive approach in the face of widespread scrutiny, known as de-policing.
“I think it was a complex confluence of factors related to, but not inherently caused by, a sort of increasing distrust in police, increasing de-policing, and exacerbated but not caused by the pandemic, and a nation awash in guns,” Asher said, stressing he was offering only a hypothesis.
Homicides climbed again in Houston last year, from 400 to 469. With a rate of about 20 murders per 100,000 people, 2021 marked one of the city’s deadliest years over the last three decades. Houston also surpassed Dallas for the highest murder rate among Texas’ large cities — though still well behind other big cities around the country.
Overall, Harris County law enforcement agencies tallied 632 homicides last year, a 12 percent increase from the previous year, according to DPS data. The uptick was driven almost entirely by murders in Houston, however, with the homicide rate in unincorporated Harris County staying flat at about 5 killings per 100,000 people.
Now, following back-to-back years of sharp increases, the murder rate has begun to recede countywide. Each major category of violent crime — murder, rape, robbery and assault — has declined in Harris County through the first half of 2022 compared to the same point last year, according to DPS data.
Hidalgo, up for re-election in November, has cited the reversing murder trend in her attempts to counter Republican challenger Alexandra del Moral Mealer, who has vowed to prioritize public safety and hike law enforcement spending if elected.
Even with the initial decrease through June, however, the countywide tallies of murders and assaults remained on pace to far exceed their levels from 2019, the year before those two categories spiked.
Law enforcement funding
While the political dispute over constable funding has attracted headlines in recent weeks, the combined budget of Harris County’s eight constable precincts makes up only a fraction of the county’s overall public safety spending. In the most recent annual spending plan, Commissioners Court budgeted about $879 million for the sheriff’s office, constables and district attorney, nearly two-thirds of which went to the sheriff.
That amounted to about a 15 percent increase in funding for the county’s main public safety departments across the first three years of Democratic control on Commissioners Court, which began in January 2019. Those same departments saw their funding rise at roughly the same rate — 14.5 percent — over the final three years of the Republican court majority, from 2015 to 2018.
A key difference, however, is the county’s decision to do away with rollover funds in March 2021, shortly after Commissioners Court approved the county budget that year.
Some constables said they submitted their annual budget requests based on the assumption they would retain their rollover funds, only to later discover otherwise. Republican Commissioner Jack Cagle, a critic of the move, has compared the situation to stealing someone’s savings right before their bills are due at the end of the month.
“Now I don’t have the money to pay my bills when the next month rolls around,” Cagle said. “I think that that was not fair to those who are dependent upon their rollover (funds) to come in and take, in essence, their savings account away from them.”
County budget officials note they allowed each department, including constables, to retain unspent funds last year for specific proposals and demonstrated needs, as long as they were used for one-time expenses. They were not allowed to use the funds to pay for personnel, as some constables regularly had done.
When the county ended the rollover policy last year, the eight constables had a collective $18.9 million in unspent funds, mostly accumulated over multiple years, according to the Office of the County Administrator. They requested about $5 million in one-time expenses out of those funds, all of which were approved, while the rest were returned to the county, County Administrator David Berry said.
Most of the remaining funds came from Republican Constables Mark Herman and Ted Heap, who later filed the complaint that sparked Hegar to weigh in on the issue.
During a court meeting last year, Hidalgo said the policy change was intended in part to end the practice of departments using rollover money to fund baseline operations, including hiring personnel, outside the traditional budgeting process.
“The problem is, if we allow folks to fill unfunded positions that have not been approved as part of the budget, and retroactively say, hey, now I want you to make them permanent, it sets a terrible precedent,” Hidalgo said. “… We cannot set a precedent where folks fill positions that are unfunded, and then expect us to fund them, and if we don’t you call it defunding the police.”
Hidalgo and county budget officials also said Harris County largely was an outlier in allowing departments to keep unspent funds for future budgeting cycles. In a memo last year outlining the change, Berry said some departments were not filling all their funded positions so they could increase their rollover amount.
Commissioners exempt
Former county judge Ed Emmett, a Republican whom Hidalgo unseated in 2018, said he favored the use of rollover budgeting because he thought it incentivized fiscal discipline among departments and discouraged end-of-year spending sprees on unneeded items.
He also took a swing at Hidalgo and Democratic Commissioners Rodney Ellis and Adrian Garcia, without mentioning the latter two by name, for preserving their own rollover funds in the county budget.
“I think Judge Hidalgo and the Democrats would be on firmer ground if they’d done away with their own rollover budgets,” Emmett said. “I mean, how can they say that? It’s an absurd argument to say, oh, rollovers are terrible, but we kept ours. Really?”
Hidalgo and all four commissioners are exempt from the policy change. The proposed county budget for next fiscal year estimates Hidalgo will carry over less than $1 million, while the four commissioners would retain at least $85 million in combined unspent funds.
Emmett said he sides with Mealer and other Republicans who argue the county should be spending more on law enforcement, but he also took issue with Hegar’s intervention in the budgeting process.
“I don’t think the state helps by getting involved, is all I’m saying,” he said. “I think that’s something that the local residents can pick up on.”