In-custody deaths ‘alarming’ in Texas
Almost a third of the nearly 11,000 people who have died in the custody of Texas police, jails and prisons since 2005 succumbed at least in part to a pre-existing medical condition — an “alarming” number suggesting police and prisons need to dramatically improve screenings before someone is handcuffed or locked in a cell, says the director of a new criminal justice think tank.
The finding is part of a detailed examination of incustody deaths performed by the Institute for Predictive Analytics in Criminal Justice, a new Texas A&M University System center led by Alex del Carmen, a criminal justice professor at Tarleton State University.
Following last year’s police killing of former Houston resident George Floyd in Minneapolis, the Houston Chronicle revealed how Texas laws designed to identify racial profiling were failing because the
state wasn’t even collecting the information necessary to know where it was occurring. In response, the A&M System created the institute to perform the sort of data collection and analysis that Texas couldn’t — or wasn’t — doing itself.
Its first report — a survey of who died while in the legal custody of law enforcement or corrections officers, and how — was released this week. It’s not the first, or even most detailed, dissection of the state’s custodial death numbers. But del Carmen said he expects it to be the first of many the institute will tackle, both retrospectively as well as in real time for legislators who could use the data-crunching to inform new laws and policies.
The Chronicle’s reporting focused on information that police by law were supposed to gather during traffic stops but didn’t.
In 2017, state legislators responding to the death of Sandra Bland — a Black woman who was arrested following a traffic stop that escalated into a confrontation with a white trooper and was found hanged days later in the Waller County jail, a death that was ruled a suicide — passed a law requiring police to collect data that would allow departments to analyze in depth how their officers treated minority and white motorists. Such information is crucial for administrators and policymakers striving for more equitable enforcement. Studies across the country have shown that police stop, search, arrest, use force on and kill Black people in numbers disproportionate to their population representation.
On paper, the new law identified important details such as why each stop was made, whether the driver was searched and what if anything was found — all separated out by the race of the driver. But when it came time to actually gather the information, the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement neglected to include the race part.
Patchwork of data
While some departments collected the race data on their own, others didn’t, leaving a patchwork of often useless data points among the state’s 2,000 law enforcement agencies — “a crime against public records requests,” according to one racial-profiling expert. Soon after, the commission ordered policing agencies to include the racial details starting next year.
The Institute for Predictive Analytics’ focus, however, extends beyond racial profiling, del Carmen said. For its first project, the institute decided to tackle a pile of numbers the state had been collecting for years but had not analyzed in a meaningful way.
The inaugural project produced a flurry of revealing bird’s-eye view information about the state’s custodial deaths. AfricanAmerican custodial deaths, for example, occurred at a rate more than double their demographic representation.
Some of the data points also hinted at individual tragedies, raising disturbing questions unanswered by the report. The youngest person to die in custody was 11 years old, it found.
Del Carmen said other statistics pointed toward the need for even deeper, more precise study. Just under half of all the custodial deaths occurred in a medical facility. But, he pointed out, the men (fewer than 6 percent of all custodial fatalities were women) could have sustained injuries or been subjected to negligent medical care elsewhere before being moved to a hospital to die.
Avoiding scrutiny
In a report last year, the Texas Commission on Jail Standards said it was aware of several local jails that had transferred mortally injured or ill people out of their facilities to a hospital, where they died soon afterward. By doing so, jail administrators can avoid the scrutiny that comes with an in-custody death.
The institute’s researchers also ran into the same problems the Chronicle uncovered in its analysis of racial profiling data — that no matter legislators’ good intent in requiring agencies to compile numbers to shed light on a problem, the effort can be thwarted by bad data collection.
For example, it concluded that 12 percent of custodial deaths between 2005 and 2020 were homicides, caused by police or guards, a startling number, del Carmen said. Yet Texas law enforcement agencies and lockups had reported the manner of death in only one-third of all fatalities, rendering any conclusions incomplete at best.
The research group next hopes to tackle the racial profiling data that inspired its founding. The Sandra Bland Act mandates that police report other granular traffic stop information, as well, such as how many stops result in arrests for minor Class C violations, a question criminal justice reformers have already started digging into.
The deadline for law enforcement agencies to report last year’s numbers to the state arrives in less than a month.
Del Carmen said he’ll be waiting.
“We’re incredibly excited,” he said.