But the district attorney’s 56-page report last month to the Harris County Commissioners Court fails to substantiate that claim. Among its fundamental flaws is the lack of any mention of the county’s crisis-level backlog, which Ogg herself has been emphasizing for months.
The backlog, dating back to Hurricane Harvey-related closures and exacerbated by more than a year of pandemic-related closures and delays, has resulted in as many as 139,000 cases languishing, including 73,000 involving felonies. That’s left defendants, including those released on their own recognizance or after posting bond, waiting months or years for a trial.
Ogg’s report also mischaracterizes key data to skew the picture of how often defendants out on bond — including those on cashless bond awaiting trial on misdemeanor charges — re-offend or miss their court dates.
Before bail reform, very few misdemeanor offenders were freed on bond, so naturally the numbers of those who commit new offenses while on bond would be less than now, when most defendants in similar cases are free while awaiting their court dates. The numbers also show there are fewer defendants facing misdemeanor charges in the first place. The number fell from 50,000 in 2015 to just over 38,000 in 2020.
Monitors appointed by the federal court overseeing the bail settlement concluded in their Sept. 3 report that the rate of re-offending among those freed on bond had fallen or stayed steady since 2015. Ogg disputes that in large part by claiming the monitors included thousands of cases involving defendants who were kept in jail — and thus unlikely to re-offend — or whose charges had been dismissed. But the monitors were right to include those cases, too, because it gives a more complete picture of the public safety problem before bail reform was implemented.
What’s more, in analyzing recidivism among misdemeanor defendants free on bond, Ogg ignores that roughly two-thirds of the misdemeanor cases filed in 2019 and 2020 were dismissed. That’s relevant because many defendants facing equally weak cases prior to 2019 pleaded guilty in order to avoid having to spend days or weeks in jail for lack of money to bond out.
Ogg also clouds the picture by noting that increasingly, judges are granting cashless, personal bonds to defendants charged with felonies. Judges issued four times as many personal bonds in felony cases from 2017 through 2020, for instance, which Ogg cites as evidence that “bail reform,” or at least the spirit of it, has not been solely confined to misdemeanors. She may have a point there, and there is a case in federal court seeking to reform bail in felony cases. Those changes should be debated. So should a Texas constitutional amendment that would give judges more discretion to deny bail to people posing a serious risk.
But none of that is relevant to whether the misdemeanor reforms are working in misdemeanor courts, nor whether they’re responsible for rising violent crime rates.
There is no question that violent crime is up in Houston — there have been 350 homicides in 2021, a 27 percent increase from last year — but it is also clear that this is a nationwide phenomenon. Homicides in the United States increased 29 percent from 2019 to 2020, the largest single-year increase since the FBI began tracking such statistics. This uptick has affected cities big and small, the vast majority of which have not implemented any semblance of bail reform. Many experts believe the COVID-19 pandemic is causing the uptick, but it will take much more time and data to be sure.
By singling out bail reform as a root cause of violent crime, Ogg is tailoring a conclusion to fit her thesis, and we’re frankly perplexed as to why. We have supported the DA in her request for more prosecutors because the case she makes for needing staff to clear the backlog makes sense. Her assault on misdemeanor bail reform is just senseless. .
We are just two years into a new bail system that was once hailed as a model for the nation. While there is still much work to be done to improve the misdemeanor system — the independent monitors note, for instance, that homeless and mentally ill people are still often kept in jail for too long before trial — what we do know is racial disparities in pretrial release have diminished. The county has saved millions in jail costs. We can’t let this progress become a casualty of a political debate over crime.
Violent crime is a terrible problem in our city and it deserves urgent action from law enforcement, prosecutors and judges to address. But falsely blaming bail reform won’t fix the problem. It just changes the subject.
