Houston Republic

Data suggesting that Texas needs to end systematic arrests of people for fine-only offenses continues to mount with a report issued by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement (TCOLE) detailing racial profiling last year.

Some of the worst findings in the report were out of Harris County, where police are almost four times more likely to use physical force during a traffic stop than in Texas law enforcement as a whole, according to the TCOLE report. Nearly 41% of all traffic stops involving officer use of force in the state happened in Harris County last year. Harris County makes up about 16% of the state's population.

Houston police had the highest use-of-force rate in Harris County, about 82 instances out of 10,000 stops, a figure 10 times higher than the statewide benchmark, according to the report. 

Mary Mergler, senior counsel for the criminal justice project at Austin-based Texas Appleseed, which issued its own report in 2019. | texasappleseed.org

The report also highlights Harris County law enforcement’s practice of making arrests for fine-only offenses. Last year, more than 3,880 people were arrested and processed for an infraction whose maximum penalty is a $500 fine. 

Some departments in Harris County were worse than others for fine-only offense arrests. For example, Pasadena ISD Police, Harris County Constable Precinct 7, Baytown Police and South Houston Police all made more than 425 class C arrests, traffic or ordinance related, per 10,000 stops.

Last year, as the still-ongoing pandemic significantly reduced road traffic, more than 41,000 Texans were jailed on fine-only and non-jailable offenses, according to the TCOLE report. About 64,100 traffic stops in 2019 resulted in an arrest of a driver for a minor traffic violation. Such arrests require hours of police and booking time and considerable criminal justice resources. 

Not only is Texas' system of arresting people for fine-only offenses a drag on state and local governments, it is deeply unpopular. Almost 75% of Texans responding to a survey support ending arrests for fine-only offenses, according to a Texas Policy and Politics Legislative issues report released earlier this year by the University of Houston's Hobby School of Public Affairs.

Arresting people for offenses not punishable by jail time has brought embarrassment to the state. Plano officials ultimately dropped charges against an 18-year-old whom police arrested because he was walking home during last month's snow storm. In another even more egregious example, the city of Keller ended up settling a federal lawsuit that followed the widely reported assault and arrest of then 22-year-old Dillon Puente and his father, Marco Puente, after the younger Puente was pulled over for allegedly making an improper wide right turn.

The TCOLE report's findings also are nothing new. In April 2019, KUT 90.5 reported that not only do misdemeanor tickets often end in arrests in the state, particularly in Travis County, those activities take officers away from more important public safety priorities, crowd booking and jail facilities and worsen tensions between police and the public.

A study released at the time by Austin-based social justice advocacy nonprofit Texas Appleseed found that more than 30,000 jail bookings in 2017 for class C misdemeanors in 11 Texas counties. Those are offenses typically punishable by a fine of up to $500 and no jail time.

"Most misdemeanors are nonviolent offenses – and we know that," then Texas Appleseed Criminal Justice Project Director Mary Mergler told KUT 90.5. "You know, even a short stay in jail can have a really lasting impact on someone's life and we need to be using jail in a very different way than we're using right now. This data shows that."

Mergler today is senior counsel for Texas Appleseed's criminal justice project, according to her LinkedIn page.

The 2019 Texas Appleseed report also found that traffic stops in Texas make up a huge portion of county jail admissions and concluded that reducing the number of such arrests also reduces pressure on local taxpayers to come up with the millions of dollars needed to keep those misdemeanor-charged people jailed.

Keeping them out of jail also reduces pressures on those arrested, particularly women, the Texas Appleseed report found.

"Unnecessary jail stays exacerbate individuals' financial struggles, driving women deeper into poverty," the report said, adding that most women in jail have children. "An increasing number of women in jail means an increasing number of Texas children hurt by having an incarcerated mother. Like the overrepresentation of black individuals in jail bookings, we flag the growing number of women booked into Texas jails as cause for grave concern and the necessity to develop policies designed to curb this growth."

An even earlier report released by University of California-Irvine found that arresting people and jailing them, even for short periods, significantly impacts their lives.

"For the first time, our research documents the significant association between arrest and mental health issues," UCI Criminology, Law & Society Assistant Professor Naomi Sugie said at the time. "Arrested people face social stigma, feelings of powerlessness and alienation, time-consuming bureaucratic processes and uncertainty about the future – all of which stress mental health."