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February 24th, 2023:

The Denton experience with marijuana decriminalization

It’s been a challenge.

Four months after a majority of voters approved Proposition B, Denton’s misdemeanor marijuana decriminalization ordinance continues to be a difficult issue for city staff to implement completely, according to City Manager Sara Hensley on Tuesday.

Hensley, who gave a presentation to the Denton City Council, said that since Nov. 1 — about a week before Denton voters passed Prop B — 52 citations and/or arrests were made by Denton police for misdemeanor marijuana possession or paraphernalia related to marijuana.

Of those 52 cases, Hensley pointed out that 23 arrests were for primary violations other than marijuana possession. Those violations include issues such as warrants, criminal trespass or public intoxication.

Hensley said that certain parts of the ordinance simply couldn’t be implemented because it violates state and federal law.

“I recognize the voters have spoken,” Hensley told council members Tuesday afternoon. “I understand that, but we don’t have the authority.”

Nick Stevens, a board member of the advocacy group Decriminalize Denton, said later Tuesday evening at the City Council meeting that what some council members and city staff are saying publicly is different than what they claimed privately.

Stevens also said the ordinance has become a political issue instead of a nonpartisan one, as indicated by the overwhelming majority of voters who approved the measure in November. He wondered why the city didn’t provide the demographic breakdown of those citations during Hensley’s presentation because historically, minorities have been unfairly targeted by law enforcement.

“The disappointing part — outside of the breaking local law — is not giving the demographics,” Stevens told the Denton Record-Chronicle.

The Record-Chronicle requested demographic information on the citations from the Denton police Tuesday afternoon.

“All of the information the City has to provide will be included in the City Manager’s presentation today to City Council,” the Denton Police Department media relations team said in an email Tuesday. “We do not have any additional information prior to them receiving that work session report.”

[…]

At Tuesday’s Denton City Council work session, Police Chief Doug Shoemaker was also on hand during Hensley’s presentation to answer questions and reassured council members that misdemeanor amounts of marijuana would continue to be a low priority for police. He also reaffirmed that the odor of marijuana wasn’t initiating probable cause and search and seizure issues, though it was part of the process in some cases.

Denton Municipal Judge Tyler Atkinson discussed the deferred adjudication process that is available to people who receive misdemeanor marijuana charges and how the municipal court does its best to work with offenders by lowering fines, offering community service and other opportunities.

Atkinson also mentioned that the court sends text messages to people to let them know about the process and how to expunge their records. The videos are also posted on YouTube.

“We’re the only city in the whole state that sends them out and [posts them] online,” Atkinson said.

After Hensley’s presentation, council member Jesse Davis mentioned that it has been an all-or-nothing-type situation with the decriminalization issue and suggested finding a “middle ground” by implementing parts of the ordinance that doesn’t violate state law.

In Hensley’s presentation, she pointed out that the City Council does have the discretion to amend the budget in regards to how city funds are spent.

For example, the Proposition B ordinance states no city funds will be used for THC testing of misdemeanor amounts of marijuana. But, it requires a council approval and not a voter one under the city charter, as Mayor Pro Tem Brian Beck pointed out in early December when he tried to get his fellow council members to pass a duplicate ordinance of Proposition B to give it the budgetary teeth it needed.

“I’m willing to talk about what we have in our authority to do,” Davis said regarding the budget and which part of the ordinance can be implemented. “It is fair. It is not fair for the voters to tell us to break the law. That is nonsense and not our job.”

Beck and fellow council members Vicki Byrd and Brandon Chase McGee encouraged city staff and other council members to follow the will of the voters and allow the courts to decide what can and can’t be implemented.

“I think we need to fully implement it and if the state slaps our hands back, we know where we are,” McGee said. “We’re answerable to the people. None of us got 70% of the votes. None of us. How often do we see that 70% pass anywhere? There is no reason not to do it, so let’s do it.”

A video of how to expunge one’s record in Denton is embedded in the story. I found this to be fascinating, and quite different from the experiences in Bell County and Hays County, not to mention the pre-vote conflicts in San Antonio. All of that was discussed in the story as well, so go read the rest. There is a legitimate question about what a City Council is supposed to do with a voter-passed ordinance that one can reasonably read to be in violation of state law, at least in part. The bigger issue here remains the fact that state and federal law are much stricter about marijuana than the public wants them to be. Cities can only nibble around the edges of that, and at their own peril in a state like Texas. The problem needs to be resolved at a higher level, and that’s a much more difficult thing to do.

ShotSpotter

I’m more skeptical than not, but there is a way to make me less so.

Two years in, Houston’s ShotSpotter program has resulted in 5,450 alerts, 99 arrests and the seizure of 107 guns, but no real consensus on its value as a crime-fighting tool or even how to measure its success.

Critics say the numbers — just 19 percent of the gunfire alerts in the last 25 months even led to an offense report — do not justify the $3.5 million cost of the controversial tool. In the remaining cases, officers were dispatched based on the alerts but did not find any evidence, such as shell casings.

Authorities filed 126 charges related to ShotSpotter alerts, including one capital murder charge, according to Houston Police Department Assistant Chief Milton Martin, who presented an update to a City Council committee last week. Half of those charges involved misdemeanor offenses, most commonly the illegal discharge of a firearm in the city.

Not directly reflected in those statistics, Martin said, is the intelligence that HPD was able to gather from ShotSpotter data. Because residents do not always call 911 to report every gunshot they hear, the tool has allowed officers to map out areas where gunfire problems are the most severe and deploy its resources accordingly, he said.

“Just in the first year of operation, over 200 shell casings that we collected were linked to firearms that were used in other crimes in other parts of the city,” Martin said. “While that’s not an automatic ‘Oh, now we know who to arrest,’ it’s information that investigators did not have before.”

Some advocates, however, say the numbers do not justify the cost of the program: $3.5 million for a five-year contract from 2022 to 2027 at an annual price of approximately $74,000 per square mile.

“Only 20 percent of alerts result in an offense support, meaning that 80 percent of responses are a waste of public resources,” Christopher Rivera, outreach coordinator at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said. “I believe that we can use the $3.5 million…and put it into programs that actually reduce gun violence, like housing and health care and debt relief.”

[…]

Meanwhile, critics and studies of the system in other cities raise questions about the accuracy and efficacy of the gunfire detection tool.

Little consensus exists even among officials who have adopted the technology. In Texas, San Antonio canceled its contract in 2017, after just one year of operation, saying that ShotSpotter simply was not worth the money. Harris County officials, however, have called ShotSpotter a “godsend” for the Aldine area.

Chicago’s former Inspector General Joe Ferguson said Houston’s statistics so far are “in the same universe” as those in other parts of the country that have been subjected to criticism by experts.

The author of a 2021 report by Chicago’s Office of Inspector General, Ferguson found that ShotSpotter alerts rarely led to evidence of a gun-related crime and could result in biased policing behaviors. He cautioned Houston officials against making premature conclusions based on ShotSpotter data during an interview with the Chronicle.

“What was found in Chicago and has been found in other places is the false positive rate is over 50 percent,” Ferguson said. “And people don’t understand that. People assume things are worse than they are. That spawns fear, and fear spawns overreaction, both as a political matter and in terms of response in the field and on the street.”

At the same time, Ferguson applauded Houston’s incremental approach to implementing the program.

“The way that Houston is going about it is the way that these things should be approached. It started with a pilot program, it is focused, it generates the data, and the data is subjected to analysis and made publicly available,” he said. “But the results that they’ve gotten so far aren’t significantly better than what has been reported nationally.”

I thought I had written about ShotSpotter before, but my archives say otherwise. This article does a pretty good job of telling you what you need to know, and there was a CityCast Houston podcast episode from last January that also discussed it, if you want to know more. My sense about this is similar to how I feel about security cameras, which is that it sounds like it could be beneficial, and may have value in certain specific circumstances, but we need to be very rigorous about the data that we have for it and make decisions based on that data. Basically, does the data say this thing works as its proponents claim it does, which is to say that it reduces or helps solve crime at a certain level, or does it not? What even is a reasonable expectation given our investment, the context in which we are using it (e.g, in a high-crime area or just someplace where the locals are loudly clamoring for it regardless of need), and the experiences of other cities? We need to know that going in, and we need to be willing to turn it off if it’s not working as hoped. If we have all that in place, then I’m willing to give it a try. If not, then surely there are better uses of the money.

Dispatches from Dallas, February 24 edition

This is a weekly feature produced by my friend Ginger. Let us know what you think.

This week in Dallas area news, we now know the candidates for various races in the May elections in the Metroplex; staffing and evidence issues in the Dallas Police Department; and news from Dallas Museums. Also, from the border by way of the BBC, a fascinating short film about a Texas town that is now part of Mexico.