Couple of stories of interest relating to the District Attorney’s race. First, DA Devon Anderson announced the creation of a special court to handle prostitution cases.
Devon Anderson
A new program Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson announced on Thursday targets prostitutes, offering some arrested the opportunity to get out of the world’s oldest profession.
Surrounded by representatives of women’s advocacy groups, Anderson said a program she is implementing, called Safe Court, will help young adults from 17 to 25 who are arrested on misdemeanor prostitution charges in the same way Harris County’s drug courts and other specialty courts work.
“Research has shown that sending the people who are involved in prostitution to jail does not give them the tools to break free from the prostitution business,” Anderson said at a news conference. “We need to recognize that they are long-time victims of abuse and neglect and many have very serious addiction issues.”
[…]
Anderson, appointed in September 2013 to take over the office after the death of her husband, Mike Anderson, has pushed for more focus on illegal trafficking. Mike Anderson created a human trafficking division at the office and hired a special prosecutor to go after those who profit from trafficking and pimping.
Devon Anderson has added a prosecutor and an investigator to the division. On Thursday, she said prostitutes are manipulated by traffickers through intimidation and violence.
“You have to break the connection between the prostitute and the pimp, or the prostitute and the owner,” Anderson said. “Get them to a safe place and help them work on all of their issues.”
She said a specialty court has the resources to individually help prostitutes with drug or alcohol addictions, long-time trauma, a lack of education and other problems.
“Specialty courts in this courthouse work,” Anderson said.
I approve of this idea. Prostitution is a big problem in some parts of the county, and a lot of other crime is associated with the presence of prostitution activity. That doesn’t mean shipping prostitutes off to jail is a good solution, however. Anderson is right that rehab >> punishment in these cases, and that working to help these women is the right way to go. I look forward to seeing what this new court can do.
Meanwhile, Kim Ogg is focusing on burglary.
Kim Ogg
Harris County District Attorney candidate Kim Ogg on Tuesday rolled out a plan to automatically send convicted burglars to jail, the same day GOP incumbent Devon Anderson unleashed TV and radio ads in which she promised to put criminals in jail or send them to their death.
Being tough on crime appears to be the new focus each candidate has decided to take since they last month outlined their approach to another issue – marijuana.
After both unveiled platforms for leniency for low-level marijuana charges, they want to convey they are not soft on crime because, three weeks from the election, the race is becoming competitive, political analysts said.
“The focus is on a relatively small share of (Republican) voters who are willing to split their ticket,” said Mark Jones, chair of the Political Science Department at Rice University.
“For Anderson,” Jones said, “the key is retaining them as Republican voters, and Ogg’s challenge is to convince them that they can confidently split tickets and not have to worry about her being ‘soft on crime.’ ”
[…]
A representative for Anderson said Ogg’s proposal is not a change, at least when it comes to home burglaries.
“Burglary of a habitation is already a no probation/no deferred adjudication policy,” said Sara Marie Kinney, a spokeswoman for Anderson. “It has been for 30 years.”
She also said the elected district attorney has little control over whether police agencies solve the cases, so the number of burglaries reported far exceeds the number of cases brought to the DA’s office.
However, Ogg said the district attorney has the ability to coordinate criminal investigations countywide and the budget to back it up.
“Our DA’s office needs to lead on the issue of burglary,” she said. “It’s our job to set law enforcement priorities, and we are going to be using assets seized by crooks to catch more crooks.”
In the first article above, Ogg charged that Anderson has the lowest prosecution rate for burglaries over the past six years. Her proposal is to not offer probation plea deals to burglary suspects. I’m not a big fan of taking hard lines like that, and I suspect that reality will intrude on it one way or another. That said, I do agree with putting a higher priority on burglary cases – Lord knows, the people in my neighborhood have been complaining mightily about break-ins and thefts for months now – and I do think the DA can take a leadership role in that. More to the point, this fits with the idea of putting less emphasis on minor drug crimes, since one of the points of that was to free up prosecution resources to focus on other issues.
Ogg catered to her core constituents with the pot pledge and her stance on capital punishment. Her handlers are now convinced she will fall victim to straight ticket voting if she can’t sway more moderates because aside from a very small group of Lykos groupies like that goofball Big Jolly, the ones still upset their candidate lost the last election’s primary, few GOP supporters are going to vote for Ogg (maybe a few from the Log Cabin Republicans at best). The problem is that once again, Ogg is convinced that the elected District Attorney is somehow empowered to direct local law enforcement agencies in anything more than an advisory capacity. Her campaign still maintains that the DA is in charge of all local police, an “untruth” to be generous, and can set policies with a blank check.
This expansion of Anderson’s work on human trafficking both her and her late husband, has some promise but like any pledge or campaign promise, the devil is in the details. Houston has a lot of hookers and enforcement of existing laws is minimal given the small size of city and county vice units. Precinct 4 Constable Hickman has pandered to a small group of developers and right wingers with his office devoting so much emphasis to spas, massage parlors, truck stop hookers, and the like; often under the guise of “stopping human trafficking”. When asked for a single example of said trafficking, one that doesn’t cause a reasonable person to roll their eyes into the back of their head, the public is given a political non-answer. I suspect most of his enforcement is to please business developers who on one hand lease out space to all the spas in Hickman’s area but on the other find doing so causes other clients to move out (they want their cake and eat it too).
So Ogg gets another “fail” for promoting an unworkable solution and Anderson gets a slight nod depending on how her office follows up on this latest development. If Ogg wanted to stir things up among undecided voters, she’d offer a program to deport all illegals caught engaging in burglary. Granted, she’d have no authority to do that but such a limitation has not stopped her other pledges as a candidate for political office.