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70 Million
Activists in Houston were galvanized by events in Ferguson in 2014 following the death of Michael Brown. First, they took to the streets in protest. Then they started organizing. Not long after, they found a kindred spirit in the most unlikely person: a candidate for the DA office. 70 Million reporter, Ruxandra Guidi, chronicles how activists and reformers are succeeding in cutting the jail population, diverting drug arrests, and increasing accountability for local police. { TRANSCRIPT BELOW }
70 Million is made possible by a grant from the Safety and Justice Challenge at the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The 70 Million podcast is a production of Lantigua Williams & Co.
Image Credit: Ruxandra Guidi Image Caption: A bail bonds agency welcomes business next door to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office. A federal judge recently ruled the county’s bail practices unconstitutional.
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TRANSCRIPT
Ruxandra:
Known for being “tough on crime”, tougher even than Texas as a whole, Harris
County incarcerated mostly low-level and non-violent offenders. Its jails were the
subject of numerous federal investigations over inmate abuse. It was no different
than Missouri. At the same time that scores of people went out to protest in
Ferguson, around 100 people gathered at a park, south of downtown Houston.
Durrel Douglas was there. He was 28 at the time, and working as a labor
organizer.
Douglas:
After Ferguson, there was this Facebook invite to this event at MacGregor Park.
Ruxandra: Durrel’s a Houston native. He was born and raised in South Park, a black and
Latino enclave known in the ‘90s for its high crime rate.
Douglas: Somebody set up an event and people just went — there was no organization,
there was no nothing.
Ruxandra: Durrel says he still doesn’t know who was behind the Facebook post. But
eventually, the crowd at the park swelled to 300 people and then took off en
masse in the direction of the courts and police headquarters downtown.
Douglas: People are just joining, like we’re passing apartment complexes and people are
just joining. We’re this mob of people.
Ruxandra: At one point, the demonstrators blocked a freeway, and police on horseback
stayed out of their way, holding back traffic. Durrel remembers being captured by
the TV cameras that night.
70 Million S1E3: Reform Activists and a New DA Find Common Ground. 2
Douglas: All of Houston saw us, y’all saw the cameras, all of Texas saw us… And you do that
whole thing to really sort of encompass and remind people, like, we didn’t just
walk from MacGregor to the Denny’s on Southmore, we demonstrated a
constituency that wants change.”
Ruxandra: What change might look like was still unclear at that point. But Durrel knew that it
had to involve criminal justice reform. He was all too familiar with how the system
worked; he used to be a prison guard in central Houston.
Douglas: I did it for exactly five years. I started as a corrections officer, and then I was a
sergeant, and then I was a lieutenant.
Ruxandra: He saw firsthand how black men like him could easily find themselves in prison
and unable to rebuild their lives. What’s more, Durrel would often guard others
who’d grown up in his neighborhood.
Douglas: And here I am, this 23 year old black man, who’s watching all of these inmates,
mostly black and brown, and there are these white guys on horses with rifles in
their hands and they’re checking them off… Jones! Yessir… Johnson! Here, sir.
And I’m like, is this 1843, right?
Ruxandra: On the night of the protest, Durrel and his fellow activists felt euphoric. They
couldn’t imagine just going to sleep. So instead, they stayed in Durrel’s apartment.
Durrel took out a whiteboard, and on it, he started listing the local issues that
needed change.
Douglas: It was at that point that we realized like, wait, all this time we’ve been saying stuff
like that happens here. It is literally happening right now.
Ruxandra: It only took a few online searches for them to learn that Harris County didn’t
release transcripts of police shootings, that local police weren’t required to wear
body cameras while on duty, and that in Texas, members of grand juries were
chosen by a judge, what’s known as a “pick-a-pal” system. Typically, a grand jury
is made up of 23 people who determine whether criminal charges should be
brought against a suspect. If that jury is made up of friends of the judge, that
usually means they’re white and older, and not peers of most of the defendants
facing them.
Douglas: I mean, we were pulling the data, we were getting the racial makeup of their grand
juries because even though the names are blacked out, the racial makeup is
there. So we were able to actually access a lot of that stuff, and so the pressure
was building.
Ruxandra: Three people lead the effort: Durrel, who had union organizing experience,
Damien Thaddeus Jones, a policy activist focused on environmental justice, and
Shekira Dennis, a former Obama White House intern interested in civic
engagement. For months, after work, the three of them met at Durrel’s apartment.
They dug up the data that would help them make their case to other organizations
70 Million S1E3: Reform Activists and a New DA Find Common Ground. 3
and possible supporters. They spoke to neighbors, to public officials and pastors.
By early 2015, they had a name. Here’s Shekira.
Dennis: Houston Justice was a very organic, grassroots initiative started by three young
African American kids who wanted to make a difference; it was not something we
wanted to be this big grandiose thing, like oh my god, all these foundations are
going to look at us and give us a million dollars. We just wanted to do the work our
way, given the tools that we had.
Ruxandra: They didn’t have money, but they did have social media, smartphones, and a big
network of fellow activists who were outspoken about the urgent need for racial
equity.
Dennis: We lobbied legislators, we knocked on doors, we organized in churches, as it
pertained to grand jury reform and that had taken us so far.
Ruxandra: Houston Justice made lots of noise, calling for protests and town halls that invited
locals of all backgrounds to join their effort for criminal justice reform. But the
group was also demanding change at the top; they called for the resignation of
the District Attorney, Devon Anderson.
Anderson was the head prosecutor in a county court where black people
represented 19 percent of the population, but made up almost half of those
arrested for drug possession. During Anderson’s tenure, 200 African-American
inmates died in jail, due to neglect and abuse. Eighty-five percent of them had
been awaiting trial and hadn’t yet been convicted of a crime. Faced with these
statistics, Shekira and her fellow organizers realized that for starters, they needed
to demand public accountability.
Dennis: What we needed was for them to be responsive, and we just weren’t getting that
type of feedback, so our job then is to empower other community stakeholders to
come forward, to join forces, to move the needle.
Ruxandra: DA Anderson refused to resign. But less than a year since the MacGregor Park
protest, the needle was finally moving further. A new state law passed, banning
the “pick-a-pal” system, Houston Justice circulated petitions to demand that police
officers wear body cameras, and they prevailed. And by 2014, a different kind of
candidate ran for the District Attorney’s Office.
Political ad: I’m Kim Ogg, and I want to be your next DA. My opponent says I’m dangerous;
she’s right.
Ruxandra: Kim Ogg was an openly gay native Houstonian who started out as a line
prosecutor in 1987 and advocated for victims’ and defendants’ rights. She ran on a
platform that included drug policy and bail reform, deprioritizing drug-related
arrests, and holding police officers accountable. Ogg would not beat incumbent
Devon Anderson in 2014, but that’s when Shekira first noticed her.
70 Million S1E3: Reform Activists and a New DA Find Common Ground. 4
Dennis: It’s never going to be — ‘the activist community is excited about the DA’s office’,
alright?
Ruxandra: Still, Shekira says she was hopeful about Ogg’s reform-focused campaign.
Dennis: We’re trying to really work past 20, 30 years of irresponsiveness or insensitivity to
communities, so there’s a gap of trust, right? We gotta bridge that gap.
Ruxandra: Among those trying to bridge that gap of trust were Houston Justice, Texas
Organizing Project, immigrant rights groups, and black churches.
And riding that wave of reforms was Kim Ogg who ran again in 2016 and won,
becoming the first Democrat in that office in 36 years. Shekira believed in Ogg’s
vision so much that she left Houston Justice to go work for the new DA as a new
community outreach coordinator.
DA Ogg seemed eager to work with local activists. Sitting in her small corner
office overlooking downtown, she still has a lot to say about what makes her
different from her predecessors.
Ogg: The DA was not playing fair, not with bail, not with nonviolent offenses, and not
even doing a great job on violent offenses. A great example is the prosecution of
10,000 misdemeanor cases a year for marijuana possession at the expense of
leaving 8,000 rape kits.
Ruxandra: She wanted to put fewer resources into arresting drug users and more into solving
sex crimes. She also wanted to do away with a common practice that would entail
testing small, personal-use amounts of narcotics in a lab after an arrest.
Ogg: Public policy is set by the leaders who are elected, and offices decide what the
priorities are by the way they spend their money. And when you spend them on
testing marijuana instead of testing rape kits, that’s a statement.
Ruxandra: Soon after she got to office, Ogg also fired more than three dozen prosecutors.
Her list of reforms was daunting, especially for the most populous county in Texas
— one known for handing out a lot of convictions, sentencing harshly and favoring
capital punishment.
So she re
Ruxandra: Sandra is a critic of Texas’ harsh sentencing and tough-on-crime policing. I met
her inside her campus office, surrounded by leather-bound law books. She tells
me she’d been more interested in studying the courts and the police from the
outside, rather than advising them from within until DA Ogg came along, and
Sandra sensed a rare openness to dialogue and reforms — a unique opportunity.
Thompson: I just realized that nobody that I could see, I didn’t really hear a lot of voices
speaking out for the people who were getting trapped in the system. Because I
think frankly that the problem built up over decades without people realizing what
they were doing, what the consequences were of the kind of system that they
were operating.
Ruxandra: The way Sandra sees it, the entire criminal justice system had been broken for
years, from the laws and the patrol officers who enforced them, to the courts
where defendants faced a judge and the jails they sent them to. Around the
country, but particularly in the South, whether it was in Ferguson, Missouri, or in
Harris County, Texas — the poorer the defendant, the more unjust their treatment
was.
Here’s how it usually worked: If you were arrested for a misdemeanor or minor
offense, that meant the police had probable cause — it didn’t mean you were
guilty of something, necessarily. Yet before you could face a judge in court, you
were required to pay money to get out of jail. If you didn’t have the money for bail,
anywhere between 500 to fifteen hundred dollars, you could be held for days or
weeks on a charge, without any conviction.
Thompson: If you go back you can listen to blues songs from the 20s about ‘getting stuck in
jail ‘cause I don’t have the money for bail.’ And it’s part of the sort of American lore
that you have to pay money to get out of jail. But when we started really looking at
it we realized, well, this is only really a problem if you don’t have money. And for
people with money it’s no big deal whatsoever; they get to go on with their lives,
they get to go back to work and go home and take care of their children and pay
their bills. But for the poor, it’s devastating.
Ruxandra: Being in jail can derail people’s lives even if they ultimately walk free. But if you
get a conviction, and therefore a record, the results are even more devastating.
Koontz: I had no idea of the long-term effects when it comes to housing, when it really
gets down to job opportunities and you sit down and you speak to someone.
Ruxandra: This is Terrance Koontz, or TK. He was convicted of a felony for evading arrest
with a vehicle in 2011. Though he only spent one night in jail, he ended up with a
record. His driver’s license was suspended, he had trouble getting school loans,
an apartment, and a job.
Koontz: There’s no, what kind of felon are you, what was the charge, what did you do, how
long ago was it? It’s just no, this complex does not take felons, we do not hire
felons here. I felt like, had I not had my support system, I would probably be
— I think I would have just lost my sanity, because it’s a lot to try to
process.
Ruxandra: Many years before that felony record, TK was just a boy growing up in the Third
Ward, a working-class neighborhood that’s the center of Houston’s African
American community.
Koontz: My very first experience with police I was, I guess, 8 or 9.
Ruxandra: On that day, TK’s third grade class had an early dismissal from school and he
headed home alone. All of a sudden, a police car stopped next to him. The officer
leaned out the window and asked him, over and over again, whether he was
skipping school.
Koontz: And the officer put me in handcuffs and put me in the back of his car and basically,
I guess, did whatever he had to do in his computer system to see what was going
on, or call the school or verify… I don’t know what he did. All I know is that I was
walking home from school and all of a sudden I was in the back of a police car.
Ruxandra: He was eventually released and sent home. But the incident stayed with TK
throughout his childhood and adolescence. And it was the first thing that came to
mind one fateful night in 2010.
Koontz: I should not have been doing what I was doing. I was speeding, going about 100
miles per hour going through Bellaire, which is definitely the wrong territory for me
to be doing anything, even walking. Maybe I should not even be there.
Ruxandra: When TK calls Bellaire “the wrong territory” — he means it’s a wealthy, mostly
white neighborhood with big homes, a part of town where black drivers can be
stopped simply for being there.
Koontz: Then I heard the sirens, and as soon as I heard the sirens I pulled over and of
course I expected to get a DWI, I didn’t take a field sobriety test, they just took me
- When I woke up the next morning I found out that I had a DWI and evading
arrest and evading arrest is a felony in a motor vehicle in the state of Texas.
Ruxandra: TK insists that he didn’t try to outrun the cops and evade arrest. Yes, he was
driving drunk, but he says he’d stopped the car as soon as he noticed the police
car behind him and he didn’t resist the officer when he was handcuffed. That next
morning, sitting in jail, TK was confused about what to do next.
Koontz: So I talked to this brother and he told me who his lawyer was and I took that
lawyer.
Ruxandra: Unaware of his options, TK listened to his lawyer and decided not to fight the
case. In Texas, felonies like his are punishable by 180 days to two years in state
jail and a fine of up to 10 thousand dollars. In Harris County in particular,
prosecutors at the time would even threaten to give harsher sentences to those
who wouldn’t take a guilty plea. TK was terrified. So he pled guilty.
Koontz: And long story short, I paid $4,000 to get a felony and a misdemeanor because I
pled because I was so naive and afraid of, if I lose this case, they’re going to send
me to jail.
Ruxandra: Above all, TK was desperate to get back home, to regain his freedom.
Koontz: Once you go in there, you know, like, time stops. Like you really start… Like I may
never get out of here again — this is all you’re thinking about.
Ruxandra: He may have gotten out of jail, but now TK had a record, and it would take him
weeks and months to realize the full implications as he tried to move on with his
life.
Koontz: And I often think back about that night and that whole experience. There was no
real assessment of who I was, where I came from, let me check your references,
let me look at your background. I had never been in trouble. Before I got arrested I
worked at the Boys and Girls Club, YMCA, like, I was employed, I was an
upstanding citizen for the most part; I just had a rough night with alcohol. But the
judge didn’t consider that. She said, well the officer said this, go back, have a seat.
You know? I still wake up sometimes feeling trapped.
Ruxandra: TK’s experience may have derailed his life, but it also launched him into activism.
He eventually found work as a community organizer for the Texas Organizing
Project, helping others like him to rebuild their lives or challenge the courts or
police when necessary. He was at that MacGregor Park protest back in 2014,
along with the Houston Justice folks.
Koontz: It’s not easy, but I know I’m not the only one, which makes it harder for me to sit
back and just feel sorry for myself.
Ruxandra: It’s been nearly two years since the changing of the guard at the DA’s office. Many
reforms are yielding results already; in the first few months of Ogg’s tenure last
year, the jail population went down by about a thousand inmates. Over five
thousand people who would have typically been charged with a misdemeanor for
marijuana possession were instead diverted to a four-hour “Cognitive
Decision-Making” class without getting a criminal record. Public defenders are
now present in magistrate courts to represent defendants in their initial court
appearance. And new initiatives are in place to support victims of domestic and
sexual violence. DA Ogg says, let the results of the new DA’s office speak for
themselves.
Ogg: I believe the public is smart enough when they’re presented with the facts and the
data, to decide. And think that’s what my election was reflective of.
Ruxandra: But less than a year into Ogg’s term, her plans for reform faced two major
challenges. In April came a federal class action lawsuit arguing that Harris County
kept people in jail for too long simply because they were too poor to post bail. A
judge called the county’s bail practices unconstitutional and ordered the release
of almost all misdemeanor defendants within 24 hours of arrest. DA Ogg
welcomed these reforms. But this came as a shock to those working in the county
jails, including Assistant Chief Debra Schmidt, a 32-year veteran at the Sheriff’s
office.
Schmidt: One of the largest reforms that we have in place right now requires an almost
immediate release of misdemeanor defendants. That has had a tremendous
impact.
Ruxandra: I met Assistant Chief Schmidt at the jail, a giant concrete building on the edge of
downtown. The jail survived the other challenge to reforms, the one no one could
have seen coming.
News clip: Breaking news in America this Wednesday morning, searching for survivors.
Rescuers in boats going door to door overnight in Houston, after Harvey dumped
for than fifty…
Ruxandra: In August, the storm pummeled Houston, displacing thousands of people and
flooding homes and buildings, including the DA’s Office and the courthouse. Trials
to this day are taking place in the jail and in other undamaged county buildings.
Assistant Chief Schmidt agrees with the DA on the need for keeping most
nonviolent offenders from crowding the jails. But she is overwhelmed by the
complex and delicate task of reforming the jails and the pretrial bond system
overnight and with limited county resources.
Schmidt: Right immediately after Harvey our jail population plummeted. And then the other
impacts of Harvey caught up, which were namely and specifically the fact that we
didn’t have enough venues to hold felony court. And that outpaced everything.
Ruxandra: Today, there are 10 percent more people in Harris County jails than before the
storm, effectively canceling out the progress made in reducing that population.
Schmidt: And that is significant. That is a massive jump.
Ruxandra: But perhaps one of the most radical changes under DA Ogg has been a renewed
effort for accountability throughout the criminal justice system, including a
revamped civil rights division that investigates the police.
News clip: A couple charged with murder at a local Denny’s will now stand trial. Terry
Thompson and his wife Chauna, a former Harris County deputy, are accused of
the crime.
Ruxandra: In 2017, Chauna Thompson, a deputy police officer, and her husband Terry, had
an altercation with a drunk man outside a Houston restaurant. In a first for the
county, the DA’s office indicted the Thompsons for murder in the choking death of
John Hernández. They’re facing separate trials: Chauna will face hers in October.
The Civil Rights division has also indicted at least a dozen officers for things like
aggravated assault and obstruction of justice. Some see it as sending a message
to all law enforcement officers in Harris County. And many of them are pushing
back. Among them is Joseph Gamaldi of the Houston Police Officers’ Union. Here
he is at a panel discussion earlier this year.
Gamaldi: I’m sure before I walked into this room today, y’all assumed that we have
hundreds of shooting by our officers in the city of Houston. Last year, we had 2
million citizen contacts; we had 15 officer-involved shootings. Fifteen.
Ruxandra: Gamaldi says that number could even be lower if his department had more
resources.
Gamaldi: If the community wanted to make an investment in the police department and
increase our staffing to a point where we could have two officers in every single
car, we’d probably drive that number down to five. I mean, it’s right there in front
of us if we have the will and the money, that we’re willing to do that.
Ruxandra: Gamaldi’s rationale goes something like this: more money for the Houston Police
Department would result in fewer officer-involved shootings, because patrol
officers would have more backup, and would therefore be less likely to act out of
fear of being hurt.
But the argument doesn’t hold for criminal justice advocates like TK or the
members of Houston Justice who’d like to see less police, not more, and better
police training, and who feel that law enforcement officials are rarely punished for
their abuse of power. Until now.
Seven years since his felony charge, TK is emboldened to advocate on behalf of
himself and others. For him, it comes down to this.
Koontz: We deserve better today, we want better today. And it’s not a complex math
equation or rocket science — it is simple standards of living. I should be able to
pay my bills, I should be able to enjoy time with my family. Simple things. I don’t
need the big house; I just need to be able to enjoy the one I live in. I need to know
that I can go outside and walk in my community without being oppressed by a
police officer.
Ruxandra: Like other advocates calling for bail and inmate reentry reform, TK is hopeful
about this moment in Harris County history. But he’s not placing all his hopes on
DA Ogg. He’s betting on people like himself, who are going on to become
community organizers and engaged citizens.
In Houston, I’m Ruxandra Guidi for 70 Million.
Mitzi: Thanks for listening. Now we want to hear from you. Have you, a friend or a loved
one experienced the impact of jails? Are you active in local reform? Can we help
you recognize someone in your community who’s been an agent of change? Email
us at hello@70millionpod.com or call us at 202-670-4912.
For more information, visit 70millionpod.com. We’re an open-source podcast, so
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