Dateline Houston

“Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.” – Mark Twain

As you probably know by now, almost 77,000 Texans got letters in the mail in September asking them to let their county know within 30 days if they are not dead, lest their voter registration be canceled. Harris County citizens got more than 9,000 of those letters. I’ll skip to the end: as of Wednesday, the “purge” (really, has that word ever meant a good thing?) is on hold until after the November election. But the way this played out deserves study, because it’s further suggestion that the Texas guvm’t is willing to accidentally and/or incidentally disenfranchise a huge number of people to prevent a statistically irrelevant quantity of fraud.

Act One.

As soon as the letters went out, it was clear to anyone paying attention that mistakes had been made. Most of the letters were delivered on a Friday and Saturday, September 8th and 9th, and by the end of Monday the 11th, more than 300 Harris County residents had already called their county office to complain. Importantly, none of these people were dead.

Harris County Tax Assessor-Collector Don Sumners immediately recognized the severity of the problem and declared that no one in his county would be deleted from the voter rolls until after the November election and after further investigation. Sounds pretty responsible, right? After all, in the three weeks since the letters went out, 32 percent of the Harris County voters presumed dead have been found very much alive, and only seven percent have been confirmed dead.

Let’s math, shall we? In Harris County, 9018 people received dead letters. So the living-but-potentially purged voters number about 2,885. And the actually dead are about 631 voters—a significant number, surely, but there’s no indication that any of those people would have been impersonated by someone trying to vote in their place. The vast majority, though registered, probably wouldn’t have voted because… they’re dead. So why the rush to “clean up” the rolls?

To maintain the integrity of our elections, of course. How big a problem is dead-voter impersonation in Texas? Well, in defending his ill-fated voter ID law, Attorney General Greg Abbott told Fox News in July that more than 200 people (!) who were legally dead had voted in the last election. At the time of this year’s presidential runoffs, Texas had more than 13 million registered voters. So that’s .0015% of the registered voters, which you should really say out loud—one-and-a-half thousandths of one percent—that AG Abbott said necessitated the Voter ID law.

But see, it wasn’t 200 dead voters that voted. When PolitiFact investigated that claim, they found that actually when you look a little closer at the data, it was really four. Four zombie voters. I’m not even going to dignify that with math.

Act Two.

So, back in Harris County, Tax Assessor-Collector Sumners saw that there was a problem with the dead letters and said, “I think we should wait on this.” In response, the Texas Secretary of State’s office, that Friday, froze Harris County’s voter registration funding. Money is the big gun in government; cutting off funding is the nuclear option. So the United Nations can fail for a year to get everyone to sign a mean letter to Syria, but the Texas Secretary of State’s office can, within three days, center its thumb on the windpipe of a major county and press?

People in places high and low started questioning the methods and timing of the purge. Cutting dead voters from the registration rolls isn’t new—the state has done it for years, using information from their own Bureau for Vital Statistics. What’s different is that, during the last session, the Texas legislature passed House Bill 174 requiring the secretary of state’s office to use the Social Security Administration’s “death master list” (a great band name) to assemble their roster of the probably-dead. The resulting lists were much bigger than usual and included both “strong matches” and “weak matches,” all of which were sent to the counties so designated. A strong match correlates the last name, date of birth, and entire SSN for a registered Texas voter and a dead person on the Social Security list. A weak match pairs either the same full Social Security number plus birth date or just the birth date, last four digits of the SSN, and one name component, which presumably includes middle names. (Think of the Waynes!) Of the 77,000 names the secretary of state’s office sent out potentially to be purged, about 70,000 of them were weak matches. Plus, according to the Travis County voter registrar, strong matches are automatically cancelled. So the vast majority of those affected by this move were already designated maybe not actually dead.

Unlike the Voter ID bill, HB 174 sailed to passage. It got through the Texas House with only one dissenting vote and the Senate unanimously. It was also precleared by the U.S. Justice Department, meaning it wasn’t thought discriminatory.

But was it? Analysis by the Houston Chronicle showed that in Harris County—where, I remind you, nearly a third of letter-getters have already proved not dead—voters in traditionally black neighborhoods received a disproportionate number of the letters. Lise Olsen writes, “Nearly 2,900 [of the 9,000 letter recipients] live in Harris County Commissioner’s Precinct 1 – a minority opportunity district created more than two decades ago that includes most of the county’s historically black neighborhoods.”

Drink that in.

There are a couple of reasons this might be. One is that residents of those neighborhoods may be older and so more likely to have died. Another is that traditionally African-American surnames are among the most common. The Chronicle observes that, across Texas, “voters named Smith, Johnson, Williams, Jones, Brown, Davis, Garcia and Rodriguez were most likely to be tagged” weak matches, and that “about 13,000 voters listed had last names associated with Hispanic heritage.”

Is this incidental? Was it deliberate? Considering that the elderly and minorities are more likely to be Democrats and more likely to be wrongly dropped because of HB 174, one smells fish. But nobody wants to say so out loud. They just want to stop the insanity.

Act Three.

And they did. Four living voters who’d been notified of their deaths sued the state to stop the purge, and on Wednesday settled in an agreement that no one would be purged until after the election and after verification of their (actual) death. This ended the inquiry into whether the bill as conceived or as carried out had Democrat-suppressing intentions.

Secretary of State Hope Andrade said (in my mind, blithely), that the process “has never precluded counties from taking the time local officials deem necessary to confirm a voter’s status.” Except for the whole freezing funding thing.

As for Harris County’s heroic tax assessor-collector, Don Sumners, he is content. “I hope everybody’s happy,” Sumners said. “I feel vindicated that we actually ended up with a solution that everybody could agree on, and it’s pretty much what I was doing.”

When Mitt Romney’s comments about the 47 percent came to light, perhaps the most shocking part was made of two words rattled off in a list that ended with “you name it.” Romney said of this dismissible 47 percent of Americans that they, (erroneously) “believe they are entitled” to health care, housing, and “to food.”

To food.

Are we, as citizens of the United States, or even just as living humans, entitled to food?

I would think this question were easily answered, in theory if not in practice. But then, pre-Romney, I wouldn’t have thought it needed asking at all. Yes, people should be able to eat. Look at Death Row: we feed even those we think deserve to die up until the day we kill them. Surely if Charles Manson still gets his daily trays, we can agree that everyone is “entitled” to food.

So what about someone arrested for possessing marijuana?

Until last night, when Michelle Alexander, Stanford Law graduate and associate professor of law at Ohio State, addressed the Progressive Forum at the Wortham Center in Houston, I had no idea that most states, including Texas, prohibit anyone who has ever had a drug conviction from receiving food stamps.

In fact, the federal law that prohibits public benefits for drug felons was passed in 1992 by Democratic President Bill Clinton, as part of “welfare reform.” It contained an opt-out provision, but as of 2010, only 13 states and the District of Columbia had decided that, yes, even drug felons are entitled to food.

This is one of roughly a thousand head-spinning revelations in Alexander’s 2010 bestseller, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. Reissued in paperback this year, The New Jim Crow has stayed on The New York Times Best Seller list for nine months and spurred a national conversation about whether, in the same America that elected a president of color, the criminal justice system is now doing the job that Jim Crow laws used to do: ensuring African Americans remain an “undercaste.”

Last night, Alexander exhorted a rapt audience of about 700 to “wake up” to the changes that 30 years of drug policy have wrought. Simply put: study upon study confirms that African Americans are no more likely to use or sell drugs than white Americans, but they are far, far more likely to go to prison for it, particularly if they are poor. Once a young person is transformed into a Felon, upon serving his time he’ll find virtually unscalable obstacles to full reintegration into society. This is because while it’s no longer acceptable to deny housing, employment, suffrage or public benefits simply on the basis of race, it is not only legal but, in the eyes of most, including a large part of the minority community, totally acceptable to deny these rights to a Felon.

In Texas, for example, a Felon (and I capitalize this to draw attention to the fact that this one characteristic becomes a whole identity subsuming the rest of the person’s history and worth) is not entitled to food stamps. Ever. According to Ana Correa, executive director of the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition, Texas has more 70,000 people exiting its prisons every year. Those citizens have an extremely difficult time obtaining housing, being hired for any kind of job, or even legally feeding themselves. In Texas, even if you have no criminal record, if you allow a Felon to stay at your apartment with you, you can be evicted for it. So even family members of a former prisoner put themselves at personal risk by taking in their own who may not otherwise be able to obtain housing.

Alexander pointed to Texas as the “birthplace of mass incarceration,” and observed that while “Right on Crime” trends are beginning to erode “Tough on Crime” mentalities, this is little cause for rejoicing. The decrease in Texas prison populations has been a response to the extreme expense of mass incarceration in an age of shrinking state and local budgets, not because of recognized injustice. Alexander says that as long as the rationale for deincarceration doesn’t acknowledge the racial and economic origins of the prison boom, nothing is fixed.

The New Jim Crow, like anything bold, has its critics. Some recoil from Alexander’s suggestion that President Reagan deliberately publicized the explosion of crack cocaine in the inner cities to bolster support for his already-declared war, which, she notes, began two years before the advent of crack and when drug use rates were falling. Others criticize her focus on the minority community, ignoring the impact the drug war has had on poor people of all races, and failing to acknowledge the minority community’s support for tough drug enforcement.

But last night, Alexander made a point of recognizing the cost of the civil rights movement to poor whites and the way racial inequity historically has been used to keep the lower classes from organizing together. She called for a nothing less than a “multi-racial, multi-ethnic human rights movement on behalf of all of us” that would end felonies for simple drug possession, and, more expansively, ensure that the caste system created by slavery, perpetuated by Jim Crow laws and then mass incarceration would not be replaced by a new system to do the same job. She urged communities to break their silence about their own and their loved ones’ criminal histories, to create an “underground railroad” to help Felons reintegrate, and to shift to a public health model for treating drug abuse and drug addiction.

In closing, Alexander pointed out how detention of undocumented immigrants was now supporting the prison industry and functioning as the boogeyman to retain poor whites’ support for conservative policy. “We have to connect the dots,” she said. “It’s our task, I firmly believe, to end this.”

I can’t put it any better than does KTRK’s Christine Dobbyn:

“A mentally ill double amputee was shot and killed by a Houston police officer this weekend after he refused to drop a pen.”

There are many details in a story like this, of course. Some of them are arguably mitigating. But before we get to those, a word from our Chief.

In a statement released today, HPD Chief Charles McClelland called Saturday’s fatal events “tragic and unfortunate for all involved,” although surely, Dateline Houston would add, more so for some than others. Chief McClelland says he’s asked the FBI to “monitor and investigate this incident” in addition to the investigations being conducted by HPD’s own Homicide and Internal Affairs Division and the Harris County DA’s Office, Civil Rights Division. The Chief closes his statement, “It is my desire to have everyone reserve judgment until all the facts and evidence in this investigation have been gathered.”

Thus, Dateline Houston will resist her powerful impulses to judge and even weep and will instead attempt here only to present the available facts and evidence, and then some further contextually relevant facts and evidence.

Brian C. Claunch was 45 years old and wheelchair-bound, having lost an arm and leg in a train accident years before. Claunch had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and until about 2:30 Saturday morning, he lived at the Healing Hands group home in central Houston with two other disabled men and John Garcia, the home’s owner. Claunch had lived at Healing Hands for the last 18 months as “part of a placement by the Harris County guardianship program,” according to the Houston Chronicle. Garcia told KTRK that Claunch “liked to doodle. He was always doodling at the table.”

Claunch’s caretaker called police at about 2:00 AM Saturday morning because Claunch had become agitated, demanding soda and cigarettes. According to the police report:

“The suspect was agitated and began to yell at the officers and threatened to kill them and the other residents of the home. As he yelled at the officers, he waved a shiny object in his hand in their direction. The suspect refused the officers’ verbal commands to drop the object and advanced in a threatening manner toward one of the officers. As the suspect backed one of the officers into a corner, he attempted to stab the officer with the object. Officer Marin, fearing for his partner’s life, and his own safety, discharged his duty weapon one time, striking the suspect. The object was discovered to be a shiny, ball point [sic] pen.”

Officer Marin shot Brian Claunch in the head. Marin, a five-year veteran of HPD, also shot and killed another suspect in October 2009. That suspect was allegedly armed with a knife.

Two officers, two guns, and one man known to be mentally ill, in a wheelchair, with a ballpoint pen. The facts. The evidence.

Saturday night, an HPD officer shot at an alleged beer thief in a gas station parking lot. The suspect evaded capture.

On September 16, an unarmed 26-year-old man reached for what turned out to be a cellphone and an HPD officer shot him in the leg. The man had a history of mental illness.

On July 9, an HPD officer shot and killed an unarmed 54-year-old, Rufino Lara, whom the officer said was ignoring commands and made a threatening motion. Lara had a beer in his waistband and didn’t speak English. HPD says Lara ignored police commands, but witnesses say he had his hands against the wall and was compliant before being shot to death.

While all officer shootings are investigated by Internal Affairs, no law enforcement officer in Harris County has been charged in a shooting since 2010, when Sgt. Jeffrey Cotton was acquitted for shooting an unarmed man in his own yard.

In 2008, the city of Houston finally settled a lawsuit brought in 2004 by the family of 14-year-old Eli Escobar, who was unarmed and walking away from a scuffle with which he was uninvolved when an HPD rookie killed him with a shot to the head.

If Houston politics were a reality TV show, Councilmember Helena Brown would be the housemate that producers had selected specially as insurance against a boring season.

While Dateline Houston was having its mind blown in the Nevada desert, Brown was making headlines again, this time for trying to bill the city for stuff that the city obviously shouldn’t be paying for. Among this stuff was a personal lawyer Brown hired to attend meetings between herself, the mayor, and—wait for it—the city attorney. As in, the attorney employed, and already paid for, to advise councilmembers. A strong case could previously have been made for Brown regarding her employer as antagonist, but this really nails it. (The city will pay for outside counsel when there’s a conflict of interest, but none seemed apparent, and Brown refused, as she always does, to explain her actions.)

It also nails Brown’s fascinating hypocrisy, which might be explained by obliviousness. This first-term erstwhile hotel receptionist has made a name for herself by voting down fire trucks and care for the elderly, saying every blessed week that the city is broke and the country is broke, but she tried to bill the city for $2,108 in gas money spent not by her but by William Park, whom the Chronicle coyly IDs as a “volunteer adviser to the councilwoman on fiscal issues.”

Props to the Chronicle’s Chris Moran, who writes lines like that with a narrow eye but a straight face.

In July, the Houston Press made Brown/Park its cover story, speculating that Park, a disgraced financier, influences Brown’s votes and soapbox speeches if not outright writes them. Whatever the arrangement, Brown, in trying and failing to cover the man’s gas bill, starts to look a little victim-y. She/they have rendered her wholly ineffective, since she usually votes alone and doesn’t seem to have made any friends on the Council.

Then one reads that, while denying her employees benefits ostensibly to save the city money, Brown tried to get reimbursed for buying 13,000 magnets.

The expense, of more than $3,000, remains under review.

In May, Dateline Houston brought you the story of Lloyd Oliver, our latest local star of How to Succeed in Government Without Really Trying. But Oliver’s moment in the spotlight has come to an abrupt, less than dignified end.

Oliver, who has run and voted several times as a Republican in Harris County, bested Zach Fertitta in the Democratic primary race for District Attorney. Fertitta was widely respected by both parties and had been an Assistant DA since 2003. Oliver, a lawyer, said he was running because it’s “good for business.” After his win, which he attributed to “dumb luck,” Oliver said he hoped the Democratic party would send campaign funds his way so he could “get me a John Edwards $300 haircut.”

That’s not what happened. Today, the Harris County Democratic Party took Oliver’s name off the ballot, preferring to leave Republican Mike Anderson unopposed in November.

In a letter to Oliver, Harris County Democratic Party Chairman Lane Lewis said Oliver had violated party rules when he told the Houston Chronicle in May that the incumbent DA, Republican Pat Lykos, “would have gotten my vote.” But Lane added, “You should know that regardless of my decision above, the Democratic Party has determined that it will not present a nominee this election cycle” for Harris County DA.

Ouch.

Oliver was incredulous and promised to appeal to state party officials and, if necessary, bring a federal suit to stay on the ballot. He also called those who’d brought the complaint and sided against him “goobers.”