Articles tagged: police
Armed With Lessons From a Dallas Serial Killer, Families Push for Reforms in Texas Law
Bills before the state Legislature this session would subject precious metal buyers to more scrutiny and protect assisted living residents.
Shannon Gleason Dion often holds a gold necklace with a guardian angel medallion when she testifies before the Texas Legislature. Her mother, Doris Gleason, wor...Read More
In San Antonio, Police Reformers Square Off with the Cops’ Union
A proposal to end collective bargaining, on the ballot May 1, aims to spur police accountability in Texas’ second-largest city.
In the heat of last summer’s uprisings over the killing of George Floyd, a small group of San Antonians, with little experience in criminal justice reform, ha...Read More
The Lege This Week: “Another Watershed Moment”
The push for an omnibus reform package named after George Floyd underscores how outrage over his death changed local and state policy debates around policing.
Welcome to the 87th Legislative Session. Since the last session came to a close in June 2019, Texas has been hit by an unrestrained pandemic and a crippling eco...Read More
Editorial: Defund the Constables
The office of constable may have made sense back when Texas was a sprawling frontier. Instead, constables basically now run their own little personal fiefdoms.
From the March/April 2021 issue. Texas Republicans’ longtime demand that cities shrink their budgets ran into a thin blue line last year. Austin called thei...Read More
Undetected
Homicide cases are going unsolved in Texas, leaving serial killers to murder again.
Undetected As more homicide cases go unsolved, the backlog of unsolved murders grows and serial killers are free to kill again. Too few police departments are e...Read More
Will the Texas Legislature Stop Police from Arresting People for Fine-Only Offenses?
After years of failed attempts, Texas lawmakers are again trying to curb petty arrests that disproportionately target people of color.
Update: On Monday, Marco Puente agreed to a $200,000 settlement in his lawsuit against two police officers with the City of Keller. On a broiling August day las...Read More
Fort Bend County Will Soon Have Its First Black Sheriff Since Reconstruction
Eric Fagan, elected during a larger national reckoning on race and law enforcement, will lead an office that has been under fire for racial profiling.
Walter Moses Burton was 21 years old and living in slavery when he arrived to Texas in 1850. The wealthy white planter who enslaved Burton also taught him to re...Read More
Researcher Howard Henderson on Reimagining Policing in the U.S.
Henderson says policing in the U.S. perpetuates systems of inequality that mirror the nation’s history of colonialism.
The uprising sparked by the police killing of George Floyd on May 25 has pushed the debate around public safety into territory that would have seemed unthinkabl...Read More
For Austin Police, Claims of Racism Are Only the Tip of the Iceberg
An investigation into allegations of racism against a former top cop points to deeper problems of bias and retaliation at the Austin Police Department.
In December, following the abrupt resignation of an assistant police chief accused of using racial slurs on the job, Austin’s city council launched an investi...Read More