Amnesty International Houston ZOOM Meeting. Please note, there will be no "in person" meeting this month!

2/15/2022

Please attend as we will be discussing the future and general direction of
Amnesty Houston, local 23.

First Tuesday, March 1st, 7:00 PM

If you don't have the app, go to:

https://zoom.us/join

and enter the ID and Pass code;

Meeting ID: 811 8306 0868
Passcode: 072017

Important: After you enter the meeting ID number, you may get what appears to be an error message, but if you click on the "OPEN IN EXTERNAL APPLICATION" button, you will be able to enter the pass code and join. If you still have difficulty, please call me at 281-495-3783. That is my home # so you will still be able to reach me.

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Attorney of jailed rape victim says DA lied in video statement

8/5/2016

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http://www.click2houston.com/news/investigates/attorney-says-district-attorney-lied-in-video-statement

HOUSTON - The attorney for a rape victim who suffered a mental breakdown on the stand at her rapist’s trial and was then put in jail so prosecutors could make sure she returned to testify said Harris County District Attorney Devon Anderson lied in a videotaped statement responding to a KPRC Channel 2 investigation.

Anderson refused to face on-camera questions as Channel 2 investigated the case of Jenny, who was raped by serial rapist Keith Hendricks.

Anderson responded to the Channel 2 investigation Wednesday with a video posted on YouTube and her Facebook account.In the video statement, Anderson said she stands by her office’s decision to hold Jenny in jail for a month until she would be called to testify again.

“How were we to assume that a homeless, mentally ill victim of an aggravated sex assault would return to testify at the trial of her rapist when that victim was going through a life-threatening mental health crisis and had expressed her intention not to testify?” Anderson asked.

Jenny’s attorney, Sean Buckley -- who is suing the Hendricks’ case prosecutor, a jail guard, Harris County Sheriff Ron Hickman and Harris County -- calls Anderson’s statement a lie.

Buckley said Jenny was not homeless when she came to testify against her attacker or after she was eventually released from jail.

Buckley said Anderson misled viewers.

“She has to know that is (a) false statement because her investigators were the ones who went there to pick Jenny up at her apartment and bring her to Houston to testify,” Buckley told investigative reporter Jace Larson Wednesday. “Now that I know the district attorney’s office is willing to lie to the public about the facts of this case, I’ve got to protect my client. I’ll be sending out subpoenas for their emails and phone records.”

Channel 2 Investigates has asked the Harris County District Clerk’s Office and the Harris County Sheriff’s Office how many times a witness has been placed in jail to assure the witness will be available to testify.

Numbers had not been released as of Wednesday.

A written statement Tuesday, issued by Anderson’s office, said, "Witness bonds are a common tool used by prosecutors and defense attorneys.”

A day later, she suggested her office does not use it frequently.

“We rarely do this, but when a case calls for it to be done we are willing to make that hard decision,” she said.

Anderson said she works hard for crime victims.

“This office has a long history of supporting victims of crime. To claim otherwise is outrageous,” she said. “I have carefully reviewed the case and fully support our prosecutor’s actions. It bears repeating: This was a difficult decision and there were no apparent alternatives that would ensure the victim’s safety and her appearance at trial.”

Buckley said there were alternatives.

2016 Click2Houston.com/KPRC 2

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15 Things Your City Can Do Right Now to End Police Brutality

7/13/2016

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https://mic.com/articles/121572/15-things-your-city-can-do-right-now-to-end-police-brutality#.WbVdiYWTS

By Zak Cheney Rice July 01, 2015

Martin Luther King Jr. said it best in 1966: "[The] law cannot make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also."

Two years later, he was shot and killed in Memphis. But his dream that the United States legal system might eventually overcome its racial biases and serve its non-white citizens equally lives on.
For months now, politicians have invoked King's legacy to implore black citizens to stay peaceful in the face of routine violence. The irony of this plea seems lost on its askers, but it does fall in line with a question that's haunted Black Lives Matter protesters for the past 10 months, namely, "What's going to happen next?"
In other words: How, besides protesting, can we actually make sure no more black people are killed, beaten or tortured by the police? And how can we promote justice and equity in law enforcement more generally?
There's a strong case that the problem with policing isn't actually the police, but us — the police are merely enforcing our democratic will. Yet the real-life benefits of this umbrella term we've dubbed "police reform" — decriminalization, commitment to reducing prison populations and community oversight, to name a few — can still be impactful, if not quite a cure-all.

To that end, the Center for Popular Democracy and Policy Link, two nonprofit advocacy organizations, have partnered with various protesters and street-level organizers to find some concrete solutions to this problem. The result is a 15-point report, titled Building From the Ground Up: A Toolkit for Promoting Justice in Policing, which Mic has synthesized below to identify the concrete steps citizens and local governments can take to affect change.
"[This report] is the result of dozens of interviews ... and work we've done on the ground," Marbre Stahly-Butts, a policy advocate with CPD and co-author of the toolkit, told reporters in a press call earlier this month. "Its goal was really to reflect the aspirations of these on-the-ground organizations."
Each point can be molded to shape your municipality's particular needs, and most are doable through a focused and sustained bit of pressure on local elected officials.
Here are 15 things your city can do right now to better promote justice in policing.

1. Stop criminalizing everything.You may have gotten the impression that everything is a crime these days. That's because it probably is.
The state of California, for instance, has created 1,000 new crimes in the past 25 years, while Michigan currently has 3,102 crimes on the books. New York City alone has 10,000 crimes, rules and codes the police can enforce. In many cities these crimes include innocuous activities like being in a park after hours, drinking alcohol in public, panhandling, spitting and sleeping on the subway. Some cities have even criminalized the wearing of saggy pants (true story).
This is absurd. None of these should warrant criminal punishment. The report estimates that police officers spend 90% of their time dealing with minor infractions like these and just 10% on violent crimes, resulting in a system where people of color are disproportionately summoned to court for low-level offenses — 80% of these summonses are for blacks and Latinos, to be specific.
The solution? The reports says to push police departments and district attorneys to de-prioritize enforcing and prosecuting low-level offenses. Change city charters to limit the health, park, tax and administrative offenses that police are responsible for enforcing. Reclassify misdemeanors as civil infractions, whenever possible.
Last but not least, put measures in place to reduce the collateral consequences of these offenses. Employment, immigration, parenting and public housing status should not be affected.

2. Stop using poor people to fatten city budgets.Most courts can issue an arrest warrant if you don't show up for your court date for a summons or ticketed violation. The result is people spending time in jail for not paying parking tickets.
To make matters worse, the practice is incentivized. Court fees and added fines for not appearing in court or paying the original ticket often supplement city budgets, not to mention these warrants make it really hard to get a job in order to pay the fines you weren't able to pay in the first place because you had no job, and hence no money. See the pattern?
Here's what you can do, according to the report: Pressure lawmakers to eliminate "failure to appear" charges in municipal court. Implement reminder phone calls and free transportation for indigent people with fines where needed. Offer alternatives to monetary payment — community service is an option. Implement a system where fines are dictated by people's specific income level. And cap the amount of money a city budget can pull from these fines and fees.
3. Kick ICE out of your city.Immigration and Customs Enforcement agencies rely heavily on local police. As it stands, ICE can ask your police department to hold someone suspected of immigration violations for up to 48 hours before they pick them up. Not only does that incentivize racial profiling, it also makes people with potential immigration issues really not want to come to the police, even if they need help or could be really helpful in a case.
Shut it down. The report suggests that cities sever ties between ICE and local police departments. ICE should not be able to request these holds. Nor should they have easy access to the address and names of family members of people detained by local police, as they do now. And if ICE wants an exception to any of these rules, the report says they should have to obtain a warrant from an Article III judge. ICE should also have to pay for anyone detained on their behalf, as happens when it requests local law enforcement detain suspects for up to two days — cities and local police should not have to foot the bill, and neither should you.

4. Treat addicts and mentally ill people like they need help, not jail.Jail is not a "one size fits all" prescription. Some issues — like acting erratically due to mental illness or possessing and using drugs due to addiction — are actually better served by medical attention, not incarceration.
The report suggests training law enforcement officials to address these issues at their discretion, with the aim of guiding addicts and people who live with mental illness into treatment programs instead of jail. Legislators should be involved only minimally, mostly to provide funding. Also train police to better identify and confront these problems using de-escalation tactics, and keep track of results through frequent data collection and analysis.
5. Make policy makers face their own racism.This one is pretty simple. Law enforcement disproportionately impacts people of color. It funnels them into jails and prisons at staggering rates. Between 1980 and 2008, America's incarcerated population grew from 500,000 to 2.3 million. Sixty percent of incarcerated Americans are now black or Latino.
One of the primary causes is policy that — whether intentionally or unintentionally — targets blacks and Latinos through drug and search laws, for example. The report recommends that policy makers should have to evaluate the potential racial impact of any new laws they create, and involve community organizers and people who work with disadvantaged populations in every step of the process. Implement a common language for how to evaluate these topics — from patrol officers all the way up to the mayor's office. And of course, collect data on the results.

6. Actually ban racist policing.Bias in policing can be intentional or unintentional, but citizens currently have almost no recourse if they submit allegations of such conduct. Data collection (which we'll go into more below) is an important tool for establishing evidence of bias.
But at the very least, cities, counties and states should provide avenues through which private citizens can take the police to court when they believe they've been profiled. The term "bias" itself should also span a wide array of categories — race, gender, immigration status, housing status, disability, HIV status and more. And allegations of bias should be incorporated in an officer's evaluation process, the report says.
7. Obey the Fourth Amendment.ICYMI, that's the one prohibiting "unreasonable searches and seizures," which often lead to unnecessary (typically drug-related) arrests.
These arrests tend to be marked by severe racial disparities. In 2013, blacks and Latinos in Chicago were four times more likely to be searched during a stop than whites. To rectify this problem, the report says that police should have to alert people to their right to refuse a search — much as they are required to read arrestees their Miranda Rights.
Officers should have to present documentary proof of consent — whether in written, audio or video form. They should also guarantee that there will be no negative consequences if a person refuses a search. The report recommends training the police better on when a search is legal or not. Make officers articulate clearly why they want to conduct a search. Make them present documentary proof of search consent — and if they don't, the presumption should be that the search was unconstitutional.
Last but not least, there should be consequences for officers and departments who do not obtain objective proof of consent.

8. Involve the community in big decisions.Communities should have significant say in how they are policed. Current civilian oversight commissions — maintained in more than 100 jurisdictions — often feel like they lack meaningful control in this respect.
Here's a thought, per the report: Every city should have an adequately funded community oversight board with significant investigatory and disciplinary powers. They should reflect their communities, especially the elements of their communities most affected by police abuse. The majority of these committees should be democratically elected. And if at all possible, they should avoid having former or current police officers to avoid a conflict of interest.
9. Collect data obsessively.Data is the lifeblood of effective police reform. You can't solve a problem without knowing its scope, and the disparate impact of policing practices are imminently knowable if we decide we want to know them.
The report says that cities and departments should maintain a transparent and searchable database on every stop, frisk, summons, use of force, arrest and killing they conduct. The database should be regularly updated. It should be public, but implement measures to protect the privacy of those it involves as well. It also should include all relevant info for each interaction — race, gender, time, place, reason and any other consideration that could help detect bias.
And it should be available online.
10. Body cameras.Body cameras have made their name as an almost knee-jerk reaction to every instance of police abuse over the past year. "Body cameras!" politicians demand, as though advocating for them suggested any kind of long term commitment to fighting misconduct.
Body cameras are far from the solution. But they can be important and helpful, especially when the local community supports their use, guided by clear regulations. There should be clear rules for when these cameras must be activated, the report says. If there's a case where they should have been used but have not been, there should be a presumption of police misconduct. Body cameras should be earmarked by states or localities, not as part of local police budgets.
Clear measures should be established to allow citizens to access this footage, in addition to protecting and validating their own right to film police.

11. Don't let friends of the police prosecute the police.Cases against police officers should be tried by independent prosecutors, not the district attorneys who work with them all the time.
Each state should establish a fully authorized and independent Office of Police Investigations, with the authority to prosecute police officers in criminal court. The report says should also be equipped with sufficient and independent resources. In the absence of such an office, independent prosecutors should be assigned to all cases where police conduct leads to the death of a civilian. In cases involving state police departments, attorneys general should assign an independent prosecutor.
12. Oversight, oversight, oversight.So you've caught the police doing something wrong. Now what do you do? Even if you successfully prosecute an officer or department for wrongdoing, there isn't much infrastructure in place to promote any follow-through — i.e., measures that can implement broader, long-term change.
That's why external oversight committees — ones that oversee the implementation of reforms and proactively identify issues in police operations and practices — are important. These should be independent, and instituted at the city or county level, the report suggests. They should regularly analyze data and identify disparities. They should have full investigatory powers into the police: access to relevant documents, subpoena power, ability to compel testimony. The budget should be consistent and sufficient. And the police should be required to acknowledge and respond to their recommendations.
13. No more military equipment.One thing we learned from Ferguson, Missouri, last year is that our police are disturbingly well-armed. Through a federal program called 1033, local police departments in all 50 states have been requesting (and receiving) military-grade weapons and equipment from none other than the Pentagon since the early 1990s.
More than 100 colleges and universities and over 20 school districts have access to this equipment as well. Its cumulative worth today stands at $727 million.
Municipal solutions to this problem aren't easily forthcoming, the report says. It's really up to the federal government to decide whether to make it available or not. President Barack Obama did recently issue an executive order prohibiting police departments from obtaining specific equipment — namely tracked armored vehicles, grenade launchers, large caliber weapons and ammunition and bayonets (yes, bayonets). But few states have restrictions regulating how the equipment already obtained should be used.

14. Establish a "use of force" standard.Consider this: Maybe it's so hard to legally determine whether a police officer used excessive force in a given situation because there's no national standard for what constitutes excessive force.
How can we solve the problem if we can't agree on what the problem looks like? This standard needs to be better defined and enforced. The report says that all departments should issue a statement affirming that their officers should use minimum force to subdue people. They should develop clear and transparent standards for reporting, investigating and disciplining officer who do not comply. They should develop policies that let other officers intervene when fellow officers are using excessive force. And their training should be adjusted to emphasize de-escalation.
15. Train the police to be members of the community, not just armed patrolmen.Police are trained to handle some rough situations: people with guns, people with knives, car chases, foot pursuits. The Washington Post writes that new recruits usually spend about 60 hours learning how to handle a gun. It's all very tactical. But guess how much time they spend learning how to de-escalate tense situations, or properly handle the mentally ill? Eight hours apiece, according to the Police Executive Research Forum.
This is a problem. Police should be trained on how to develop better relationships with their communities. This training should incorporate culture, diversity, mental illness training, youth development, bias and racism.
The report recommends that recruits should be thoroughly and professionally trained on procedural bias and fairness, implicit bias, institutional bias, relationship-based and community interaction, crisis intervention, mediation, conflict resolution, appropriate engagement with youth based on science of adolescent brain development, de-escalation and minimizing use of force, coping with mental ill individuals, increasing language proficiency and cultural competency, appropriate engagement with LGBTQ, trans and gender-nonconforming people and documenting, preventing and addressing sexual harassment, abuse and assault.
Sounds hard? Welcome to being a police officer.
A final reminder: Unless cited otherwise, the facts, findings, statistics and conclusions presented in this article were adapted from Building From the Ground Up: A Toolkit for Promoting Justice in Policing, available here.

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Journalist Khadija Ismayilova in Azerbaijan free but conviction must be quashed

6/1/2016

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Click here to read the article.

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3 Palestinians Executed in Gaza Soon After Call by Hamas to Resume Death Penalty

6/1/2016

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_Click here to reade the article

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Race and the Death Penalty in Texas

4/5/2016

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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/03/opinion/sunday/race-and-the-death-penalty-in-texas.html

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Man Who Killed 5 Executed Wednesday

3/10/2016

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Man Who Killed 5 Executed Wednesday

by Jolie McCullough, The Texas Tribune
March 9, 2016

^{Editor's note: This story has been updated to reflect the execution.}

More than 18 years after killing five people with five shots from a hunting rifle, Coy Wayne Wesbrook, 58, was executed Wednesday evening. At his trial, Wesbrook testified that he “lost it” when his ex-wife invited him to her Channelview apartment and then had sex with two other men, according to court documents.

"I want to say that I am sorry for the pain that I have caused you people. I am sorry that I cannot bring everybody back. I wish it could be different," Wesbrook said before he was executed by lethal injection, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice

With no pending appeals, Wesbrook told an Associated Press reporter during a recent prison interview that he had “no doubt” he was going to be put to death.

"I'm sorry it happened," he told the AP. "But I'm not going to sit here and boo-hoo about it."

On the evening of Nov. 13, 1997, Wesbrook went to meet his ex-wife, Gloria Coons, at her apartment under the impression that she wanted to reconcile, according to his original testimony. Instead of finding her alone, though, Wesbrook walked in to find Coons drinking with her roommate, Ruth Money, and two male friends, Anthony Rogers and Kelly Hazlip.

Wesbrook said later in the night, conversation turned sexual, and Coons walked into the bedroom with Hazlip. Rogers soon followed, and when Coons came back out, she said she had performed oral sex on Rogers and was about to have sex with Hazlip.

“It awes me. It just flat – just flat awes me,” Wesbrook said during his trial in 1998. “I mean, I just couldn't get over what was going on in front of me.”

After attempting to leave and having his keys taken by another man who showed up later, Antonio Cruz, Wesbrook got his .36-caliber hunting rifle from the cab of his truck and walked back inside, he testified.

Within about 40 seconds, he fatally shot all five people in the apartment, according to court documents.

"You hear all your life if you catch your old lady in bed with somebody, don't just shoot her but shoot her lover too," Wesbrook told the AP. "In her case, there was a bunch of lovers. I just took care of my business.”

State prosecutors argued that Wesbrook’s account didn’t match with the wounds and positioning of the victims, according to court documents, claiming that Wesbrook went to Coons' apartment with the intention of killing her.

He was convicted in the murders of Coons and Cruz and sentenced to death in 1998. Since then, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has twice handed the case back down to the trial court to review claims of an intellectual disability, according to court documents.

Both times, the trial court found the claims insufficient, and the Court of Criminal Appeals upheld the conviction and sentence, according to documents.

Wesbrook’s attorney, Don Vernay, said the “travesty” in this case is the court’s decision on his client’s intellectual disability.

“The question of his guilt was not an issue,” Vernay said. “In my mind, he fit the criteria [for intellectual disability]. This execution should not happen, but it’s Texas, man.”

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at http://www.texastribune.org/2016/03/09/man-who-killed-5-faces-execution-wednesday/.

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Helen Prejean speaking at St Thomas University

3/1/2016

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Watch a former prosecutor apologize for sending an innocent man to death row

2/21/2016

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The Ticket machine

2/2/2016

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PORT ARTHUR, Texas — Officer Rickey Antoine is known around town as the man who gave his own mother a traffic ticket. She was driving 42 miles an hour in a 30 zone, out by the high school football stadium, the story goes. “She said, ‘Boy, quit playin’ with me,’” Antoine recalled. But Sadie Mae Antoine’s son makes no exceptions. His mom drove away with a ticket, Antoine said, and she didn’t cook him chicken dinner for the next couple months.
Antoine, 49, wears sport sunglasses and drives a fuel-black Dodge Charger he calls Roxanne, after the way Eddie Murphy sang the Police song in Beverly Hills Cop. “My Roxanne loves putting on her red lights,” he said. Roxanne often rumbles past Port Arthur’s empty lots and abandoned storefronts as Antoine scours the area for misbehaving motorists. Cameras peer out from the top of Roxanne’s trunk, their lenses scanning license plates in search of drivers who haven’t paid off their traffic fines.
Antoine launched a traffic-policing juggernaut in this small Gulf Coast city. Back in 2007, his bosses at the Port Arthur Police Department tapped him for a brand-new kind of job: writing up driving infractions full-time. Antoine went on a ticketing binge, and, propelled by all the new money from fines, city leaders expanded the traffic unit from just him to eight officers.
Then, with the help of the cameras, which automatically scan the license plates of nearby cars as police cruisers drive around town, the team expanded its reach to target not just people breaking the rules of the road, but also those who owe money from prior infractions.
Police higher-ups say the traffic unit has made Port Arthur a safer place to drive. The unit also caused the city’s yearly revenue from fines to soar, from $750,000 in 2006 up to as high as $2.1 million in 2012 before settling, most recently, at $1.5 million.
But people who cannot afford to pay their fines — which can run to a thousand dollars or more — often wind up behind bars, leading to a great disparity in the consequences of traffic tickets on people’s lives.
License plate recognition software is often touted as a way to catch terrorists, dangerous fugitives on the run, and stolen cars. But Port Arthur and many other departments around the country use it for a less extreme — but more lucrative — purpose: to pull over people who owe debts to the city municipal court, demanding, in many cases, that they either pay up or go to jail.
In Port Arthur, the impact is especially stark. The city of 55,000 is one of the poorest in Texas, with poverty and unemployment rates around double the state’s average. The defining feature of the city’s old downtown is decrepitude: crumbling shingles, rusted awnings, jagged broken windows. Plywood boards with painted red squares mark dilapidated homes.

A street in downtown Port Arthur. Scott Dalton for BuzzFeed News
For many residents already struggling to meet their obligations, traffic tickets add yet another burden that may tip them into further financial ruin. Many end up behind bars. From 2009 to 2011, the height of the city’s traffic enforcement spree, about 1,500 people were booked into lockup for unpaid traffic fines. In fact, traffic and other fine-only offenses result in jail at a higher rate in Port Arthur than in most other cities in the state, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis of Texas court data.
Beyond those numbers lies a racial dimension: The people who Port Arthur police put behind bars for their traffic tickets are disproportionately black. While black people make up only 40% of the overall population — and are ticketed at about that rate — they accounted for about 70% of the arrests for these citations in 2014, according to a BuzzFeed News analysis.
Over the past decade, about 1,300 people have spent three days or more in jail for traffic tickets — and about 75% of those people were black.
For low-income, hourly workers, time in jail can cost them a job. Even if they don’t lose their job, they lose wages. Missing a few days of work can make the difference between staying afloat and drowning in debt. Black people in Port Arthur are about 65% more likely to be poor than white people.
Using the license plate readers, Antoine’s unit arrested Artezha Williams this past summer for unpaid tickets from a neighboring town. A day passed before she saw a judge, who put her on a payment plan and let her out. Her supervisors at Walmart, where she worked the overnight shift, were understanding. But she was taken off of several work shifts, so her $9.50-an-hour paycheck was light that week. The officers had also towed Williams’ car, which she needed to get to work. She couldn’t get it back without paying $302, up front, forcing her to fall behind on other bills, including her utilities.
Shirley Sanders worked as a housekeeper at a local hospital. She was picked up in July 2015 for outstanding tickets she received more than a decade ago. Sanders had been ordered to perform community service in 2001, but hadn’t completed it, and she owed the city $1,500 in fines. She was sent to jail for 10 days. She was lucky; she wasn’t fired. But she wasn’t paid for the eight work days she missed. When she got home from jail, her water had been cut off. She spoke with BuzzFeed News a few days after she was released, and she was waiting on her next paycheck before she could sort it out. In the meantime, her daughter was coming by her house with buckets.
Port Arthur officials say their traffic plan is not about raising money for the city, but about saving people’s lives by making the roads safer. Port Arthur Police Chief Mark Blanton said putting more people in jail was not the goal, in part because “it costs money” to lock them up.
But he said that increased financial strain for some is “a worthwhile trade-off” for fewer traffic deaths. “Having to pay for a funeral is a big financial burden too if someone gets killed in a car accident,” Blanton said.

Officer Antoine makes a traffic stop. Scott Dalton for BuzzFeed News
Traffic safety is equally important for poor people and for people with money. But traffic fines, as they are typically imposed, inflict far more pain on poor people.
Poor Texans all across the state have told BuzzFeed News of how one or two driving mistakes have snowballed into insurmountable debt. Texas suspends the licenses and registrations of thousands of drivers every year who haven’t paid surcharges for certain offenses. A scathing report of that policy found that many people, in urgent need of the use of their vehicles and without the money to pay, simply continue driving illegally, creating more liability for everybody else.
A recent BuzzFeed News investigation found that some judges across Texas routinely ignore basic state and federal laws meant to protect people from getting jailed simply because they’re too poor to pay their fines.
That is not the case in Port Arthur. Municipal Judge Kermit Morrison tries to help people struggling with their fines, offering them community service or payment plans that can run as low as $5 per month.
Yet many Port Arthur residents miss their court dates, or fail to complete their community service — because they have to work, or perhaps because they forget or don’t make it a priority. Then a warrant goes out, and they get arrested. They get released after a couple of days with a new chance to do community service or enroll in a payment plan. Some, like Williams, the Walmart employee, can put jail behind them. Yet others slip up again, and are then ordered to “sit out” their fines, which often means a week or more behind bars.

“My god, when we first got the system, it was just constant.”
Port Arthur’s attempt to work with people is helpful, said Judith Greene, director of the New York–based nonprofit policy research group Justice Strategies. But even community service places a hardship on people who may have low-income jobs that consume much of their time and may have children to look after. And it’s a hardship that the wealthy, who simply pay their fines, do not have to face. As a result, she said, “poor people go to jail and rich people walk.”
And there is little evidence that hitting people’s wallets with heavy fines is necessary to achieve safe streets.
Academic research does link aggressive traffic policing with fewer car accidents, and fewer deaths. But evidence suggests that the financial penalty does not need to be steep: Getting the ticket correlates to driver safety, not the amount it costs, said Donald Redelmeier, a professor of medicine at the University of Toronto who co-authored a 2003 study on traffic enforcement published in The Lancet. This would support “frequent enforcement, but not necessarily draconian enforcement,” he said.
“You can take a good policy too far,” Redelmeier said. “That is true about hand-washing, it’s true about antibiotics, and it’s got to be true about traffic safety.”

License plate reader cameras on Antoine’s car, which he calls “Roxanne.” Scott Dalton for BuzzFeed News
The brochure that reached Chief Blanton’s desk in 2008 displayed a picture of Manhattan’s Chrysler Building lit up against the night sky, and promised to help catch terrorists. The software the brochure advertised was called the “Mobile Plate Hunter 900 Series,” and it could do far more than a whole phalanx of traffic officers: read up to 1,500 license plate images per minute across four lanes of traffic, and alert officers “within milliseconds if a vehicle is suspect.” The technology could aid law enforcement not just with homeland security but also with stolen cars, Amber Alerts, and wanted or missing persons.
The pitch gave Blanton another idea: Why not give the devices to his traffic unit, to catch people who had arrest warrants for their unpaid tickets? The unit was already expanding and had already begun to increase city revenue from fines. But typically people who didn’t pay the city the money they owed would only be held to account if officers caught them on a different driving infraction, and then looked up their record. The license plate readers would allow the officers to pull people over without any other probable cause.

The Mobile Plate Hunter 900. ELSAG North America
Officer Chuck Cobb gave it a trial run. Over the course of 16.5 hours of work, he made 124 traffic stops and 69 arrests. Collectively, those people owed the city $71,500 in unpaid fines. The city would be able to collect only some of that money, but still, officials were so pleased with the program that they ultimately put license plate readers into six traffic unit cars. “My god, when we first got the system, it was just constant,” Officer Gerald Bush told BuzzFeed News. “I mean, you’d get 40 or 50 hits a day.”
The number of Port Arthur debtors in the county jail had already started to surge — but with the advent of the license plate readers, it exploded. The amount the city spent on locking people up jumped 175%, from $152,800 in the fiscal year ending in October 2008 to $415,800 in 2011. But at the same time, revenue from fines rose by more, from $1.2 million to $2.1 million. The devices themselves were expensive, Antoine said, but they weren’t a tough pitch to city officials. “You get it back,” he said, with the money collected from people the machines sweep up.
License plate readers are everywhere in American law enforcement. A 2011 nationwide survey by a nonprofit police research organization found that 70% of the agencies that responded had at least one of the devices, and 85% planned to add more within the next five years.
No national figures exist for how many departments wield it the way Port Arthur does, to nab people who owe debts on traffic offenses. But enforcing traffic warrants is “definitely a primary use” for the clients of ELSAG, a major producer of license plate readers, spokesperson Nate Maloney said.
Yet Maloney insists it is not meant to be a moneymaking endeavor. “We don’t tout it as a tool for revenue; we tout it as a tool to enforce laws,” he said. Asked about the software’s disparate impact on poor people, especially poor black people in Port Arthur, Maloney said the machines actually help prevent discrimination. “Whether the driver is black, white, green, or blue has no bearing on whether our machine will run the plate,” he said. “It’s an equal opportunity technology.”
ELSAG made the initial pitch to Port Arthur, but after some technical issues, the department went with a competitor, Vigilant Solutions. In an emailed statement, Brian Shockley, Vigilant’s vice president of marketing, said, “Our LPR systems do not create new charges, we are merely helping law enforcement find suspects or in the case of traffic warrant enforcement — criminals who have already been found guilty in the court of law and have not abided by the punishment levied by a judge.”
Port Arthur’s use of the technology caught on with some other nearby departments, most notably neighboring Beaumont, which uses two for its traffic unit. Sometimes the departments team up and go on warrant stings together, blocking off parts of a busy street down to one or two lanes. That creates a funnel, allowing the devices to capture every single license plate, so no one driving by with a traffic warrant can elude their grasp, Antoine said.

Downtown Port Arthur. Scott Dalton for BuzzFeed News
The founding of Port Arthur was ordained by ghosts. The late-19th-century businessman Arthur Stilwell called them “brownies,” and they came to him in his sleep and told him what to do. He had grand plans to build a railroad connecting Kansas City with the Gulf of Mexico. The original route was to end in Galveston, but — at least as he put it in his late-in-life memoir, I Had a Hunch — the brownies warned him to steer clear, for a “tidal wave” was coming. (A few years later, a hurricane crushed Galveston, killing 8,000 people.) Instead, Stilwell chose a location farther inland, near the Sabine Lake on the Texas–Louisiana border. The brownies ordered him to name it after himself.
Port Arthur was incorporated in 1898, and three years later oil surged out of a rig nearby. The companies that would later become Gulf Oil and Texaco quickly moved into town, and so did transplants looking for jobs in the refineries. By 1930 the city had 50,000 people. Over the last four decades, white people have left Port Arthur in droves, and downtown Port Arthur has become predominantly black. The city’s commercial center shifted to “mid-county,” a new development on a stretch of land away from downtown.
Today, mid-county is strip malls and subdivisions, and downtown Port Arthur is crumbling away to nothing. McDonald’s and Walgreens both left downtown a few years ago. The city’s tallest structure, the Hotel Sabine, has sat unused for more than three decades. A city council member recently proposed wooing Hollywood directors to Port Arthur with the promise they could blow up the hotel and other vacant properties, to bring in investment — and save the city the cost of tearing the old landmark down.
The oil refineries still hum along, heaving thick smoke into the air and brightening the skyline with firefly lights at night. The oil towers brush up close to several old Port Arthur neighborhoods, and local environmental activists say that it is the black community that suffers from the resulting pollution.
Rickey Antoine grew up in west Port Arthur, and in 1984 he was a star runner at Abraham Lincoln High School. He joined the Port Arthur Police Department in 2000, after a stint as a prison guard. The department’s traffic enforcement was a backwater then.

Valero’s oil refinery looms on Port Arthur’s horizon. The Washington Post / Getty Images
In 2002, city officials noticed that the amount of money from fines — money they counted on for the city’s general fund — was starting to drop “considerably behind last year’s pace.”
City leaders urged the cops to pursue people with arrest warrants for unpaid traffic tickets more aggressively. In the years that followed, the city won federal overtime grants and joined a state program that would prevent people who hadn’t paid citations from renewing their licenses.
Revenue began to increase — and so did the amount the city spent to jail people. At a city council hearing in 2005, Councilman Felix Barker pointed out that the extra cash the city had brought in far exceeded the cost of jailing all those people. “We increased the profits,” he said.
In spring 2007, department higher-ups decided to try putting an officer on traffic full-time. Rickey Antoine was a natural candidate, given the enthusiasm he had shown on overtime shifts. “It was a dream come true for me,” he said. Over a two-month span early on, he wrote about 1,450 tickets, averaging about 30 a day. The bosses were thrilled. They made the traffic unit permanent and began expanding it dramatically. Amid that growth, in 2009, they started using the license plate readers.
As Antoine gained notoriety, he stuck to his simple mantra of never making exceptions for anyone — including, he said, his own mother. A search of citations issued in Port Arthur in the last decade turned up no record of his mother’s ticket. She could not be reached for comment on the incident, but Antoine offers the story, which he said happened many years ago, as an example of how he applies traffic laws fairly.
Thinking back to times he had been pulled over as a driver, Antoine felt that when he’d gotten a warning, he didn’t change his behavior to drive more carefully. When he got a citation, he did. “In my mind, I’m saving a life every time I stop [someone],” he said.
The only thing that gives him pause when he’s out on the streets is the chance he might create a traffic hazard of his own. He used to pursue violators when it rained, but he spun out once, so now when showers come he gives Roxanne a rest. He believes that cops are more likely to die from a car crash than from a crook’s bullet.
Drivers are liable to offer any number of excuses, from sick relatives in the hospital to urgent bathroom needs. He hears a lot of “Rickey, it’s me” from old classmates and former football teammates. It never works. “I done lost so many friends,” Antoine said with a laugh. In addition to losing his mother’s fried chicken dinners for a time, he’s been warned to stay away from some restaurants where kitchen staff might make unsavory modifications to his meal. He prefers to eat at the local Luby’s buffet restaurant, where the food is served in plain sight.

Officer Antoine with Roxanne. Scott Dalton for BuzzFeed News
There is another approach — one that doesn’t necessarily have to get in the way of aggressively ticketing motorists for disobeying driving laws. In the early 1990s, several courts around the U.S. experimented with “day fines,” which are scaled to income, meaning the same offense might cost a poorer person $50 and another, wealthier person $500.
Judith Greene of Justice Strategies studied two of those courts and found that it worked. One court that she looked at found that day fines not only increased the percentage of people who paid what they owed, but they also increased the overall amount that the municipality collected. Another potential benefit of this strategy is that it might encourage wealthier people to drive better, since their fines would be higher, said Redelmeier, the professor who has studied traffic enforcement.
But though countries in Europe and Latin America still deploy day fines, in the U.S. the idea petered out. Some critics of this system worry about how it would be enforced, as it would require overworked courts to figure out how much their defendants make by either deciphering their income tax returns or taking their word for it.
In Port Arthur, sometimes the cost of a ticket ripples over to people who didn’t commit the driving infraction in the first place. The police department’s warrant officer, Keith Perkins, told BuzzFeed News that he sees people call their family or friends to ask if they can help with the money.
But when Perkins finds people with warrants who truly don’t have the money, he brings them to jail, where Judge Morrison will hear their cases within a day or two, or maybe three if it’s late on a Friday. Perkins does make exceptions if someone has a medical condition that requires daily treatment, like kidney dialysis, since the jail will have no interest in paying for that. But few other excuses will fly. Sometimes when people come to him they bring their kids, claiming there’s no one to take care of them and hoping that he’ll take pity. “Very seldom do I let them walk,” he said.

Sometimes the departments team up and go on warrant stings together.
Port Arthur’s traffic enforcement frenzy has begun to level off. Fine collection had risen to three times higher than it was before the traffic unit, but nowadays it is back down to merely double. Jailing has dropped in the past 18 months, too.
That may be because three of the six license plate reader cars stopped working within the past two years, and the city has been slow to replace them. Another factor is that Antoine is more of a figurehead these days. He teaches driver safety classes, writes a column in the Port Arthur News called “Ask a Cop,” and co-hosts a weekly radio show. All this leaves less time for traffic stops. Lt. Steve Brinson, his boss, said he figured Antoine could reach more people this way, and save more lives.
Still, whenever Antoine does hit the streets behind the wheel of Roxanne, he often pulls someone over after their license plate is flagged by his machine. “These LPRs don’t sleep,” he said. The machines find hits at all hours, he said, including people in their pajamas grabbing a bite at Whataburger.
Despite his zeal for writing tickets, Antoine said he takes no joy from hauling people in poverty to lockup. “You wish there was something else better you can do,” he said. Yet he noted that the law does not allow him to go easy on people who are in rough financial shape, even if he knows time in jail will disrupt their lives.
Like one of the experts who suggested that fines could be reduced, Antoine believes that it’s getting a ticket that changes driver behavior, not how much the ticket costs them. “You have a heart and you feel for those people,” he said. “The judge could charge a dollar. I don’t care.”

Alex Campbell is an investigative reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. His secure PGP fingerprint is 0712 96AD 2FED CEF9 AFA7 9280 0397 E646 0A39 2C8A
Contact Alex Campbell at alex.campbell@buzzfeed.com.
Kendall Taggart is an investigative data reporter for BuzzFeed News and is based in New York. Her secure PGP fingerprint is 4148 BEAD 45CF E7D3 84CC F602 ABF3 469D E2F7 D8A0
Contact Kendall Taggart at kendall.taggart@buzzfeed.com.

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