(The Center Square) – A bill has been filed in the Texas House to create a grant program to assist law enforcement agencies with clearing violent crime cases.
State Rep. Mitch Little, R-Lewisville, filed HB 3577 to improve clearance rates for violent and sexual offenses, in cases where offenders have been arrested, charged and prosecuted.
“An offense is cleared when a law enforcement agency arrests an offender for the offense. The arrest of one person can clear several crimes or several persons may be arrested in the process of clearing one offense,” a Texas Department of Public Safety 2023 Crime in Texas report says.
The Texas Uniform Crime Reporting program is the state’s repository for crime statistics, which is maintained by the Department of Public Safety. It collects and verifies data from more than 1,400 law enforcement agencies in the state. “Historically, the UCR program was voluntary, leading to inconsistent monthly data submissions, which hampered the ability of state and municipal governments, law enforcement agencies, academic entities, and the public to obtain a reliable depiction of crime in Texas,” DPS explains.
In 2023, the state legislature enacted changes to amend state code to mandate that all law enforcement agencies submit crime data to the Texas UCR program. Since then, an additional 251 agencies have been reporting the data, it says.
The report includes the type of violent offense, number of offenses reported by year, by jurisdictions based on population, clearance rates by year and offense, and five-year comparisons from 2019 through March 10, 2024.
Clearance rates for murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, for example, dropped from 60.4% to 53.1% in five years, according to the data. Clearance rates for rape, sodomy and sexual assault with an object dropped from 22.8% to 14.7% over five years; clearance rates for aggravated assault dropped from 40% to 36.8% over five years.
Little’s bill proposes making additional changes to improve the process, specifically related to violent crimes, including indecency with a child, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, murder, capital murder, aggravated kidnapping, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon and aggravated robbery.
The Office of Public Safety in the governor’s office would administer the grant program; DPS’ criminal justice division would be responsible for establishing criteria for grant applications, processes and amounts awarded. Funds may be used to hire, train and retain personnel to investigate violent and sexual offenses, for forensic technology, records management among others, according to the bill language. Law enforcement agencies that receive grants are also required to report clearance rates and percentage of clearance rates by arrest with some exceptions.
The bill is expected to help larger police departments dealing with large volumes of crime and backlogs of cases, like in Houston. The state’s largest city reports the greatest number of the majority of violent crimes, according to the data.
Last year, the Houston Police Department dropped 264,000 crime reports, including violent crimes and sexual assaults that weren’t investigated because a “lack of personnel” code was assigned to them, The Center Square reported. While the HPD claimed crime was down, it turned out that reporting of crime was down, prompting an investigation by the mayor and resulting in the former police chief’s resignation.
The HPD has also struggled with outdated systems, including “a broken system of maintaining evidence,” Mayor John Whitmire said earlier this year. This included evidence stored dating to 1947 and 400,000 pounds of marijuana being eaten by drug addicted rats, The Center Square reported.
According to a recent Texas Public Policy Foundation survey, 85% of those polled support reallocating law enforcement resources to prioritize violent crime resolutions.
