Criminals Slipping Through the Cracks in Dallas - Including ORC Suspects?
Dallas judges should be clamoring to keep criminals off the streets. So why aren’t they?

The failure to link information through law enforcement and the judiciary is an embarrassment.

By the time that person stands before a magistrate for a bond hearing, much of that history too often isn’t in front of the judge. As a consequence, magistrates frequently set a bond for the current offense, without accounting for the violent background or extensive criminal history of the suspect in front of them.

This increases the likelihood that dangerous offenders will get low bonds and return to the street when their history suggests a high bond and remaining in jail would be more appropriate.

Dallas Police Chief U. Reneé Hall is doing her part to change this by compiling data on repeat offenders and giving officers the direction and discretion to request higher bonds on suspects who street cops know are the source of neighborhood trouble. But Hall can’t do it alone. Her job is to arrest criminals. The rest of the criminal justice system also needs to make it a priority to slow the revolving door.

Hall says her officers have witnessed many repeat offenders returning to the streets on low bonds, and in January she instructed officers to ask the court to impose higher bonds for repeat offenders. Her idea is to make sure that the court system has complete criminal histories available when people accused of crimes seek bail. To date, Dallas police officers have requested a high bond in more than 263 arrests, where most suspects have a long list of priors for acts of violence.

The impact on public safety of low bonds on repeat offenders is something that the legal system should track, analyze and understand. But that doesn’t happen. It needs to. It is not unreasonable to require that the Dallas County district attorney’s office and judges have access to the full scope of a suspect’s history before judges rule on whether or not to keep an offender behind bars.

The answer is better data collection, synthesis and analysis across the law enforcement and judicial systems — something that won’t be cheap on the front end but that would pay off enormously in keeping communities safe.

Since September 2017, in Dallas County, magistrates and district judges have operated under a federal court order that requires them to consider a defendant’s ability to pay when setting bail in addition to a defendant’s risk to the community.

In the interest of fairness and public safety, judges and magistrates should be clamoring to have this additional information in order to do their job better.

No judge wants to return violent offenders to the streets, and certainly not because of what they didn’t know about that person’s criminal history. The existing system makes that more likely, and that is unacceptable. dallasnews.com