Last week, Harris County officials expressed hope that their recently-debuted online dashboard, which displays details about bail bonds in criminal cases, will help ease public concern over crime.
Commissioner Adrian Garcia is among the officials who hope the dashboard, which became available to the public on February 23, will be a step in the right direction. The idea is to work toward making the criminal justice system more transparent. Some of the information it displays includes a judge’s history of granting bail and approving bonds.
The dashboard’s development comes after the Harris County court system received backlash for claims that violent offenders are repeatedly released on low bails, only to commit more crime. According to NBC 5, these complaints have come from crime victims, law enforcement, and community groups.
The idea for the dashboard was partly inspired by a conversation Garcia had with Paul Castro. Castro lost his 17-year-old son during a road rage-related shooting last July.
Castro told NBC he wants crime victims to know more about cases they are involved in, including the role judges and bondsmen play in the process and the reason some defendants are granted bail.
“What winds up happening is we are by ourselves,” Castro said. “We’re at the mercy of a system that’s very hard to understand.”
The dashboard’s creation is meant to hold bail bondsmen accountable for their impact on the criminal justice system, Garcia told NBC, claiming that judges are ordering higher bonds for defendants, but bondsmen are offering “a fire sale on our safety.”
Harris County has announced plans to ask the local bail bond board to enforce a minimum of 10% bond payments by defendants, NBC reported. Defendants are typically expected to pay 10% of their bail, but bondsmen in Texas have been accepting less.
The Professional Bondsmen of Texas have made it clear they do not agree with the county’s new stance on bonds. An attorney representing the group, Ken W. Good, told NBC that bondsmen have always used payment plans.
“I think this is all a distraction from the fact they’ve broken their criminal justice system, and they have no plan to fix it,” he said.
Good added that judges are responsible for deciding who should get bail.
According to NBC, a federal judge deemed the Harris County misdemeanor bail system unconstitutional following a lawsuit that claimed poor defendants were behind bars longer due to poverty.
A similar lawsuit regarding felony cases is currently pending in federal court.
Near the beginning of February, officials for the City of Houston, located in Harris County, announced plans to spend $44 million on addressing the city’s rising violent crime rate. Garcia told NBC the county has spent over $130 million toward lowering crime in the past three years.
