Prop U: the rubber hits the road

We’re starting to see the fallout of the passage of Prop U in the November election last year. Currently there are about 3,000 police officers in Dallas. The formula for police vs population in Prop U means we need about another 900. That’s a lot of new cops in a time when it’s hard to hire, even with the additional money DPD will get from the required distribution of city monies under Prop U.

DPD says it can add about 300 officers this year, plus more space for its academy. City Council originally wanted to recommend 250 new officers, but after some debate has settled on asking for 325. You’ll note that that’s adding ten percent of the existing force, which is a lot. DPD’s culture needs to change, but uncontrolled change isn’t ideal either.

That said, if DPD doesn’t bring on new officers quickly, some resident, probably someone connected to Monty Bennett and Dallas HERO, is going to sue the city. The loser of that lawsuit is going to be the citizens and taxpayers of Dallas. Meanwhile, the DMN’s editorial board thinks that since the people passed Prop U, the city needs to get creative and get more new officers in the door by any means necessary, especially financial incentives. That money will have to come from somewhere. One source the city has identified is the Office of Community Care, which provides social services to Dallas residents. It’s going to lose about $5 million to DPD. Monty Bennett is getting exactly what he paid for.

Sources:

Jailhouse blues

Calling the Tarrant County Jail a problem spot is something of an understatement. Prisoners die there at a rate of about one a month; almost 70 have died in total since the current Sheriff, Bill Waybourn, assumed his position in 2017. He was most recently reelected in November, which surprised me a little given how much coverage and how many protests there had been over all the deaths in the jail. That said, nothing had gone wrong so far in 2018 until the beginning of February. Now we have two deaths.

The first, during the first week of February, died by suicide. He’d been screened following some questions during his intake but was cleared by the county’s mental health group. He was found and hospitalized and died a couple of days later. The second one was last week, where an inmate was sent to the hospital and died three days later. No cause of death has been released in her case.

Tarrant County is also still dealing with the fallout from deaths in 2024 and preceding years. The most notorious of the cases from last year was the death of Anthony Johnson, Jr., a former Marine who died by homicide in May. Johnson was known to be bipolar and to have schizophrenia, but ended up asphyxiated during a fight with jailers. His family is now suing Tarrant County and 15 of the jailers involved, though last week the judge in the federal court dismissed Tarrant County from the suit on grounds that the jail’s procedures did not cause Johnson’s death. The family has asked to amend their suit with an eye to keeping Tarrant County on the hook. One of the issues is unreleased footage of Johnson’s death, which the court has not seen.

Since 2022, Tarrant County has paid $4.3 million to end jail lawsuits. Sheriff Waybourn claims that most of the people who die in custody die of natural causes.

If you read all the sources, notice the way the Star-Telegram covers these deaths as opposed to the way that KERA and the DMN cover them. Some of the difference is that the DMN isn’t covering hometown power brokers the way the Star-Telegram has to. The rest of it is editorial and stylistic.

Closing my tabs – 2025 02 23

Sources/Resources: The Dallas Express

Up to now I’ve been talking about news sources I read or at least wouldn’t turn up my nose at when they turn up on Google. Today I’m going to talk about one that I wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole other than to check out the two-minute hate from our billionaire would-be overlords. That’s the Dallas Express, the pink slime subsidiary of Monty Bennett, a local hotel magnate with political aspirations and money to burn.

The Express is built on the good name of a Black newspaper that covered Dallas from 1892 to 1970. The current operation was founded four years ago. The history is covered pretty nicely in this Texas Observer article by Steven Monacelli from 2023. There’s also quite a bit more about Bennett and the Observer in this profile of Bennett detailing his involvement in the Dallas HERO astroturf group that was behind Props S, T, and U on the Dallas charter amendment ballot last November. (Bennett lives in Highland Park, of course, so he’s not even in the city of Dallas.) The gist of the 2024 article is that Bennett uses paid protestors to get at his enemies, then reports on the protests and complains that no other press outlet is covering them. Regular readers will also notice that Pete Marocco is mentioned in the 2024 article in connection with Dallas HERO, where he was parked for some of the time between his last stint at USAID and his current job destroying it.

The point here is that the Dallas Express, despite claiming to be a nonprofit and an objective news source, is anything but. It’s a vanity project of Monty Bennett and nothing you read there should be taken seriously other than as a signpost to what Bennett and his cronies want.

School District Saturday – 2025 02 22

This week, we’re going to catch up on Keller ISD and all its troubles, plus Fort Worth gets a new superintendent.

People with dirty minds see a lot of dirt

A story I’ve been keeping an eye on while I scramble out from under the piles of stories from international, national, state, and local sources is the seizure of photographs from the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. The Modern had an exhibit of Sally Mann photographs that closed at the beginning of this month. Among the many photographs in the exhibit were four photos of her then-young children naked. After some community outrage, Fort Worth PD showed up to seize the photos in January.

Now the ACLU of Texas, FIRE, and the National Coalition Against Censorship have gotten together to write a letter to FWPD describing the seizure as unconstitutional censorship. Nobody seems to have anything to say to local media; the museum and FWPD are keeping mum.

Here’s the thing: I haven’t seen these photographs, but I’m old enough to remember when toddler bathtime photos were considered normal and not sexual exploitation of children. I’m glad my bathtime photos aren’t on the internet, a topic that brings up questions of consent, and I certainly can see how putting naked photos of your little kids in an art exhibition brings up the same questions. But artistic nudity, especially where little kids are concerned, is real. If any photo of a naked kid you ever see is sexual, or even pornographic, in your eyes, you have a problem.

The Modern had noted that the Mann exhibit had mature content, which I understand is necessary in the GOP-led city of Fort Worth, but honestly photos of little kids running around naked shouldn’t need that label. Nor should the Cowboy exhibit at the Amon Carter Museum around the corner have had to post a warning because the exhibit included a painting of two men kissing. Tarrant County has a prudish bully in County Judge Tim O’Hare, who commented on the Mann exhibit on Xitter. And of course the Dallas Express had to have its say back in December. These are the folks who think photos of child nudity are inherently sexual. They’re the ones with the dirty minds, and the problem.

Closing my tabs – 2025 02 16

What I’ve been reading this week:

Sources/Resources: Local TV stations

I don’t watch TV at all (not a snob thing; my computer feeds me plenty of idiot stuff) but I do read the local stations’ news sites for coverage of various topics.

WFAA is Dallas’ ABC affiliate and partners with the DMN. It’s independently owned along with a UHF counterpart (KFAA), making Dallas the largest major media market to have an independently-owned station broadcasting one of the “big four” network feeds (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox). I subscribe to their politics feef and regularly see other platforms like the Texas Tribune linking to them. I feel like they’re pretty reliable for coverage and they regularly have details that other outlets don’t get.

KERA is also the name of the local PBS television station as well as the NPR radio affiliate. As I mentioned last week, I find them very reliable.

KXAS, aka NBCDFW, is the local NBC affiliate. I see links to them occasionally and find them in google searches for various local news topics. I don’t have a strong opinion about them either way.

KTVT and KTXA are two branches of the CBS network in Houston, both owned by the network. Their news site links back to the Texas directory of the national CBS site. I don’t see them linked very often and I don’t have a strong sense about their local coverage.

KDFW aka “Fox 4” is the local Fox affiliate; it was originally owned by the now-defunct Dallas Times-Herald and passed through various hands including many years as a CBS affiliate. Fox has owned the station since 1996. I don’t seek out their coverage but occasionally I see links to them or find something that nobody else has when I’m googling for local stories about a specific topic. They’re not national Fox news, but I’m just a little wary of them as a source.

School District Saturday – 2025 02 15

There is regularly a lot of news about the school districts here in North Texas, which is because just as Texas is the national laboratory for bad government, North Texas is one of the state laboratories for terrible school district decisions. So I’m going to try to round up what’s going on with our local districts and what’s going on statewide (and nationally, if needed) that will affect our local schools.

The impending breakup of Keller ISD

Keller ISD covers the eastern part of Fort Worth and the suburb of Keller. The district is highly regarded but, like every other district in Texas, facing demographic and financial challenges exacerbated by the choices of our state government. I missed the beginning of this story because I don’t hang around on Facebook enough, and certainly not in the parts where stakeholders in Keller ISD spend time, but the story is that certain members of Keller’s seven-member board decided they wanted to split the poorer western side of the district from the eastern, suburban side of the district, with the dividing line being Old Denton Road. This was all happening in November and December, when we were all busy with other things.

Somehow, this has become an actual plan that appears to be happening. Keller’s web site refers to this project as “reshaping” and has a proposed map for the split. Some of the trustees were blindsided by the reveal of the proposed split back in January. The superintendent, who had only joined the district in December 2023, offered her resignation and the board named an interim superintendent in their January 30 meeting.

Meanwhile, there’s a lot of opposition. At the meeting on the 30th, 200 speakers signed up and the majority were against the split. The Star-Telegram has editorialized against the split. Republican State Rep. Nate Schatzline, the pastor of Mercy Culture, is open to the plan but is concerned it will drive down property values if the new school district isn’t as high-performing as Keller ISD; he would represent much of the new district. Democratic Tarrant County Commissioner Alisa Simmons, whom regular readers will know as a foil of Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, is also against the split.

So what is going on here? One piece of it is almost certainly the public interest lawsuit against Keller’s at-large trustee election system. I’ve written about these before but the gist of it is that Brewer Storefront, the public advocacy arm of a big law firm, has been threatening to sue districts around the state for at-large trustee elections. In the case of Keller ISD, they have May elections and that’s also a factor. These two rules make it harder for voters of color to have their say, which is illegal under the Voting Rights Act of 1965 (to the extent that still applies under the current administration). Brewer is now pushing to stop the split as well.

But the other rumor I’ve heard and can’t confirm is that the trustees behind the original split discussions–whom I can only guess at by seeing who’s against it, because it’s not them–are your bog-standard reactionary school board haters and the split is happening for obvious reasons. I find this theory somewhat compelling because it fits with everything else happening in Texas, in North Texas school boards, and because the start of these discussions in November and December aligns with a time when it became clear the Justice Department wouldn’t do anything about resegregation of school districts. This quote from an opponent of the split makes that clear:

The saddest thing of all was when a student said to my son I hope they split the district so that I can go to school with all white kids

Some further reading on this story: