Would You Like a Transit Lesson with that Shoe Shine?
Recently as I was leaving a rodeo committee meeting at Reliant, I stopped at a shoe shine stand to have my boots shined. During the shine I struck up a conversation with the young man operating the stand. It was late and he told me was about to head home, which was near Westheimer and Highway 6. I asked him how long it would take him to get home.

"Oh, about two to three hours," he replied.

"How can that be?"

"Oh, I ride the bus."

He then went on to share that one of reasons it took so long was that Metro had cut back the number of buses running, making it harder to make the two connections necessary to navigate the 14-mile trip home. He also told me that since the bus fares had been increased the roundtrip would cost him $5.00. He had calculated that the higher bus fare would pay for his gas if he drove to work. So he was saving up his money to buy a car. In doing so he could get to work earlier and stay longer and thus increase his income. Or he was considering using the extra time to take some classes at HCC so that he could get a better job.

There were three things that struck me about this conversation. First, in debates about public transportation policy we frequently hear about issues such traffic congestion, development patterns and air quality. What we rarely hear discussed is the very important role that transit plays in providing economic opportunity. Transit provides low income workers who cannot afford to own an automobile the ability to get to a job and begin building a financial base. This is a tremendously important contribution, not only to the workers who need the transportation, but also the employers that employ these workers and thus to our local economy generally.

Second, one of the favorite pastimes of the new urban pundits is to deride Americans' "love affair" with the automobile. They depict the attraction of the automobile as some sort of deranged erotica, the last vestiges of mankind's desire to dominant nature as opposing living harmoniously with her. This is complete nonsense. The allure of the automobile is very simply freedom; the freedom to go where you want when you want. This young man's desire to own a car was a perfectly rational economic decision from his perspective. He wanted a car to free up his time to improve his own economic circumstances.

Third, our transit policy in Houston has utterly failed the transit dependent like this young man. For it to take 2-3 hours to make a 14-mile trip is a disgrace. And his story is hardly unique. The Houston Chronicle has run a series of stories documenting similar travails. The poor service is a direct result of Metro decision to downscale its bus service. It is rarely discussed today, but the 2003 referendum which authorized the light rail, also mandated that Metro would increase bus service by approximately 50%. Instead, today we have fewer buses and fewer bus riders than we did in 2003.

The truth is that transit policy in Houston is made by people that do not have to rely on public transportation to get to their jobs. It is made by businessmen, lawyers, developers, academia, the media and other wealthy elite whose grandiose vision for the city trumps the real life hardships of trying to hold a job without access to an automobile. We can only wonder what our transit system would look like if the folks that actually had to use it everyday to get to work had a voice in making our policy.

2009 Crime Statistics:
Burglary Epidemic Resumes

In 2008, after several years of generally rising crime rates, we saw significant reductions in most crime categories. However, the 2009 report we recently obtained shows that improvement has reversed. Crime was up in almost all categories.

Perhaps most troubling is our impotence to do anything to control burglaries. In 2009, Houston set a new all-time record with 29,279 burglaries reported. The burglary rate (i.e. the number of burglaries reported per 100,000 population) which had dropped significantly last year to 1,253 increased to 1,308 in 2009. Well over 90% of burglaries continue to go unsolved.

One bright spot in the new numbers is that the clearance rates (the percentage of reported crimes for which a person is arrested and charged) for nearly every serious crime saw continued improvement. The clearance rate for violent crimes was particularly impressive increasing by 4% from 34% to 38%. This came on top of a 9% increase in 2008, thus raising the clearance rate for violent crimes from 25% to 38% in just two years, a significant improvement.



Violent Crimes

There were 25,614 violent crimes reported in 2009, also an all-time record. Murder and aggravated assault were about flat, but robbery showed a significant uptick similar to burglary. Because of a significant increase in the City's population estimate, the violent crime rate declined slightly from 1,153 to 1,141.


A troubling trend has developed in the last two years with respect to rapes. After about a decade of about 800-900 rapes being reported each year, the number dropped significantly in 2007 to under 700. However, 750 rapes were reported last year and this year the number topped 800 again. This trend makes even more urgent a resolution of the thousands of unprocessed rape kits in storage at HPD.

Property Crimes

Reports of thefts jumped by 12% to just over 77,000 (another all-time record). The theft rate also increased from 3,190 to 3,432. However, auto thefts once again declined, this year from 15,200 to 14,500. This is a continuation of a long term decline since auto thefts topped out in 2001 at over 24,000. It would be interesting to conduct a detailed study of this phenomenon to see if there are strategies or tactics that caused this decline and that could be applied to other categories.

Clearance Rates

Many observers judge a law enforcement agency by the number of crimes committed in that jurisdiction. But the overall crime rate is caused by many factors, most of which are outside the control of law enforcement. The better measure in my view is the rate at which the law enforcement agency solves crimes, both in terms of the absolute number of crimes solved and the percentage of solved cases vs. reports, commonly known as the clearance rate.

Judged by this yardstick, HPD continued the improvement we saw last year. The clearance rate for most serious crimes ticked up by 1-2%. Overall, HPD solved 23,875 serious crimes last year, also an all-time record. Even in the burglary category, HPD solved over 2,300 cases compared to just fewer than 1,900 last year. The cost of solving a serious crime (determined by dividing the HPD total budget by the number of serious crimes solved) dropped from over $30,000 in 2008 to slightly less $28,000 in 2009. This is the first decline in this cost indicator for as long as we have records.

Perspective

In 2009 a Houstonian became the victim of a serious crime every four minutes, over 150,000 in total. That is about one in fifteen residents. When you add the victims' families and close friends, almost no one is left untouched.

What is probably most troubling about the upturn in criminal activity in Houston during 2009 is that crime was apparently falling in most of the rest of the nation. Final numbers have not been released, but primarily results suggest that crime rates across the country will continue the decline that has been in place for several years. The fact that Houston is headed the other direction is a clear call for action.

But that action must not be guided by the tired old cliché of "putting more boots on the ground." While it is clear that more resources are needed, especially in investigation and technology, simply throwing more money at HPD, without clear expectations as to outcomes and a system for holding HPD accountable for those outcomes, will be a waste of taxpayer money. Over the last six years we have increased the HPD budget by over $200 million, a 48% increase. The year-over-year increase has averaged about 7%, a little more than double inflation for the same period. Yet we have fewer officers and only solved 3,700 more serious crimes than six years ago. Despite the cost improvement this year, that is a marginal cost of $59,000 per additional serious crime solved. That cost structure is unacceptable and unsustainable. We cannot just do more. We must be smarter about how we do more.

City of Houston: The Coming Financial Crisis


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