Two months out from Election Day, the politically charged debate over crime and public safety in Harris County already has hit a boiling point.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo, a Democrat who presides over Commissioners Court, repeatedly has said the sheriff, constables and district attorney have received funding boosts in each county budget since Democrats won a 3-2 court majority in 2018. The annual increases are comparable to those adopted under Republican control, relative to the size of the county’s overall general fund budget, with some caveats.
“Certainly, the crime issue has been a staple for the Republican side,” said Adams, the director of TSU’s master of public administration program. “They feel that they can galvanize and gin up voter support by running on an anti-crime platform, and it’s nothing new for them. You can go back to Richard Nixon, in terms of being tough on crime, law-and-order.”Contrary to Young’s claim, Houston is far from the most dangerous city in the country.
Homicides climbed again in Houston last year, from 400 to 469. With a rate of about 20 murders per 100,000 people, 2021 marked one of the city’s deadliest years over the last three decades. Houston also surpassed Dallas for the highest murder rate among Texas’ large cities — though still well behind other big cities around the country.
Even with the initial decrease through June, however, the countywide tallies of murders and assaults remained on pace to far exceed their levels from 2019, the year before those two categories spiked.While the political dispute over constable funding has attracted headlines in recent weeks, the combined budget of Harris County’s eight constable precincts makes up only a fraction of the county’s overall public safety spending.
County budget officials note they allowed each department, including constables, to retain unspent funds last year for specific proposals and demonstrated needs, as long as they were used for one-time expenses. They were not allowed to use the funds to pay for personnel, as some constables regularly had done.
Hidalgo and county budget officials also said Harris County largely was an outlier in allowing departments to keep unspent funds for future budgeting cycles. In a memo last year outlining the change, Berry said some departments were not filling all their funded positions so they could increase their rollover amount.
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