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Voters in the nation’s fourth largest city went to the polls today and elected Equality Texas-endorsed candidate Annise Parker the next mayor of Houston. Parker was elected with 53 percent of the vote, defeating her runoff opponent Gene Locke who garnered 47 percent.

Houston is the winner because Annise Parker’s prior experience will serve her well as Mayor. Parker, a native Houstonian, has already served the city for over a decade as a City Council Member and as the current City Controller. Prior to entering public service Parker spent twenty years in the oil and gas industry. Parker will need to draw upon this experience to lead Houston through lean economic times and position the city to be a leader in new energy development.

Houston is the winner because it did not succumb to bigoted fear-mongering and homophobia. Yes, Annise Parker will become the first openly-lesbian mayor of a major U.S. city. However, Houston voters demonstrated, for the 7th time in Parker’s case, that they can elect candidates based on their experience, qualifications and abilities, without regard to their sexual orientation.

Houston is the winner because it has elected an eminently qualified public servant as its next mayor. We are all winners because fear-mongering and homophobia lost.

Source: Equality Texas.

By Wayne Krause
Legal Director
Texas Civil Rights Project

As summer approaches, an APD officer has shot another young person of color. We don’t yet know all of the details of how or why Nathaniel Sanders was killed, but there is one thing we are sure of already, and it is inexcusable: there is no video from the shooter’s police car.

How can there be no video?! Is it not APD policy to turn on the camera when an officer might come into contact with a dangerous individual or make an arrest?

APD Policy A306b mandates that police car videos record at all traffic and pedestrian stops, sobriety tests, and pursuits. APD cars are equipped with video cameras, so why aren’t officers using them?

Time after time, Austinites are forced to endure tragic incidents of APD brutality in which the actual events are shrouded in an air of impenetrable mystery. It doesn’t have to be this way. Not only do pictures tell a thousand words, but video cameras don’t write false or biased reports to protect themselves or their partners.

With violent officers such as Michael Olsen and Gary Griffin, we all now know how video cameras expose lies about what really happened on the scene. Having represented victims of these police attacks, I am certain they never would have found justice without having a videotape as evidence.

But for every case I’ve accepted, there are dozens I have not because the video backed up the officer’s account or at least showed some understandable reaction. If an officer acted reasonably on the scene, turning the camera on is her insurance policy. So why wouldn’t there be a tape?

We hear the excuses: the tape was lost, I forgot to turn it on, and so on. None of them ring true. If you’re an officer doing your job right, you want that camera on.

During the death of Jessie Lee Owens, four of the five officers who eventually arrived at the scene had video proof of their actions. The one that didn’t was the shooter, so we’ll never know what really happened.

The bottom line is if there is a shooting, but no video, we are left with nothing but the perception that the officer wanted it that way for a reason.

If the APD seriously wants to put an end to this problem, it will actually begin punishing officers who violate its video policy and it will ensure that video recorders are in working order. When is the last time an officer got more than a slap on the wrist for refusing to turn the video camera on? And if police supervisors, who are required to check the cameras regularly, can’t or won’t keep them running well, we should appoint a neutral, competent employee to do so.

Video cameras are a window to truth, and officers who turn them off cast a shadow on that truth and their profession. If we have cameras, they should work. And if you won’t do your job, you should be fired, or at least suspended for as long as your victim remains horizontal. Until that happens, it will remain a sad irony that our citizens who run red lights have a better chance of being caught on video than those shot dead.

A TCRR Sunday Sermon

By Greg Moses

For many months the right wing populist chatter box has been drumming up the spectre of a socialist radical president with no respect for civil liberties, due process, or property rights. Then as soon as the president says it is stupid to arrest a man on his own property for speaking his own mind, the right wing populist chatter box denounces the president for that.

Overnight, the fashion for denouncing the president is all the rage. Nobody worries anymore about private property, due process, or civil liberties. It is the uniformed officer who can do you no wrong. And just like that, America’s post-racial presidency has come to a windshield-smashing end. The color line is back.

One hardly knows how to defend the man who holds the most powerful office in the world. His defeat already shows on his face. Either one has already helped to defeat the president or one is already too late.

It is already too late to distinguish between racism as bigotry aforethought and racism as saturated cultural response. It is already too late to point out that the president said, “Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that . . .”

It is already too late to ask how a career cop in Cambridge can approach the home of Skip Gates without already knowing who he is. It is already too late to undo the swift victory that white supremacy has won, with all its well-known right wing populist momentum.

The choosing time has passed. You already know which side you’re on. And if you’re on the president’s side this time, you know what comes next. The president will try to figure out how to appeal to the side that you and he are not on. He’ll try to appease the right wing populist rest. Say you’ve been on the president’s side before? ‘Nuff said.

With another three years of hard work left in this presidency, I think the shape of things going forward will depend upon the internal struggle now at play between the bulls and bears. As I’m working on that struggle internally in a fractal replay of things writ large, I have to think that the arrest of Skip Gates marks a bear market in the currency of respect.

By coincidence Skip Gates was returning home from the land of scholars when he encountered some difficulties at his own front door. “Slight the learned,” warned Mozi in 400 BCE, “and you will neglect the ruler and injure the state.”

Even in Cambridge Massachusetts the learned are not respected. Apparently they are not even well known. The ruler has been neglected, the state injured. Neat as a fortune cookie America, in the image of Skip Gates handcuffed, your future has just been read.

By Nick Braune

The South Texas Civil Rights Project sent out a press release this week on a lawsuit filed against Cameron County. The suit contends that the county has retaliated against Gail Hanson, a minister and former volunteer chaplain at the county jail, after she spoke publicly about the conditions women prisoners face at the jail. The suit contends that her free speech rights have been violated.

Hanson, through her church, became an official volunteer chaplain in 2000, and had visited with and prayed with prisoners weekly up until February of 2008, but her visits were stopped after she made the public comments about the jail and criticized the sheriff.

“Preventing someone from volunteering their time to help rehabilitate prisoners because she was critical of the County is outrageous,” said Mrs. Hanson’s attorney, Scott Medlock, quoted in the press release. Medlock is Director of the Texas Civil Rights Project’s Prisoners’ Rights Program. “Mrs. Hanson should be commended for her dedication to ministering to the women held in the jail, not punished for speaking the truth about what she saw behind prison bars,” he said.

The press release explains that in February 2008, “Mrs. Hanson criticized conditions in the jail at a candidate forum in advance of the Democratic Party primary. Prisoners told her they were denied sanitary napkins, forced to sleep on the floor, given adulterated food with hair and gnats in it, and held for long periods of time without being brought to court for trial.”

The suit is not asking for money but for the simple restoration of Hanson’s access to the jail so she can continue her ministerial visits.

These complaints against the Brownsville facility are not the first. There have been many complaints over the recent years about the county jail there. The press release quotes Hanson, “I just want to make sure these women’s voices are heard. I never thought the County would prevent me from praying with them for speaking about what I saw in the jail.”

I contacted Corinna Spencer-Scheurich from the Texas Civil Rights Project for a quick comment.

Braune: I read a previous article on the Texas Jail Project website, and it sounds to me that the Cameron County Jail is improperly run and is a stressful place for women to be held, particularly stressful for the pre-trial detainees. Do you think what your client has said publicly has hit some nerve? And do you think they revoked her privilege to visit the women in the jail as a message to others to be quiet too?

Spencer-Scheurich: Clearly what Gail Hanson said hit a nerve. And, it is also clear that banning her from the jail was calculated to chill free speech on the issue of jail conditions. One of the purposes of the 1st Amendment is to protect exactly what Mrs. Hanson did — speaking out about injustice that she witnessed or heard about first hand. While there is reason to believe that things have gotten better in the jail lately, protecting Mrs. Hanson’s right to talk about the conditions is almost as important as improving the conditions themselves. Otherwise, the women in the jail would have no one to advocate for them, no one to tell their stories. What kind of society would we be if we isolated these women to the point that they suffer atrocities without us knowing?