Activists in Austin have advocated for greater civilian oversight in response. A coalition of progressive organizers pushed the city council to amend the city’s contract with the Austin Police Association (APA) in order to reduce barriers to accountability and to create an Office of Police Oversight. But the police union fought back, attempting to leash the newly empowered watchdog by blocking it from conducting independent investigations into complaints of misconduct against officers. 

Their confrontation came to a head this weekend. Activists put an ordinance on the municipal ballot to bolster and codify the powers of civilian oversight in the city. The police union and its supporters retaliated with a petition drive of their own, which deceptively bore the same name as activists’ version, and succeeded in putting a competing ordinance in front of voters to weaken oversight.

Austin voters on Saturday decisively sided with police reformers. A resounding 70 percent approved Proposition A, the measure that would bolster oversight of police. They overwhelmingly rejected Proposition B, the version supported by the police union, which received support from only 20 percent of voters.

Kathy Mitchell, a longtime advocate for police accountability in Austin who helped organize the campaign for Prop A, says the results illustrate strong support in the city for robust civilian oversight of police, and voters’ frustration at police efforts to push back against their organizing of recent years. 

“We have literally tried everything, there was no other way to enforce the stronger standards for oversight other than going to the voters and saying, ‘Okay, you’re going to have to show that this is something you expect,’ Mitchell said. “And now they have.” 

Mitchell says she hopes that Prop A’s strong showing empowers city officials to begin changing police oversight as early as this week, including pushing for independent review of complaints against officers and cases involving police violence. 

The results in Austin were a stark contrast to the overwhelming defeat of a different police reform ballot measure 80 miles south in San Antonio, which also held its municipal elections on Saturday. As Bolts reported last month, San Antonio activists petitioned for a more sweeping ballot measure, also called Proposition A, that sought to decriminalize weed and abortion as well as reduce arrests and jail time for minor charges, but faced inflammatory rhetoric and well-funded opposition from the police union and much of the city’s political establishment. 

Only 28 percent of San Antonio voters supported Prop A on Saturday. The result was a decisive win for the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, one of the most powerful and combative police unions in the country. “Tonight, the voices of our great city were heard and heard loudly,” Danny Diaz, the union’s president, said during a victory party Saturday night. “We will not become another statistic, we will not tolerate criminal leniency, and we will not allow our city to crumble.” 

Prop A’s organizers issued a statement after the election accusing the police union and its supporters of “spreading fear tactics and lies” in its campaign against the ballot measure. “We still have to do a lot of public education. We’ve been doing it for several years and we’re going to continue,” Ananda Tomas, executive director of the police reform group that led the effort, told reporters Saturday night, according to the San Antonio Current. “We know when we’re at the doors and we break all of these things down, that folks are with us.”

The police union in Austin was no less defiant than San Antonio’s despite its defeat. “The APA simply will not stand by while this city and anti-police activists operate with blatant disregard for state law and the rights and protections afforded to our hardworking men and women,” the Austin Police Association tweeted on Saturday night.

Mitchell says it’s telling that the union is talking about state law and seems to be appealing more to Texas’ Republican leaders at this point than to local voters.

The Austin Police Association is advocating for a bill drafted by Republicans in the legislature that would prohibit civilian oversight of police departments that has already passed the Texas Senate and is now pending in the House. The legislation, which would undermine Austin’s new oversight ordinance by blocking access to police information until the department finishes investigating itself, mirrors measures that Republicans have pushed through elsewhere in the country. 

State-level Republicans have stepped in to protect local police in other ways. Republican governor Greg Abbott has publicly decried the prosecution of Austin police who brutalized protesters, and even appointed one of the officers indicted for assaulting demonstrators in 2020 to a state law enforcement commission. 

“Increasingly, and this has been going on for a while, APA is turning to the GOP to save itself from its own community,” Mitchell said. “They have decided strategically to stop talking to Austin, and that is remarkable, because they are our employees.” 

The post Austin Voters Embrace Civilian Police Oversight in Saturday Election appeared first on Bolts.

The police union’s messaging, which has dominated San Antonio’s municipal elections this spring, wasn’t crafted to go after any particular mayoral or city council candidate, but rather to spread fear about Proposition A, a police reform charter amendment that local activists petitioned to get on the May 6 ballot. 

The so-called Justice Charter is broad in scope because it was drafted by a coalition of San Antonio groups representing causes ranging from organized labor to reproductive justice, which wanted to build on reforms local organizers have been pushing for years. It would add a “Justice Policy” to the city charter that calls for ending citations and arrests for low-level marijuana possession, an idea city council members have long paid lip service to but failed to fully implement, as well as decriminalizing abortion, which the council already directed the city’s police to do last August after the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision triggered Texas’s criminal abortion ban. 

Prop A also calls for banning police chokeholds and no-knock warrants, both of which the San Antonio Police Department already has internal policies against. It would also direct police to prioritize citations over arrest and jail for people accused of certain low-level crimes, like theft below $750; this would codify and expand a cite-and-release policy that city and county law enforcement began implementing several years ago in the name of criminal justice reform. 

Police union rhetoric has already convinced many people in power in San Antonio to oppose it. The city’s chambers of commerce established their own PAC last month to raise money from business interests to campaign against the ballot measure and amplify the police union’s talking points. Most of the candidates running for city council this year oppose the Justice Charter, and Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who is expected to sail to re-election later this year, urged people to vote no in early April despite having previously voiced support for much of what’s in it.

Their opposition raises major questions about Prop A’s future even if it were to pass, as some local officials also signaled they would not implement whole swaths of the measure. Prop A could also be challenged by Republican officials who dominate state government and love to pick fights in Texas’ more liberal cities, and anti-abortion activists who already sued to try to stop the measure from appearing on the May ballot are likely to keep agitating should it win.

Still, Ananda Tomas, founder and director of ACT 4 SA, the police reform group that led the effort to get the Justice Charter on the ballot, says that the intense opposition from the police union and the backtracking from the mayor highlight why local activists are pushing reforms through citizen-led ballot initiatives in the first place. 

“I think not just here in Texas or San Antonio, but nationally, you’re seeing a lot more ballot initiatives as the people’s way of fighting back,” Tomas said. “When we have city or state leadership or even federal leadership that’s not moving with the people, then we’re going to take matters into our own hands, and that was the exact thinking behind this.”

Tomas’ group was born out of the massive protests and increased activism around police accountability that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020. In 2021, Tomas and Act 4 SA gathered enough signatures to put a different measure on the ballot that sought to repeal police collective bargaining rights in San Antonio, which they had pitched as a means to begin addressing disciplinary procedures baked into the city’s police union contract that long shielded bad cops, sometimes even allowed awful ones back on the street, and yet had remained a third rail in local politics; officers the city’s police chief had tried to fire, but couldn’t, included a cop who berated and hurled racial slurs at a Black man while arresting him, an officer who was drinking on duty when he got into a gunfight and killed his girlfriend’s ex, and another who gave someone living on the street a sandwich with feces in it. 

Proposition B, the 2021 ballot measure, failed by two percentage points. But last year, when the police union negotiated a new contract with the city, it quickly agreed to tweak its arbitration process in order to give the police chief more power over firing decisions—a departure from previous contract talks, when disciplinary rules were essentially off limits and yet still negotiations could drag on in years of acrimony and litigation with city officials. 

“There was this whole narrative shift and power that the city was able to get in the negotiations by saying, ‘Hey, this is how close you guys came to losing your contract because people are so upset with how unaccountable it is,’” Tomas said. She thinks that the close vote over Prop B ratcheted up pressure to change the next contract. 

The history of the San Antonio Police Officers’ Association is a case study in how police unions amass and wield power in local elections. It dove headfirst into local politics in the 1980s when it started publicly endorsing and opposing candidates, created a political action committee to bankroll their supporters, and established a formidable phone banking operation ahead of elections. People running for city council who wouldn’t commit to better pay and equipment for cops were smeared as anti-police and pro-crime, and by 1988 San Antonio police had paved the way for other police unions by negotiating one of the best wage and benefits packages in the nation.

San Antonio’s police union became notorious for its brash approach to local politics. One former San Antonio mayor wrote in a memoir about turning down police union money ahead of an election in the 1990s and receiving a gift basket with a dead rat in return. Politicians started calling the police union president at the time “The 44 Caliber Mouthpiece.” In 2013, after San Antonio’s then-city manager Sheryl Sculley established a task force to study reforming officers’ generous benefits because she thought they were threatening financial disaster for the city, one high-profile business leader on the benefits task force reported being tailed in his car by police officers. Sculley felt so aggrieved after battling the city’s public safety unions that she wound up writing a book chronicling the experience, which she titled “Greedy Bastards.”  

With its fiery campaign against Prop A this year, the police union is again fighting back against what little reform it has been forced to accept in recent years. It has opposed the local cite-and-release program since Bexar County’s reform-minded district attorney spearheaded it after taking office four years ago, and which the Justice Charter aims to strengthen. The DA and his supporters say the program has saved the county $5.6 million in jail booking costs, helped alleviate overcrowding at the dangerous county lockup, and diverted thousands of people with petty, non-violent charges towards services.

Danny Diaz, president of San Antonio Police Officers’ Association, said in an interview with Bolts that cite-and-release policies have fueled an uptick in crime that was reported in San Antonio as well as cities across the country during the pandemic, even in places without such changes. But the city’s longtime police chief, William McManus, who does not support Prop A, has rejected that notion, and the DA’s office reports a recidivism, or re-offense, rate for defendants in the cite-and-release program of 9.6 percent compared 38 percent for people booked into the county jail. 

Diaz insisted that the police union’s terrifying vision of what could happen if Prop A passes is “realistic”—that decriminalizing marijuana and abortion, in addition to codifying and expanding cite-and-release, would really allow dangerous criminals to escape consequences, force business across San Antonio to close, and plunge the city into chaos. But he also struggled when asked for evidence. How, as he argued, would local businesses and the community at large be worse off if more people accused of low-level theft got a citation and summons to appear in court instead of being hauled to jail? “I’ll put it as simply as I can,” Diaz said. “As children, we were all taught not to lie, cheat or steal. This proposition is basically telling people you can steal.”

Diaz, a former SWAT officer, also insisted that decriminalizing marijuana was a slippery slope but again sputtered general talking points about lawlessness when pressed. “If they’re not convicting or going to court or going to jail or giving fines for maijuana, they’re gonna turn around and do the same thing for theft on cite-and-release,” he said. 

The police union’s ads and public statements over Prop A are also divorced from the reality of what’s actually in the ballot measure, claiming for instance that it seeks to decriminalize offenses like graffiti. But a cite-and-release program, which is meant to avoid people’s stay in jail, does not “decriminalize” since people would still be subject to criminal penalties.

Currently, it seems unlikely that any sweeping policy changes would immediately follow passage of the Justice Charter; San Antonio’s city attorney has already claimed that much of what’s in it is unenforceable. But part of what’s motivating the police union’s attacks on Prop A is the concern that a win would put pressure on future city councils to go further.

Diaz said he’s worried about more “activists” making it onto the council in the future and pushing to implement elements of the Justice Charter, especially if they see this year’s vote as a clear referendum by residents. He pointed to two progressive council members, elected in 2021, who voted against the union’s last contract for not going far enough on reforms to police discipline and oversight, and are now supporting the ballot measure. 

The single element of the ballot measure that city officials have said they would implement has also riled the police union. It would create a new position at city hall, a Justice Director, someone without ties to law enforcement appointed by city council to review public safety policy, hold regular stakeholder meetings with communities that are heavily policed or have complaints about officers, and help mediate conflict between police and the public. The police union has, unsurprisingly, ridiculed the idea of appointing someone without policing experience to monitor them. But Prop A supporters have called it their best attempt to bolster independent oversight of the San Antonio Police Department, which is currently paper thin, even compared to dysfunctional oversight bodies in Texas’ other large cities. 

Progressive organizers in other Texas cities have turned to local ballot measures to force reforms that local elected officials are refusing to consider or failing to fully implement. While most of those campaigns centered on marijuana, San Antonio’s is the most expansive and the first attempt by a Texas city to decriminalize abortion since the end of Roe.

But these initiatives are also a kind of end-run around an anemic and poorly organized Texas Democratic Party. One recently-formed statewide group, Ground Game Texas, has thrown itself into helping local organizers, including the coalition of San Antonio activists pushing Prop A, raise enough signatures to put reform measures on their local ballots.

Mike Siegel, who helped start Ground Game after twice running for a central Texas congressional seat on a progressive platform, said that the point of their work isn’t just to mobilize voters and build coalitions across the state, but also to force debates whenever people in power dig in their heels. “We’re starting fights,” Siegel said. “I think that’s the most important thing we’re doing, and I think that really is in some ways the core of Ground Game, kind of a catalyst, an allied group that partners with local organizations that have deep roots in the community.” 

“Now we are head-to-head as a coalition with the anti-abortion lobby and the pro-cop lobby, which are two extremely formidable forces,” Siegel said. 

Lingering questions over implementation, as well as fearmongering and misinformation by the police union, have clouded what’s actually at stake in San Antonio’s upcoming Justice Charter vote. But Yaneth Flores, policy director at the abortion rights group Avow Texas, insists that the threats pregnant people face in light of the state’s total abortion ban underscore the importance of taking a stand at the local level and codifying protections. 

“I think that’s the right path for us, to say that as a city we are not buying into the fascist policies of the state,” Flores said. “I’m not exaggerating when I say that, because we are being robbed of having autonomy to make our own health care decisions.”

In addition to presenting it as a local bulwark against increasingly extreme anti-abortion laws at the state level, Prop A supporters hope that it sparks a deeper debate about what kind of criminal legal system San Antonio voters want. “At the end of the day, a really significant part of this ballot initiative has to do with a fundamental question of whether or not we as a community think that sending people to jail and having them sit there away from their families, away from their job away from their lives, is the best way to solve crime in our communities,” said Alejandra Lopez, president of the San Antonio Alliance, the local teachers union that backs the ballot measure.

Lopez said that part of the reason she has been personally working to pass the Justice Charter is because, as a teacher, she’s seen first hand how a criminal charge for pot or a stupid mistake like graffiti can derail a young person’s life and disrupt their family. She added that she’s disturbed by the inflammatory, streets-on-fire message by opponents. “The lies that are coming out of the opposition on this, we should all be troubled,” Lopez said. “We should be troubled deeply to our core about those tactics.”

The post Police Union Spreads Fear Over San Antonio Ballot Measure Decriminalizing Weed and Abortion appeared first on Bolts.

Last week, Garza’s office announced indictments against 19 Austin cops accused of assault and deadly conduct during the 2020 protests, including an officer who’s currently running for a Texas House seat. The indictments have rocked the local police department, and come on the heels of other charges Garza filed against law enforcement officers in his first year on the job.

The raft of indictments were also a reminder for Texas voters of the potential for DA elections to quickly change the landscape on policing and other criminal justice policies, just as early voting started for the state’s March 1 primary. Fifty districts are electing their next prosecutor across the state this year.

How these DA elections affect the criminal legal system in Texas will largely come down to races in four populous counties—Bexar (San Antonio), Dallas, Hays, and Tarrant (Fort Worth). In Bexar and Dallas counties, a pair of Democratic incumbents are seeking a second term after drawing conserative ire for reforms they’ve rolled out since winning in 2018. 

In Hays, a Republican incumbent is retiring after overseeing an explosion in the local jail’s population. In Tarrant County, the GOP’s last urban stronghold that has been drifting blue, a right-wing lawmaker notorious for pushing book bans looks to replace a retiring Republican DA whose selective enforcement of election laws led to lengthy prison sentences for Rosa Ortega and Crystal Mason—women who mistakenly thought they could vote, and whose convictions have been cheered by the Texas GOP in the party’s crusade against voter fraud. 

The results of these elections —in the March 1 primaries, May 24 primary runoffs, and November 8 general elections—could have profound consequences on local policies such as bail, the severity of sentences, the death penalty, and prosecutions that target reproductive and voting rights. 

Despite this critical role, more than three-quarters of the state’s 50 DA elections this year only drew one candidate by December’s major-party filing deadline—most of them incumbents. (See the full list of elections and candidates.) That trend holds in the state’s most populous counties with DA elections. Besides Bexar, Dallas, Hays, and Tarrant, only four other counties with at least 100,000 residents drew more than one candidate, and reform stakes are not at the forefront, at least not yet. The vast majority of smaller Texas counties with DA races are also uncontested. (Most Texas DAs are on the ballot in 2024 rather than 2022.)

There is plenty more to watch in Texas besides DAs this year. While the state will only have a handful of sheriff’s races, other local offices with great influence on the criminal legal system are on the ballot. A prosecutor is deploying a tough-on-crime message to unseat a Republican incumbent on the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals, for instance. And Austin has several referendums in May, including one to decriminalize marijuana possession.

To kick off our midterm coverage in Texas, below is a guide to the year’s DA elections.

1. A dual rematch in Dallas 

Dallas County’s DA election is a replay of 2018 in more than one sense. The same three candidates who ran four years ago have filed again. In the Democratic primary, former felony court judge Elizabeth Frizell will again face John Creuzot, the sitting DA who beat Frizell by a mere 589 votes in the 2018 primary. Just like four years ago, the winner will then face Republican Faith Johnson, who was the incumbent at the time. Johnson, who had gained national attention for actually trying killer cops for murder, then lost to Creuzot in the general election by a wide margin of 20 percentage points.

But the script has also partly flipped this time. In 2018, local reform advocates largely backed Frizell in the Democratic primary, but Creuzot deployed reforms after winning. He started refusing to prosecute certain drug cases and changed how it handles low-level theft, criminal trespass and other charges often associated with poverty. These changes triggered major attacks against Creuzot, from a police union calling for his removal to Republican Governor Greg Abbott accusing him of stoking crime. Ahead of next week’s primary, Frizell has echoed some of those same right-wing talking points, calling Creuzot’s reforms “dangerous.” Johnson, meanwhile, has overseen one of the nation’s largest and most-scandal plagued prisons systems since Abbott appointed her to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice after her 2018 loss.

2. A family rematch in San Antonio

Bexar County DA Joe Gonzales made jail diversion and other criminal justice reforms the focus of his winning campaign in 2018. But he said it was a personal threat from the county’s former DA that first inspired him to run. As a defense attorney before becoming San Antonio’s top prosecutor, Gonzales claimed that then-DA Nico LaHood threatened to destroy his law practice after Gonzales confronted him about withholding evidence in a case. Gonzales unseated LaHood in the Democratic primary and then won the general election that year, while LaHood eventually faced probation and a fine by the state bar.  

Nico LaHood’s younger brother, Marc LaHood, is now running to unseat Gonzales. He is one of two Republican candidates vying to face the incumbent DA in the general election (Gonzales is unopposed in the Democratic primary). In a statement to the San Antonio Express-News, Marc LaHood delivered standard tough-on-crime attacks, like accusing the incumbent of “severing ties with law enforcement agencies.” LaHood must first face former prosecutor and local defense lawyer Meredith Chacon in next week’s GOP primary, and Chacon has also played up her proximity to law enforcement, saying she would stop treating police “as the enemy.” Gonzales has drawn predictable hostility from the local police union since taking office and expanding diversion programs meant to prevent arrest and convictions for people accused of minor offenses, like misdemeanor marijuana possession.

3. A race to the right in Tarrant County

Local DAs who espouse baseless claims of widespread voter fraud have become key foot soldiers in the Texas GOP’s efforts to police the vote. And Tarrant County DA Sharen Wilson, a Republican who announced her retirement this year, has been a prime example of how prosecutorial discretion can turn mistakes into “voter fraud” convictions that GOP lawmakers wield to justify stricter laws. 

The GOP primary for Tarrant County DA could push the office even further to the right. Donald Trump has waded into the race to endorse Phil Sorrells, a judge and former prosecutor who vows to targeted undocumented immigrants as one of his main campaign issues. 

He faces state Rep. Matt Krause, a member of the chamber’s “Freedom Caucus,” which has successfully pushed for arch-conservative legislation like the state’s near total ban on abortions. Krause helped spark the book-banning hysteria that has gripped school districts across the state. And he backed legislation, passed by Republicans in 2021, that created new voting restrictions and criminal penalties around voting and election administration—a notable record for a prospective DA in the county where Ortega and Mason were prosecuted. Mollee Westfall, a current felony court judge, is also running in the GOP primary for DA. 

The winner will face one of three Democrats competing in next week’s primary. Tiffany Burks, a former deputy prosecutor under Wilson until last year, faces Albert Roberts, a former prosecutor in a neighboring county who came within 7 percentage points of unseating Wilson in the 2018 election. Former judge Larry Meyers has not run an active campaign, according to the Fort Worth Report. Tarrant County has trended blue in recent cycles, but Republicans continue to dominate local politics. 

4. Hays County candidate takes pride in never having been a prosecutor

The two candidates in the open election in Hays County, home to one of the state’s public universities and the fastest-growing county in the nation, could not have introduced themselves to voters more differently.

David Puryear, the only Republican, puts his work as a staff prosecutor in various offices front and center. Kelly Higgins, the only Democrat, is a defense attorney who does the opposite. “I submit that not having been a prosecutor is, in this county at this time, a blessing,” Higgins writes on his website. “I’ve always been the guy who insists on the protection of the Constitution.” 

Higgins vows to bring a “sea change” and “progressive vision” to the DA’s office and faults the retiring DA, Republican Wes Mau, for leaving cases to drag pretrial. The number of people detained pretrial in Hays has more than doubled since Mau became DA in 2015, according to data supplied by the county. 

Higgins told Bolts that, to reduce the volume of criminal cases and trials, he would seek to grow the availability of diversion programs and review the legal basis for arrests and charges more rigorously; this is to stop what he describes as the cynical prosecution of cases “based on the calculation that there is enough evidence to proceed.” Higgins also said he would consult reformers elsewhere in Texas, noting that “Travis and Bexar Counties have elected progressive DAs.”

Higgins and Puryear, who did not reply to a request for comment on his own platform, will face each other in November.

5. Heated primaries in McLennan, Hidalgo counties 

Only four other Texas counties with a population of at least 100,000 have contested DA races, and at this point in the campaign none of them are defined by major contrasts on criminal justice policy. It is still very early in Galveston County, which won’t see a contested race until the general election. 

But in Kaufman, Hidalgo, and McLennan counties, primaries will likely decide the next DA. That may explain the acrimony unfolding in some of those races.

McLennan County DA Barry Johnson faces challenger John Tetens in the Republican primary, with both ratcheting up fearmongering rhetoric about crime. Tetens has support from local police associations and promises to pursue harsher punishments. Johnson has responded to the criticism in unusually strong terms. 

“There is always an element of law enforcement that wants a rubber stamp in the DA’s office, and I am not going to do that,” Johnson told the Waco Tribune-Herald. But he has also turned to one of the uglier staples of “tough-on-crime” campaigning: attacking Tetens over his work as a criminal defense attorney, which Johnson says has contributed to putting “criminals back on the streets of McLennan County, where they can continue to prey on you and your family.” The GOP nominee will face Democrat Audrey Robertson in this conservative-leaning county.

Another DA candidate is attacking an opponent’s defense work in Hidalgo County, where Democratic DA Ricardo Rodriguez is retiring. One of the Democrats looking to replace him, Nereida Lopez-Singleterry, has blamed rival Toribio Terry Palacios for securing plea deals for his clients as a defense attorney. Palacios has also questioned his opponent’s ethics. Neither replied to Bolts’s questions about their policy platforms or their dispute. The winner of this Democratic primary will then face Republican Juan Tijerina; Hidalgo is a blue county, but Republicans are hoping to make gains in South Texas this year.

In Kaufman County, finally, the only challenger to Republican incumbent Erleigh Norville Wiley is Republican Rob Farquharson, who is emphasizing a traditionally tough-on-crime platform.

6. Most still run unopposed

In much of the state, there will be DA elections on the ballot but no contested races. Of the 50 districts with DA elections this year, 38 of them drew only one candidate, according to a Bolts analysis.That means 76 percent of the state’s DA elections are uncontested in 2022, the exact same rate as in 2020, when there were many more prosecutorial elections.

In 13 counties with at least 100,000 residents, only one candidate filed to run. Incumbents are completely unopposed in Brazoria, Comal, Collin, Denton, Fort Bend, Lubbock, Randall, Rockwall, Smith, Taylor, and Wichita. In Gregg and Jefferson counties, candidates who aren’t even incumbents effectively won just by filing to run, though John Moore and Keith Giblin have each worked for their respective DA offices in the past. (All of these unopposed candidates are Republicans other than in Fort Bend.)  

These counties have a combined population of 4 million. Some are undergoing massive upheavals—Denton, for instance, swung toward Democrats by a net 24 percentage points between the presidential elections of 2012 and 2020.  Public scandals around the criminal legal systems have swirled in other counties with uncontested DAs. But voters in these places won’t get a chance to weigh in on an office that largely drives criminal justice policy for another four years.

The post The DA Elections That Will Shape Prosecution in Texas This Year appeared first on Bolts.