1. Public Records Reveal That The San Antonio Police Department Solved Just 1-in-5 Homicides Last Year.
“It's the worst thing as it is. It's hard to not be here with my son, but not having closure makes it a lot worse because I don't have peace.” That’s Jamie Edwards, the mother of Isaac Orosco, who was gunned down in the parking lot of his apartment complex seven years ago this month.
As San Antonio's local CBS television affiliate reports, the family joined to remember Isaac in community with other mothers of murdered sons—all of whom are still waiting for the San Antonio police department to identify the person who killed their child—to “hold a balloon release at Isaac's gravesite, [while] sending prayers to heaven that he is at peace.”
To understand how successful the San Antonio Police Department is at solving murders like Isaac Orosco’s, Protect and Serve filed a public records request seeking clearance rates for the past two years. What we found is disturbing. In 2022, the San Antonio police department’s own records revealed that detectives cleared just 21.74% of homicide cases—or about 1-in-5 homicides. The year before, in 2021, that number was slightly higher at 28.48%. In other words, in 2021, 7-of-10 times a life was taken in San Antonio, the person responsible times a life was taken in San Antonio, the person responsible faced no consequences.
Meanwhile, 90 minutes down the road in Austin, Texas, the police department solves roughly 90% of homicides.
The bottom line difference between the solve rates of these two departments is that police Departments that devote the time and resources necessary for solving murders do in fact solve murders. As Jeff Asher, a researcher and former CIA staffer, wrote for The New York Times, the “research suggests that … one key to solving a murder is straightforward: devoting more hours to it…” And, a “study from Philip Cook, Anthony Braga, Brandon Turchan and Lisa Barao also points to allocation of resources as the most important factor.” Indeed, the failure to prioritize reallocating more of the department’s “resources into finding and talking to witnesses, collecting evidence, and clearing both murders and nonfatal shootings could be one way of helping to reverse the recent rise in murder across the nation.”
2. Antioch Police Department Scandal Keeps Growing.
The city of Antioch, California, and its police department are still reeling from an explosive and sprawling text message scandal in which dozens of officers and some supervisors—all in all totally nearly half of the total Antioch Police Department—sent “derogatory, homophobic, and sexually explicit language and photographs… demonstrat[ing] their racial bias and animus towards African Americans and other people of color in the community,” according to an detailed investigative report from the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
Now, as the Associated Press reports, “nine current or former police officers [with the departments in Antioch and Pittsburg, California] were charged [last week] in a federal corruption investigation that alleges that [these officers committed both] civil rights violations and fraud in an effort to get a pay raise and lied on reports to cover up use of excessive force.”
The four indictments lay out stunning charges against the law enforcement officers:
Excessive force against civilians, including two officers who exchanged graphic photos of a cyclist bitten by a police dog after officers stopped the cyclist for biking without a light. The caption with the photo read: “yeah buddy good boy Purcy.” The indictment also accuses the officers of “authoring police reports containing false and misleading statements to suggest that the force they used was necessary and justifiable… [when] in truth and in fact, and as the [police officers] well knew, [they] willfully used excessive force in numerous incidents.”
Faking Degrees For Raises. Other officers were “charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud and wire fraud surrounding allegations they had other people take and complete online university courses toward a criminal justice degree. The police departments offered reimbursement for college tuition and pay raises for those who graduate from college…”
Distributing Steroids. Two more officers were “charged with several counts related to distributing anabolic steroids.”
Antioch Mayor Lamar Thorpe best summed up the import of the charges for the police department and the broader community: “Today is a dark day in our city’s history, as people trusted to uphold the law, allegedly breached that trust and were arrested by the FBI. Today’s actions are the beginning of the end of a long and arduous process.”
3. A Plot Twist In Connecticut Fraudulent Ticket Scandal
Last week, Protect and Serve reported on the Connecticut Police Union voting “no confidence” in police leadership in the aftermath of an official audit that found “a high likelihood that almost 26,000 traffic citations were fabricated between 2014 and 2021—and that more than 30,000 more tickets were questionable.” In other words, the officers are accused of issuing fake tickets “for their own personal benefit [because] Troopers who appear productive are often eligible for federally funded overtime.”
As we explained, union leaders were upset because the chief of the State Police force, launched an internal probe, called the ticket scandal “unacceptable,” and pledged to “hold … individuals accountable.” Union leaders complained that releasing the names of the officers would “tarnish the reputation of Connecticut State Police,” and that the chief did not “stand up and defend the good names and reputations of our troopers in our agency.”
Well, as the Connecticut Mirror reports, on Friday, it became clear that “the union’s executive director, legal counsel and former president” who spent two decades as a state trooper, is at the very center of the false ticket scandal. Here is Jaden Edison reporting for the CT Mirror:
“An analysis of the data used by the auditors, which The Connecticut Mirror obtained through an open records request, shows that [Andrew] Matthews [the former president and current executive director and general counsel for the police union] had the second-most underreported infractions out of the 1,301 state troopers examined from 2014 to 2021. Matthews’ badge number is associated in the data with 224 infractions from 2014 through 2021 that were not reported to the profiling database, an apparent violation of state law. Fifty percent of his infractions were flagged as underreported. He also may have overreported 27 traffic tickets, the data shows, possibly a criminal act if an investigation finds that he did so with intent.”