Written by Michael Thervil
As predicted here at VEDA Magazine, John Whitmire, Houston's 63rd Mayor has now been officially sworn in as of January 1st, 2024. Eager to start his term as the new Mayor of Houston, one of the biggest things that he is aggressively facing head on is the issue of crime. This is bad news for bad dudes, but some are asking how does aggressively fighting crime affect the hard-working law-abiding people of Houston? With a severely overcrowded and understaffed jail, combined with Houston Police being under-powered when it comes to low law-enforcement numbers, Mayor Whitmire is looking to change that.
What people like about Mayor Whitmire is that he's transparent in his plan of boosting the numbers of police officers on the street as well as collaborating with the other 80 plus law-enforcement agencies such as the Texas State Troopers to sharply curb the rising crime in Houston. Currently Mayor Whitmire is looking to recruit potential police officers from other places as well. Moreover, he's offering incentives as an incentive to boost Police numbers. However, the question that's on the minds of many is: “Are his ideas on how to fight the issue of crime in Houston actually going to work?”.
Well, the one thing that people in the know understand is that the more officers you place on the street the more likely they are to find crime – but in finding crime, people with good intentions such as Mayor Whitmire, tend to make the situation worse when it comes to crime over time. What we mean by this is that when people get convicted and placed in jail, they become locked out of employment opportunities that prevent them from becoming productive members of society and falling victim to poverty – thus reducing the chances of them from getting involved in crime in the first place.
We imagine that people (including Mayor Whitmire) believe that if people don’t like the prospect of going to jail, then they shouldn’t commit crime. However, the “Hidden Hand” of life tends to come into play, and often drags people down the wrong path. Currently, Houston has a population of 2.288 million people and is growing. Of that number, there were an estimated 170,801,823 crimes committed in 2023 according to the Houston Police Department, that’s close to half of the Houston population. Let’s say half of these crimes resulted in a conviction and jail time. With households having a national average of roughly 2 children in the home, the adverse effect of incarceration has an exponential devastating effect (times 2) on not only the immediate families of those incarcerated, but the outcomes of those adverse effects can be seen in the communities in which those broken families live; and poses a direct systemic social risk to future generations because of it’s trickle-down effect.
It’s widely known that there is a direct correlation between incarceration rates and the propensity of an offender falling back into a life of crime, poverty, and unemployment. It can be argued that the combination of Mayor Whitmire being tougher on crime, boosting police numbers, and locking more people up (short term solution), the more he aids and abets in the manufacturing of crime in Houston. This public health issue is not his fault – in fact it’s nobody’s fault. But oxymoronically, it’s our fault collectively for not addressing a decades long public health issue because we failed to either seek more effective solutions to a social problem and/or for us not aggressively seeking to eliminate the factors that propel people to engage in crime in the first place.
Food for thought: it costs the taxpayers in Houston roughly $60.00 per day ($21,900 per year) to take care of someone in custody. With roughly 8,900 in custody the cost to taxpayers comes to $194,910,000. This doesn’t include the adverse economic impact on the communities in Houston.
Comments