The Harris County District Attorney’s Office launched the long-promised reform of its intake division on Monday, returning experienced line prosecutors to take calls from police officers at the scene of arrests.
The aim of the measure, a key campaign promise of new Harris County District Attorney Sean Teare, is to streamline cases and end the county’s court backlog, plagued by high dismissal rates and blamed for unnecessary overcrowding in the county jail.
The intake division, which accepts or rejects charges from police officers who have arrested a suspect on the street, was previously manned by a team of full-time lawyers with varying levels of experience during the eight-year term of former district attorney Kim Ogg.
The move is a return to business as usual before Ogg led the division’s much-criticized upheaval.
Teare said he hopes the change will strengthen cases, relationships with law enforcement, and eventually reduce the jail backlog by filing solid cases from the beginning.
“We are going to have real prosecutors accepting charges, advising officers on the street what else we need, so that we can shorten the disposition of cases,” Teare said at an event at Houston Police Officers Union headquarters on Tuesday.
He said that lawyers are getting used to their new shift and a district attorney spokesperson confirmed that this is the first step in a longer process of improving intake.
“We are in the analyzing stage, the training stage, the beginning stages,” said district attorney spokesperson Courtney Fischer.
A top priority
When Teare entered the district attorney race last year, he made the change a top priority of his campaign — amid infighting among Harris County’s many criminal justice leaders over responsibility for a complex court backlog that has plagued the county’s justice system.
Critics claimed Ogg’s system, and some of the inexperienced prosecutors manning the desk, were the problem, and Teare promised to fix the division upon taking office.
“January 1, we are back to having experienced prosecutors in those roles,” Teare told the Houston Landing in November.
These changes happenedon Monday, district attorney spokesperson Fischer confirmed on Thursday.
In addition to line prosecutors getting an extra shift, the office also installed investigators on night and evening shifts, Executive Bureau Chief John Jordan told the Landing on Thursday.
“Say an officer is sending their charges and they are lacking something, we have another officer, meaning a DA investigator, calling them in the field, letting them know what was missed, helping them and even supplementing their reports,” he said.
Officer support
“We’re excited,” said Houston Police Officers Union president Douglas Griffith.
“I think that this move is going to be a great move for not only the DA’s office but for the police officers in Harris County,” said Griffith on Thursday. “This will make it much better to [shore] up those cases, document elements, and when you have veteran prosecutors they can help talk you through it.”
The Houston Police Department, the largest law enforcement agency in Harris County, declined to comment on the changes.
Griffith explained the frustration his members faced “for years” when prosecutors accepted charges which were eventually dismissed due to mistakes like picking the wrong crime for the elements present.
“With a veteran prosecutor, they say ‘Hey, I know this is what you want but this more falls in line with this [charge],’ ” said Griffith.
The work of fine-tuning the shift and training the attorneys in their renewed role is ongoing, said Jordan, who stressed that the intake process is still being scrutinized.
“We are analyzing everything, from workflow to computer systems, to [the] number of prosecutors to the level of prosecutors,” he said. “Everything is under a microscope as we try different things, because Sean has made it clear he wants this to work for the officers as well as the development of our prosecutors.”
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