By Karen Gleason
The 830 Times
District Attorney Suzanne West assured the community it is safe despite a precipitous rise in the numbers of criminal cases being processed by her office as a result of Operation Lone Star arrests.
West made her comments during an hour-long talk to the Val Verde County Republican Women at the Ramada Inn recently. During the talk, West spoke about election integrity, bond and bail issues and the effects of the border crisis on the local criminal justice system.
Terri Flowers, president of the Val Verde County Republican Women, welcomed guests and introduced West.
West said she wanted to speak to the group about topics about which many people have misconceptions.
She said she has noticed on the national stage, officials are spending less time doing their own jobs and more time taking potshots at each other.
“When you hear any congressman speaking today, they’re probably talking about this president or the past president. How many of them are saying, ‘What am I going to do in my office tomorrow? What did I do for my constituents yesterday?’ And so, I just want to encourage us all, that we should be expecting all of our elected officials to stay in their lane and explain what they’re doing,” West said.
“In our small world here, if I spent all my time telling – and not that he needs it – but say I spent all my time telling the sheriff what he should be doing, well, that’s what he got elected to do. He doesn’t need me to tell him what to do. So if we did that locally, we would stop. We wouldn’t be able to function, and I think that’s a huge piece of what we see that happens nationally, that we try really hard not to do that locally,” she added.
West said when she won election for the DA’s office she was “pleasantly surprised” at how well all of the local elected officials work together.
“We have a Republican district attorney and two Republican district judges, and then the vast majority of everybody else we work amongst are Democrats, and I have never had any Republican or Democrat come to me and be unhappy about a political issue. It doesn’t even come up in our world,” West told the group.
The district attorney said she believes “Texas did a fantastic job of putting some really good laws in place” regarding elections, adding that her office is not investigating any complaints about the past election.
She urged the Republican women, though, to remain vigilant and involved with their local election processes.
West also cleared up some widespread misconceptions about bonds.
She said the national media often reports stories about persons arrested for violent crimes who are immediately released on bail.
“I think it shocks people all the time to know the vast majority of criminals bond out. That hits us sometimes, like, ‘Do they really?’ But in reality, the Constitution, the federal constitution and the state constitution, require that, so basically in our Texas Constitution it says, ‘All prisoners shall be bailable by sufficient sureties unless for capital offenses.’
“So, for example, I told you all we have some capital cases pending. They’re not bonding out, and we have some murder cases pending, and they’re bonds are so high, they’re not bonding out, but they have a bond. Their bond might be set at $600,000. If they could come up with $60,000 and find a surety that would bond them out, they could bond out,” West said.
“Every single person that’s arrested has the right and the ability to bond out if they can make that bond, and that always surprises everybody everywhere. But I can tell you, our justices of the peace that set those bonds and our Operation Lone Star magistrates that set those bonds, set them fairly high,” she added.
West said persons accused of crimes released on bond are also required to meet certain conditions to stay out of jail until their court dates.
West also spoke about Operation Lone Star, Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s border security initiative.
“There’s two things I’ve done in my office that I’m super, super proud of, and one of them is that we brought in a victim’s services advocate, and just having one human being in the office to help us with the victims has changed everything so drastically,” West said.
West said another major improvement she has overseen is a new comprehensive case management system.
“The case management system is fantastic because we can track everything, but the downside is that I know numbers that give me anxiety every time I run them,” West joked.
She said her office is still dealing with the 2019 and 2020 backlog that occurred during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns and with the deluge of new cases being filed by state law enforcement officers in the community as part of the governor’s Operation Lone Star border security initiative.
“So if you look at case flow from 2017 to 2019 in the DA’s office, felonies only, the caseload in Val Verde County would have been about 1,400 cases, and that’s coming in and leaving. It’s not really static, but just think, 1,400 cases. In Kinney County, 293 felony cases for two, actually three, years’ work, 2017, 2018, 2019, and in Terrell County, which is my third county, only 54 open cases throughout that time period.
“By 2019 to 2020, those numbers had decreased drastically, because things were slowing down, so Val Verde, 1,000 cases, Kinney went down to 285, and Terrell to 17.
“Then if you look at the numbers from 2021 to 2023, remember the number I just gave you from Val Verde was 1,000, and what we’re carrying right now in Val Verde is 2,300, almost 2,400. That’s just Val Verde County alone.
“In Kinney County, we went to 5,522, and in Terrell, we went down, 17 to 15.
“So usually, with all of our counties together, 2017 to 2019, our office would have carried, in and out, about 1,300, now we have almost 8,000 cases. Now, those are counts, those are charges, and it’s not all defendants. What that means is that a smuggler might get charged with seven counts at a time, but those are the astronomical numbers that the border crisis has brought to our doorstep,” West said.
She said she and all of her staff are working to move those cases through the system.
“Between the summer and this past month, my office disposed of about 500 cases, and those are defendants, and that alone is an astronomical number of dispositions, because usually for an entire year, Val Verde County would have had less then 200 dispositions. So disposing of that many in six months is a really, really big number. We’ve been working really hard,” West said.
“So let’s say we’re saying three counts (per defendant), and we’re going to go at the same pace we’re been going, the 500 cases in six months. That’ll take us five years to close out all the cases we have right now, and the same number of arrests are happening at the same time every day, and so I cannot convey strongly enough how much the border crisis is hitting our criminal justice system here,” the district attorney added.
“It is an immense undertaking to try and flow these cases through the system,” she said.
West said one way the state assists her office is funding a border prosecution unit that pays the salaries of an attorney, two investigators and two secretaries who can focus their efforts on the heavy influx of cases related to border crime.
The problem, West said, is that there is no more space in her office.
She told the Republican women she would like them to lobby their contacts at the state level to provide more mental health resources, like those that are provided to the state’s larger cities.
She also said despite the great work the Texas Department of Public Safety troopers have done and continue to do here, there is no long-term plan for measuring success, and she said she believes such a plan is needed.
“What I try to do in my office is just try to maintain our expectations and that is, we take the most dangerous people and we deal with them the fastest and the harshest and we just go down the chain. You use your resources as best you can. And so the evaders don’t like their plea offers ever and people who are dangerous to law enforcement and citizens don’t like their plea offers, and we just do the best we can to take care of the most dangerous, but I have not seen anyone from the state come to us and say, ‘Okay this is enough. You’re putting enough resources to it,’ or, ‘We understand what you’re putting to it and we’re going to do this much.’ They’re basically just sending, sending, sending and not really feeling the end result here,” West said.
“I have not seen from the state, this is our goal. If we decrease this this much, thank you and we’ve done a good job. What we do locally is we’re keeping the roads as safe as we can. The dangerous people are getting off the roads. We put as many bond conditions as we can. So we just prioritize dangerous,” she added.
“The other thing we need to expect the state to do is they’ve got to create processes to do the multi-county stuff. That’s been really difficult. So DPS can send the troopers here and they’ve been fantastic. They can out together the processing center, and then they’re done. . . They put them in jail and they send you a report and then they’re done. But for us and what Val Verde and Kinney and Terrell counties deal with, that’s just the beginning. That’s the 1 percent. The 99 percent is what our counties then pick up, and we’ve got the whole rest of the process to deal with. That’s where we are.
“The numbers are ginormous. I don’t know how else to say it. I need to just sit down with the dictionary and come up with as many words as I can for large and so every time I talk I have a different word for how big it is,” West said.
Despite the increase in border crime, West said, she believes the community remains safe.
“What I can tell you guys is you are safe. The numbers are scary, and these numbers are resource allocation, but we have the (DPS Lt.) Noe Fernandezes of the world on the roads every day keeping dangerous people off the road, and I can tell you they are arresting many, many of them, and so is your police department. They’re responding to calls and they’re doing a fantastic job,” West said.
After her presentation, West also answered a barrage of questions from the audience.
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