FW Weekly Explains It All: Johnson County Edition

I spent most of my youth in Johnson County, and as I was growing up I would occasionally hear references to the "good ol' boy" system in place there that determined, in large part, what went on in the area. I didn't think much of it, assuming that all small Texas towns probably operated in this way.

Fort Worth Weekly, which continues to impress with its coverage of local area political issues, offers an inside look at one facet of that insular system in Johnson County which affects plenty of people: law enforcement.

Over the last year I've become increasingly interested in law enforcement matters, and I find Scott Henson's Grits for Breakfast to be a good daily source of running commentary on current events within the Texas law enforcement and legal system. I haven't always been so interested in the subject matter, but that combined with Cleburne being my hometown made me take particular interest in the FWWeekly story. Here's a snip, if for nothing else than to convince you the story is worth a read:

When Patsy Keifer got busted for DWI while sitting at the side of a country road in her broken-down Chevy pickup, it didn’t surprise her. She’d refused to take a sobriety test, after all, and told the officer she’d been drinking beer earlier in the day. But winding up strapped naked to a restraining chair throughout a night at the Johnson County jail wasn’t something she’d bargained for.

...snip...

But that’s the kind of thing that seems to happen with some frequency in the county jail located on the outskirts of Cleburne. Welcome to Johnson County, where rural beauty masks a dangerously out-of-whack criminal justice system, including abusive jailers and overzealous patrol officers, backed by prosecutors willing to let people sit in jail for months without trial — and voters who seem willing to overlook all of that, as long as the system is “tough on crime.”

The "voters" part is right, as is the "tough on crime" part. When I was a teenager in Cleburne, we used to joke that you could arrested for walking on the wrong part of the sidewalk, and that has apparently become more true than we knew it to be in recent years:

In 2006, police in Burleson and Cleburne made a combined total of 4,400 arrests, of which Cleburne accounted for more than 3,100. In Cleburne, that’s the equivalent of more than 10 percent of the population getting arrested each year — a rate that raises eyebrows in other counties, especially since Johnson County’s major-crime rate is low. There was just one murder in Cleburne last year, 25 robberies, and 64 cars stolen.

So again, I direct you to the full story.