Immigrant crime stats don’t match Dan Patrick’s claims

Posted on March 27, 2014 | By Nolan Hicks

When Dan Patrick spoke about immigration in January at a forum for business groups, he chose to focus on violent crime.
Here’s what he said, as reported by our Austin bureau chief Peggy Fikac:

He pounded the need for border security by citing “hardened criminals we arrested from 2008 to 2012 — not illegals who were here for a job, who got four speeding tickets, but hardened criminals — 141,000 we put in our jails just in four years in Texas.”
“They threaten your family. They threaten your life. They threaten your business. They threaten our state,” he said, adding they were charged with 447,000 crimes including 2,000 murders and 5,000 rapes.

When asked where he got the statistics from, Patrick campaign spokesman Logan Spence referred the Express-News to a 2013 report produced by the Department of Public Safety, entitled “Texas Public Safety Threat Overview 2013″.
The statistics, as published by the Texas Department of Public Safety, don’t actually say what Patrick said. Here’s the paragraph the from the report’s key findings section that the senator seems to be quoting:

Another crime-related public safety concern exists from criminal aliens, who may not be affiliated with the cartels and gangs but act alone to commit crime in Texas. From October 2008 to December 2012, Texas identified a total of 141,982 unique criminal alien defendants booked into Texas county jails. These individuals, identified through the Secure Communities initiative, are responsible for at least 447,844 individual criminal charges over their criminal careers, including 2,032 homicides and 5,048 sexual assaults.

Spence defended his boss, the senator, in a written statement:
“The Department of Public Safety reports states: ‘If there were a national organized crime index in the Uniform Crime Report, Texas would most likely lead the nation as a direct result of Mexican cartel and gang activity along the border and throughout the state,” he said. “This is unacceptable and it threatens the public safety, health and property rights of all Texas citizens, not to mention the direct victims of the human and narco-trafficking activities.
He added: “Those who minimize the significance of these facts or accuse Dan Patrick of political gamesmanship need to take a long look in the mirror.”
The problems with Patrick’s statement, as compared to what DPS reported, are numerous. It conflates and confuses the issue and misstates what the report actually claims.
At first blush, it appears that Patrick is saying the stats track undocumented immigrants who were arrested. DPS spokesman Tom Vinger told the Express-News the stats actually track anyone who was arrested in Texas on state charges and is subsequently identified by the U.S. Department Homeland Security as an alien, without “differentiating whether they are legal or illegal aliens at the time of their arrest.” Homeland Security defines an alien as “[a]ny person not a citizen or national of the United States.
For example, if a French (or British or from wherever) college student traveled to Austin during South by Southwest and was arrested and booked for smoking pot, he would be counted in this statistic.
Secondly, Patrick says those 141,000 had been charged with 447,000 crimes, including 2,000 murders and 5,000 sexual assaults, implying they were arrested for those crimes over that four-year period, which isn’t accurate. The DPS report states that the 141,000 people it had arrested had been charged with 447,000 “individual criminal charges over their criminal careers.” Vinger said that DPS does not track how many of those 141,000 were being arrested for the first time. It’s also important to point out that these are simply arrests for someone who was charged with a crime, not a conviction.
Thirdly, Patrick describes those arrested as “hardened criminals,” who “threaten your family”, “threaten your life”, “threaten your business,” and “threaten our state.” The implication of that statement is that the folks who were arrested are serial offenders with records of violence. However, the charging statistics he’s referencing count all felonies, Class A and B misdemeanors (such as driving while intoxicated or possession of marijuana), and a limited number of Class C misdemeanors. When asked to provide a breakdown of the charges, Vinger said The Express-News would need to file an Open Records Request to obtain that information.
It’s not the first time Patrick’s made a statement like that. When he was running for his first term in the Texas Senate, in 2006, he offered a similar critique of undocumented immigrants, The Texas Observer reported at the time:

But Patrick saves his most hard-edged oratory for illegal immigrants. He blames them for a rising crime rate, overcrowded schools, an overburdened health-care system, and runaway growth in the state budget. “The number one problem we are facing,” he tells audiences, “is the silent invasion of the border. We are being overrun. It is imperiling our safety.”
“The crime rate is soaring,” he says, “and most of it can be tracked to illegal immigration. There are terrorists and drug runners coming into Texas and the sheriffs in 15 border counties are being asked to stop them with only a .45 on their hip and a shotgun in the trunk. They’ll tell you it’s the federal government’s responsibility,” he adds, “but the cavalry is not coming. It’s up to us to protect our borders.”

DPS crime statistics reports from 2006 show that total crime was actually down when compared to 2005, and the crime rate in 2005 was lower than it was in 2004. While crime did increase statewide from 2000 through 2003, the number of violent and property crimes was still markedly lower than it was in the early 1990s, when the state’s legal and undocumented populations were much smaller.
Nolan Hicks is an Express-News staff writer. You can contact him at nhicks@express-news.net, 210-250-3324, or at twitter.com/ndhapple.