Back to inside Texas politics.
Let's focus in on Dallas County now and the
race for Dallas County District Attorney.
The March primary will be a rematch of
the same race we saw four years ago.
John Creuzot versus Elizabeth
Frizzell again Cruz, 01,
the first time obviously,
but is now running on his record.
His name comes first alphabetically making
him our first interview this morning.
Judge Kruzel welcome back to the program.
You made a name for yourself in
the first three years you've been
in office there for implementing
bold reforms in the office.
If elected to a second term,
what other reforms would
you like to take a shot
at? Well, let's talk about the things
we promised and did number one.
We said, we tackled mass incarceration
and the entry point to that,
unfortunately, is misdemeanor
marijuana cases across this community.
We researched that we've
made that research available.
We have 90 something percent every year.
People of color on that.
And so we have rejected those cases,
and there's been no increase in crime.
The premise was we needed to
do that to stop violent crime.
And so we continue to work on that.
We're focused on homelessness
and and the mentally ill.
We have a multi $1,000,000 facility
that this office is leading the
construction of with Dallas County
with the city of Dallas and state
entities and Parkland Hospital.
So that instead of incarcerating
the homeless and mentally ill,
which we know there will be no good outcome,
will have that facility to take.
We're also working on pretrial intervention.
We want to reduce mass supervision,
that is,
reduce the number of people who
are unnecessarily on probation.
They will be held accountable,
but not for these two year,
five year, 10 year time periods.
And so once again we hope to
look at the research and and
get reductions in recidivism.
We want to save tax dollars
and we want to be effective at
what we do in criminal justice.
Judge
one of the other reforms you have
made to which has become an issue
in this campaign as you know,
is is not charging offenders
for for theft under $750.
Some folks, including victims of theft,
say that makes you soft on crime.
What do you say? Listen,
let's get this the policy straight.
First of all, it's anything over 100,
but up to 7:50 that involves food.
We said something like diapers or formula.
The 1st $100 of a theft by
the state of Texas goes to.
A municipality so those
cases don't come here.
What we have found is is that
the number of theft cases for
the last five to six years,
that category between 100 and
750 has gone consistently down
some years by as much as 34%
even before even before judge
you implemented this. Yeah,
so if you go back about seven years ago,
the number was very high.
Don't ask me why.
And every year since then this number
has gone consistently steadily. Down.
From the five to 600 to 100 and something
to 200 a year and so, what's the point?
No impact did not create crime.
In fact, I was called,
but I asked to go to the state
before Senate committee and
they had their experts there,
and the purpose was to talk about this
policy and everyone there said they
could find no evidence that it increased.
Crime made the community less safe,
or had any impact on law enforcement
judge. 60 seconds left here.
Should answer this one to you
recently asked your prosecutors,
at least publicly,
to stop recommending to a grand jury
whether they should indict a case or not.
What's the genesis of this?
Because this has kind of been
around for a while in the office,
but you seem to have expanded it. Well,
So what happened was in 2015 one
of my predecessors decided my
understanding is there was criticism
that the DA's office was putting a
thumb on police cases and causing
them to be no build or not indicted.
And so she developed the policy
for those that narrow set of cases
to not make a recommendation at
all that has been brought up.
It's been questioned, I thought about it.
It was questioned in a news conference.
The last one we had by a couple people
and I thought about it and I thought,
well, if it's good enough for this.
Lunch, why didn't it good enough
for all of them?
So what we've done is made the
policy consistent for everybody.
It it it gives primacy to the
presumption of innocence.
And either we present a case or not,
and the grand jury should exercise
their discretion in making a decision.
Alright
Judge cruise. Oh, thank
you for the time. Good
luck to you. Thank you.