Thumbs Down: To the Richardson Police Department. On a recent Saturday night, they received a distress call regarding a break-in at the Taco Inn on Spring Valley Road, near the Dallas-Richardson city limits. The police dispatcher informed the caller that the Taco Inn was technically in Dallas, so he would have to call the Dallas police for help. By the time the DPD reached the scene, the restaurant had been robbed and a 15-year-old girl employee had been raped.
Thumbs Up: To a proposed restaurant coalition which would provide independent taxi-shuttle service during conventions, to relieve Dallas’ pitiful taxi shortage. If something of this sort isn’t done to guarantee convention transportation, a lot of conventions will go the way of the Democratic convention- to New York, which has plenty of cabs.
Thumbs Down: To Dallas State Senators Oscar Mauzy, Bill Braecklein, Ron Clower, and Ike Harris, for stonewalling a proposal to make the city’s traffic courts “courts of record” – a move that would eliminate the glut of appeals from municipal courts. Because the traffic courts are not currently courts of record, anyone can (and apparently does) appeal his citation to a county appeals court and demand a rehearing. As a result, the county appeals court has become so clogged that judges have simply dismissed up to half the cases appealed in a given month. The senators have said they are blocking the legislation because an appeal from a court of record can be prohibitively expensive for the poor. We suspect they have a somewhat different motive: Anything that cuts down on appeals is going to hurt the pocketbook of the legal community. Messrs. Mauzy, Braecklein, Clower, and Harris all happen to be lawyers.
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