It doesn’t bother me that in her story today Tanya Eiserer failed to mention the one Trey wrote for us. That’s SOP for the News, not to cite other media in town that have either broken the story in question or, as in our case, developed significant angles that the paper missed. (Allen Gwinn knows all about this.) As Trey noted in his story, Eiserer was the first to write about these rogue cops, back in March, when they were accused of misconduct. But what she missed then she also missed today.
In her story, Eiserer says, “Why any officer might improperly fill out or issue tickets is unclear.”
To the contrary. I think it’s very clear. The real story here is the one Trey wrote. Forget about these three cops. That’s not really important. What’s important is the point system by which cops are graded for writing tickets. It’s a bounty on the citizens of Dallas. The way the system is set up, it fosters cheating — the issuance of bogus tickets. Think TAKS test. Only in this case, instead of kids getting gypped on their education, innocent people are going to jail, the crime rate continues to embarrass the city, and good cops like Shanna Lopez get booted off the force.
This is a serious, widespread problem, and it deserves smarter analysis than the paper gave it today.
