Raid in Hurst: Should Gambling Be a Crime?

I’m a little surprised that my story from over the weekend about a raid on a gambling house in Hurst is generating so much buzz. Twenty-two comments, at last count, at the bottom of the web story.

To some, it might seem like overkill. A “SWAT team” going in and raiding the place — a house that had been converted into a professional poker operation off Highway 10, also called “Hurst Boulevard.”

Police hauled the 10 organizers and employees to jail and charged them with engaging in organized crime, a felony. The customers got misdemeanor citations, something similar to speeding tickets, and were allowed to leave.

Investigators seized the cards and chips and several large Texas Hold ‘Em tables as evidence. They also recovered about seven thousand dollars in cash.

A victimless crime? Yes and no.

Yes, everyone was there voluntarily. Nobody gets hurt. Police found no drugs or guns in the house.

But no, the argument can be made that the state is the victim. Do you really think the operators paid taxes on their thousands of dollars in profits?  Organized gambling, where the house keeps a cut, is against the law.

The debate seems to be whether it really rises to the level of sending in undercover cops and a SWAT team to shut it down.  In defense of the police, how else are they going to do it other than simply ignore it?  (20-30 cars parked in front of a house every night is hard to ignore.) The cops are just enforcing the law that we as a society passed.

Yes, there are more serious crimes out there. A lot more serious. And police enforce those laws, too.

Think gambling should be legal? Marijuana too? And what about prostitution? Those could also be considered “victimless” crimes.  Laws change all the time. Example, prohibition…

So it seems to me that if someone wants to criticize the law, that’s fair game.  It’s a lot’s more on target than blasting the cops for doing their jobs.

What do you think?

UPDATE: New Info on NorthPark Shooting

I just spoke with a friend of Mary Boyd, the woman who was shot in the face at NorthPark Center on Friday night.

The friend, Christina Adcock, is acting as the family’s spokeswoman.  She says Boyd is doing better today and “grateful to be alive.”

She also offered new details of the shooting.

Boyd was in her Ford pickup waiting to pick up her daughter from the movie theater when a gunman approached her passenger door and said, “Open the door, I have a gun!”

The truck was already running, so a panicked Boyd put it in drive and sped off. The gunman followed, firing two shots before he fled.

Boyd was hit by one of the bullets. It went through one side of her cheekbone, went through her sinuses, ricocheted off her other cheekbone and came out her ear, barely missing her brain.

Boyd never lost consciousness and tried to call 911 but couldn’t see the number on her cell phone. So she drove to the nearby valet stand at Nordstrom, and they helped her.

The attack was totally random, Adcock said, adding the family would like to thank the doctors and staff at Baylor Medical Center for all they have done for her.

NorthPark Mall Bans Reporters from Shooting Scene

It’s the kind of story that gets peoples’ attention, and understandably so.

For new details, click here.

For mall statement, click here.

A woman waiting for her daughter outside the movie theater at NorthPark Center was shot in the face Friday night. Police have made no arrests and don’t seem to know a motive.

I was one of the reporters sent to the scene to try to gather information about what happened for NBC 5.

When we arrived, we saw lots of police cars outside the mall. We parked and started to get out our camera.

Two mall security guards and a mall manager quickly swarmed around us.

“Off the property,” the manager said. “You need to get off the property.”

The War on the Texas-Mexico Border

Just across the Texas border in Mexico, the drug war appears to be spiralling out of control.

Cities like Ciudad Juarez, just across from El Paso, are virtual war zones.

This weekend, the Juarez police director was assassinated, and seven men were murdered in a nearby town in suspected drug-related violence. And that’s despite the presence of thousands of Mexican Army troops.

So far in Juarez this year (and it’s only May), 300 people have lost their lives.

I have gone to the border several times over the years to report on the drug violence there.  I was there in 1997, soon after the death of drug lord Amado Carrillo Fuentes. That was the last time things were this bad.

I reported on Carrillo Fuentes, whose nickname was “Lord of the Skies” because he controlled a fleet of planes to smuggle drugs.  His death kicked off a turf war.  His brother Vicente won, according to U.S. law enforcement officials.

This most recent violence is attributed to a battle between Vicente and rivals from the Mexican state of Sinaloa.

The next few weeks could be key. Thousands more Mexican soldiers are expected to arrive in and around Juarez. And that could help calm the bloodshed, at least for awhile.

The very real fear, of course, is that Mexico will lose the little control it now has, and the violence will spill across the border into Texas.

Remember, Juarez is just one city along a very long border. Other cities, like Nuevo Laredo across from Laredo, Texas, have also seen widespread violence.

For now, it appears the government of President Felipe Calderon is serious about continuing its drug crackdown.  Just days ago, Calderon attended the funeral of a top federal law enforcement official for Mexico’s equivalent of the FBI, who was gunned down in Mexico City, presumably at the hands of the drug lords.

Optimistic government officials says it’s a sign of desperation from a cartel that is on the run.

But in the past, the drug barons have proven they are better armed than the government and have, in effect, controlled large sections of the border where local cops and politicians are on their payroll.

So many billions of dollars are at stake, I can’t help but think where there’s a demand (in the U.S.), someone will step up to supply it.  The drug war, it seems, is nowhere near over.

Stupid Criminal of the Week

At 5 feet 7 inches and 150 pounds, Mario Gonzales isn’t a big guy.  But he wasn’t small enough to fit down the chimney of a Dallas house he was trying to break into, police say.

Neighbors first heard his cries for help about 5 a.m. But they didn’t realize what they were hearing for several hours.

Rosie Canales, who lives next door with her children, heard the man screaming, “Help me! Help me!”

She asked where he was.  “Up here,” he replied.

She called 911.  Firefighters quickly arrived.

Brick by brick, they dismantled the chimney and were able to lift him out with a rope.

He went to the hospital to get checked out, then to jail.

And here’s the clincher. The house was for sale. It was empty! There was nothing in there to steal!

Definitely my nominee for stupid criminal of the week.

Husband Kills Man, Wife Charged

UPDATE: MONDAY NIGHT THE JURY SENTENCED TRACY ROBERSON TO FIVE YEARS IN PRISON. BELOW IS MY ORIGINAL POST. MY ORIGINAL QUESTION REMAINS: DO YOU THINK THIS WAS FAIR?

It is one of the most fascinating criminal cases I’ve covered as a reporter.

In December 2006, Darrell Roberson returned to his Arlington home to find his wife Tracy in a pickup with another man. She screamed “rape.” Her husband then shot and killed the man as he started to drive off with her still in the truck.

Problem was, the cry of “rape” was a lie — to cover up an affair. The dead man was Tracy’s boyfriend.

Prosecutors didn’t charge the husband with a crime. After all, he thought he was defending his wife’s life.

Instead, they charged the wife with involuntary manslaughter.

I was in the Tarrant County courtroom on Friday when the jury returned after two days of deliberations.

She cried as the judge read the verdict: Guilty. Then she was led to jail by deputies.

The sentencing phase will start Monday morning.

She could get anywhere from probation to 20 years.

What is fair in a case like this?

Roberson’s attorneys are pushing for probation. They argue she made a terrible mistake, but that adultery isn’t a crime.  She is a mother of three, a one-time PTA president, and had never been in trouble with the law before.

Obviously, it wasn’t just the affair that got her in trouble, but the false cry of “rape.” But should she have known her husband would kill the man? Maybe so…

As an aside, Roberson and her husband are still together and are trying to work through this.

It’ll be interesting to see what the jury decides about her punishment. What do you think?

Why Are So Many Americans in Prison?

A startling new study is out about the number of Americans in prison: Far more than any other country (including China, which has four times the number of people.)

And Americans spend far longer behind bars.

Consider the following facts:

–The United States has 5 percent of the world’s population, but nearly a quarter of its prisoners.

–For the first time in history, more than one in every 100 Americans is locked up. (Exact number is one in every 99.1.)  Among men ages 20-34, the odds are one in 30. And among African-American men in that same age group, it’s one in nine!

–Texas has more prisoners than any other state.

For the record, 2,319,258 Americans are locked up.

It got me thinking.

Don’t get me wrong. Obviously if someone commits a serious crime or is a danger to society, they need to be behind bars for a long, long time. As a reporter, I’ve covered my share of horrific crime stories.

But why are these numbers so high? Are we locking up too many people for too long, perhaps for the wrong reasons?

Are Americans really that much more likely to be criminals than Russians or Germans or Chinese? Is this a record we should be proud of?

Something seems broken somewhere.

A Crazy Driver, And a Robber Caught Yellow-Handed

Not to prejudge anyone before their time in court, not to label anyone, but I always love “stupid criminal” stories… And today, I had a choice of two!

Fort Worth Police say the guy in the mugshot above, Bradley McClure, 30, barrelled between two cars stopped at a red light on Henderson Street near downtown, injuring three people,  and kept on going. Right in front of a police car!

The cop gave chase. The guy drove into a pedestrian tunnel, where he was arrested. Police say he was “angry,” but it’s not clear what he was upset about.

Case two: A robber outside a cell phone store on West Berry was a little too obvious!

Workers noticed him putting on big yellow cleaning gloves before entering the store.  They called 911, and cops were there by the time he walked out with the cash. He took off running, dropping his gun and loot.  Police caught him a block or two later.

Cops 2, bad guys 0.

By the way, I ended up doing the story on the hit-and-run driver. But it’s always good to have a choice!

A Woman Police Chief

Fort Worth Police Chief Pat Kneblick made a splash in the news recently when she was appointed to lead the 1,439-officer department in North Texas’ second-largest city.  Why? Because she’s a she, one of only a few big-city women police chiefs in the country.

Her appointment is “interim” while city leaders conduct a “nationwide search.” It’s a big country, and there are no doubt many qualified candidates out there. Will she get the permanent gig?

It’s the old argument: Does the city go with new blood? Or a known entity who already knows the department from the inside?

In an interesting move, she already promoted someone else to take her old job as deputy chief, leading to an awkward situation if she’s not named permanent chief. Either she doesn’t have a job to go back to, or the deputy chief she just appointed bumps back to captain.

I first met Chief Kneblick back in 1994 when I started work at NBC 5.  The gang wars were raging that summer. It got so bad, it attracted national publicity. In a radio broadcast from jail, one gang leader called for a “truce.” She was the department’s spokeswoman, and I ran into her frequently at crime scenes. My impression of her then was that she was a hard worker and a straight shooter, who often worked overtime whenever the “news” happened. (The shootings seemed to take place every night.)

Later, she shot up the ranks to lead the department’s patrol division, among other things.

Among the troops, her appointment to interim chief is not universally applauded.