Lawyer Runs For Mayor And Starts Getting Caught In His Own Bull

The spin that marvels a courtroom gets a lot tougher when the media are checking up on you.

Tony Buzbee’s enjoyed a wonderful career as the prototypical Texas attorney hunting down big verdicts — like his landmark win against BP — and hobnobbing with Republican hotshots like Energy Secretary Rick Perry, who Buzbee got out of two felony indictments. But now that he’s got truckloads of cash, he’s decided like a lot of rich people ill-advisedly do to run for public office. And it looks like the Houston mayoral candidate is taking a page from Donald Trump’s playbook and just making stuff up and hoping to drown out everyone pointing out that he has no clue what he’s talking about.

Buzbee — whose brushes with the criminal element include the world’s greatest drunk first date story that culminates in a ruined original Warhol and a $21 million heist effort at his home earlier this year — is convinced that Houston is a violent, criminal cesspool and that it’s all the fault of the Democrats who’ve run the town since 1982.

“I know what’s going on in this city,” Buzbee said. “Don’t tell me crime is going down when everybody across the country knows that Houston is one of the most dangerous cities in the United States.”

OK, we won’t tell you that. We’ll let the actual data tell you that.

Unfortunately for Buzbee, anecdotes play great at cocktail parties underneath $800K paintings, but fall apart when people are actually checking your every rambling against empirical evidence. Not to besmirch the Houston Chronicle for its watchdog efforts, but let’s be frank: finding this data didn’t require all that much work on their part. And that’s a testament to how out of his depth Buzbee is:

Like the rest of the country, crime in Houston has plummeted over the last 30 years, as has residents’ fear of crime being the city’s most pressing problem. FBI data show that most categories of crime in Houston have fallen or remained stagnant during Turner’s term, which began in January 2016. Criminologists also scoff at the claim that Houston is among the country’s most dangerous cities.

It’s actually astounding to find “fear of crime” going down. Often people’s fears outpace the reality, but in Houston, even the perception is pretty clued in. That, alas, isn’t stopping Buzbee from making the haphazard statements like “Have you had a break-in? Have you had your car window smashed in?” to appeal to the idea that individual anecdotes are wholly valid stand-ins for, you know, broad reality. One of Buzbee’s fellow conservative candidates went so far as to claim that doorbell surveillance cameras should trump real data because people can see it and react to it viscerally — which reads like the premise of a dystopian novel but is the sad reality of Houston politics.

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Both Buzbee and King say Houston is getting more dangerous. Buzbee notably has said that Houston has more crime than “95 percent” of American cities, pointing to its overall crime rate, or the combination of violent and property crimes. He also says on his campaign website: “All types of crimes are on the rise.”

It will shock you not at all to learn that “all types of crime are not on the rise.” Nor is Houston in the 95th percentile of crime without taking some serious liberties with the numbers. It is around the 90th percentile when compared to all cities with populations over 100K, but when not compared to Mayberry and put in an apples-to-apples comparison with the country’s major cities, it’s “thoroughly middle of the road,” per Ames Grawert, senior counsel for the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.

This is the sort of puffery a trial lawyer can offer a jury to give facts just the right spin. It’s not a “lie” as much as a very creative spin. But unlike in the courtroom, the audience isn’t bound to the back and forth of the closings and will hear a sustained effort from quality media outlets like the Houston Chronicle marshaling relatively obvious crime data to unravel Buzbee’s efforts to whip up fear. He and his campaign should probably consider the benefit of taking the facts as they are and shifting his message to something that really needs addressing in the city.

Or…

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Making an enemy of the facts is certainly another path.

Houston’s mayoral candidates say crime is getting worse. The numbers say otherwise. [Houston Chronicle]

First Date Horror Story: Prominent Attorney Says Warhol Paintings Destroyed By Drunk Date


HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.