Sky Chadde

Craig Watkins wants his office to handle all criminal evidence produced on devices such as these.

Ahead of his election day disaster, District Attorney Craig Watkins announced the creation of a new division in his office. He's done this before, most recently with the Civil Rights Division, a team that will investigate, right alongside Internal Affairs, when a police officers shoots someone. The latest is a digital forensics lab that will analyze evidence such as text messages, emails and digital video. But an in-house lab that handles and stores evidence might be a conflict of interest, or at least open proseuctors to accusations of it.

In a press release,Watkins gave the example of a thief using Google Maps to case a house, instead of one of those musty paper ones, and then texting his buddies the address, instead of meeting to discuss in person. The Google search and the text messages are digital evidence.

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Bryan Burgess

When a Dallas cop shoots someone in the line of duty, you can count on Dallas Police Association leader Ron Pinkston to leap to the officer's defense. The cop who shot a mentally ill man who, as best a surveillance video shows, stood up from a chair? Shouldn't have been fired. Shoot an unarmed carjacking suspect who witnesses reported had his hands in the air? It's justified.

As head of Dallas' largest police union, this is Pinkston's natural role. He's supposed to protect his members' interests in the face of bureaucratic and political meddling, even when those interests are contrary to public opinion or a reasonable consideration of the evidence.

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James Tourtellotte

DNA analysis will be performed on a backlog of 4,144 rape kits in Dallas County.

Dallas victims of unsolved sexual crimes just got one step closer to potentially seeing justice their abusers. The Dallas Police Department recently announced it had received a portion of federal and state money to be allotted toward DNA testing for rape kits. The testing began earlier this month, and will target more than 4,000 cases from between 1996 and 2011. The department plans to submit 250 to 300 kits for testing each month.

Only 10 percent of cases will find matches. But Bobbie Villareal, Executive Director of the Dallas Area Rape Crisis Center, says that since most rapists are serial offenders, a single identified case could lead to many more matches.

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Ben Pollard

Twenty women in Dallas County were killed in domestic violence situations last year.

Life just got a little bit worse for women in Texas -- and particularly for women in Dallas County. The Texas Council on Family Violence released a study on Tuesday that shows Dallas County has the highest number of female domestic violence deaths in the state. More telling, Dallas has the highest per capita rate of domestic violence homicides in the state, with Beaumont taking second place for the deplorable ranking.

"In addition to Dallas County, Tarrant County homicide rates doubled, and Collin County tripled," says Angela Hale, a spokesperson for the TCFV. "If you look at the metroplex as a whole, you have 38 out of 119 total deaths in the state. So it is a significant number."

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Flickr user Blind Nomad

Get caught with a joint in Dallas this afternoon and you'll find yourself being chauffeured to Lew Sterrett in the back of a squad car. Get caught with a joint in Dallas this January and you may well escape with a ticket and a stern admonition to show up in court.

The Dallas Morning News reported over the weekend that Dallas County will pilot a cite-and-release program next year allowing those caught with less than two ounces of marijuana, a Class B misdemeanor, to avoid a trip to jail.

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Andreas Praefcke

Dallas County Jail

They successfully fought contract provisions that would have banned in-person visits at the Dallas County jail while the county made money from new video visits. Now exonerated inmates, prison rights advocates and County Judge Clay Jenkins aim to make the county among the first in the nation to stop profiting off phone calls between jail inmates and their families.

See also: Dallas County Will Not Ban In-Person Visits for Inmates After All

About $3 million in the county's recently approved budget stands to come from surcharges applied to phone calls made to and from the jail, but Jenkins wants to change course and find the money elsewhere.

"What you've got is an irreconcilable conflict between our desire to make money off these poor families so we can balance our budget and our duty to lower crime and treat people fairly," Jenkins says.

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This week, the Observer's Sky Chadde has a cover story about a group of Arlington "cop watchers" who spend their nights following the suburb's patrol cars, filming police's interactions with the citizenry and lobbing the occasional "oink," all in the name of liberty.

As part of that story, videographer Sarah Passon recently hit the streets with the group. Her video is above.

Prosecutor Dodds quit and accused District Attorney Craig Watkins of playing politics.

It started out as a case that wasn't very dramatic or high-profile. Latoya Scott, a 26-year-old woman, was arrested by the Irving Police Department for an alleged fight at a mall. Prosecutors said Scott hit and scratched a woman she was dating. She was charged with family violence assault, a felony a Class A misdemeanor.

But now that assault case has turned into the minor backdrop for another fight, a weird feud between the county attorneys on the case and the judge overseeing it. Rebecca Dodds, the former chief of the misdemeanor division in the Dallas County District Attorney's Office and the main prosecutor on Scott's case, insisted that Scott pleaded guilty to the assault charge back in April. But Judge Elizabeth Frizell said that wasn't true and tried to hold a jury trial for Scott on September 2.

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Andreas Praefcke

Dallas County Jail

Two weeks ago, County Judge Clay Jenkins led a successful effort to change a contract that would have ended in-person visits with jail inmates while the county collected a share of the money a private company made from charging for the video visitation that was to replace it.

See also: Dallas County Will Not Ban In-Person Visits for Inmates After All

The county will still offer video visits in addition to in-person, but the county won't collect a surcharge from inmates or their visitors from video visits. Yet Jenkins still is not happy. He wants to the restart the process for finding a company to provide jail communications and eliminate surcharges for phone calls too. Dallas County would make $3 million from the surcharges over the life a proposed contract with Securus Technologies, which had the original winning bid.

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The National Bar Association says it has filed an open-records request with the Dallas Police Department for information regarding police brutality.

A national organization of black lawyers and judges is still awaiting a response from the Dallas Police Department to the group's recent request for 10 years worth of public information "regarding the number of individuals who have been killed, racially profiled, wrongfully arrested and/or injured while pursued or in police custody."

National Bar Association President Pamela Meanes says the group is seeking data from 25 cities that have a history of police violence in minority communities. She expects the police departments to be cooperative, and the group has already heard back from Kansas City and Little Rock, Arkansas. The association will sue if necessary to get the data.

"The ultimate goal is to identify police departments that have a pattern of abuse so the the federal government can come in," she says.

At least some of information her group is seeking may soon be available online to everyone. Dallas Police Chief David Brown told a community meeting Thursday night that the department will soon publish, for the first time, information on officers' use of deadly force. "This will be detailed briefings of all our police shootings dating back to 2003 to current," he said.

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