What happens when you need to go to small claims court? Or if you get an eviction notice?
These procedures are overseen in the county where you live by elected justices of the peace.
In most counties, the district that justices of the peace serve are redrawn periodically, so each court serves roughly the same population. But in Harris County, these lines haven’t been redrawn since 1973, leaving some courts completely overwhelmed by cases.
Caroline Ghisolfi, a data reporter for the Houston Chronicle, said the difference between precincts is staggering.
“Precinct 5, which is one of the busiest and most populous precincts, added more than 150,000 people over the past decade. It’s now at over 1.3 million,” she said. “Take another precinct, which is supposed to have pretty much the similar caseload, Precinct 6… They lost population and now they’re only at about 131,000 people. That’s in the East End.
That translates to really, really different caseloads. In Precinct 5, we have 15 times more cases over the past ten years than we do in Precinct 6.”
Rebecca Schuetz, who covers housing for the Chronicle, said part of why the district lines haven’t been redrawn in over 50 years is because they are tied to the constables. That’s because eviction notices are delivered by constables, so traditionally their jurisdictions are matched with a justice of the peace.
“The constables have become very powerful in and of themselves. And one thing that they do in Harris County is they’ll provide patrols to neighborhoods. So a community can say, ‘hey, we would like extra patrols.’ The constables will do that for a fee,” Schuetz said.
“And they build these strong relationships that make the constables not want to move and also means they have this political power because there’s these neighborhoods that don’t want to lose their relationship with the constables. So because of that, there is the possibility for political backlash if you redistrict it.”
Schuetz said this has a real impact on people who live in bigger districts. Smaller districts have been able to implement creative strategies to work with people facing eviction to prevent it, but that only works when the caseload is manageable, she said.
“In some of these big dockets where there’s not enough hours in the day to get through all of them, they sort of depend on enough people not showing up so that they can spend some time on the people who do,” she said.
“Some of these dockets are hundreds of people. Not only does that mean that the courtroom can’t possibly reach out and talk to everyone before the case, but it also means that when you show up, instead of just going in and out of the court, it means you might be waiting six hours for your case to be heard. The big dockets also have a discouraging effect on showing up.”
Schuetz said there has been talk about changing the precinct bounds, but it hasn’t gotten very far.
“One of our colleagues spoke with Commissioner Rodney Ellis, who said he floated the idea,” she said. “But there has been an additional wrinkle. And that additional wrinkle is… I don’t know if you remember the sort of scare that some governments might defund the police or defund law enforcement.
Well, the Texas Legislature recently passed a law saying you can’t defund the police, and now commissioners are worried that if they redraw the precincts, moving some money from one precinct to another might be considered defunding and there might be some penalties involved with that. So I do think this might be something that other major cities start having problems with in the future.”
However, Ghisolfi said this problem will continue to get worse unless a fix is found.
“This is not going to be a problem that fixes itself. The precincts that have the largest caseload, that have the most population, are also seeing the greatest growth in both caseloads and number of civil cases that we’re seeing there, and the number of people that are moving there,” she said.
“We looked at data for the past decade and the trends are not looking good. We expect those to continue to grow going forward.”
