Five Easy Pieces: How to Fix Dallas's Very Broken, Busted Municipal Courts System

Back in March, the Office of the City Auditor noted that the Dallas Municipal Court system is all kinds of messed up. Which is why the Dallas City Council's set to get briefed Wednesday on an efficiency study aimed at cleaning up the mess -- though how much time the...

By Robert Wilonsky

June 15, 2009

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Back in March, the Office of the City Auditor noted that the Dallas Municipal Court system is all kinds of messed up. Which is why the Dallas City Council's set to get briefed Wednesday on an efficiency study aimed at cleaning up the mess -- though how much time the council spends with the briefing on Wednesday's a bit iffy, as it shares agenda space with a detailed 181-page preliminary FY2009-'10 budget sneak preview sure to eat up most of the day.

This much is certain, though: The team charged with fixing the muni courts has ID'd five areas in desperate need of change -- and pronto. According to the briefing, the city needs to:

Reduce the number of cases that are set for trial
Decrease the time it takes for a case to go to trial
Decrease the number of witness scheduling conflicts
Decrease the time it takes to process citations
Decrease the number of errors in citation writing

The briefing's full of interesting items worth nothing, such as: It takes anywhere from six months to two years to get a trial; there are, on average, 12,693 traffic trials requested per month; though it costs the city more than $1 million for Dallas police officers to come down and testify, they actually take the stand less than 1 percent of the time; 70 percent of the cases that go to trial wind up getting tossed for myriad reasons; and the city guesstimates that this fiscal year alone, 1,339 citations will get tossed to do writing and/or entry errors that will cost the city $320,038 in revenue.

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