Vice Cops Raid East Dallas Gambling Ring

On January 14, vice cops fanned out across East Dallas and descended on a half dozen aging storefronts in crappy, low-rent strip centers: one off Columbia Avenue a mile east of Deep Ellum, another where Garland Road transitions from isn’t-it-nice-to-be-near-White-Rock-Lake! to all-beauty-has-been-extinguished-from-the-world, the rest along Ferguson Road. Later, they visited…

Texas Prisons Use Solitary Confinement Way, Way Too Much

When Alexis de Tocqueville penned his meditation on the American prison system in the 1830s, the country’s experiment in solitary confinement was a half century old, begun in 1786 by pacifistic Pennsylvania Quakers as an alternative to execution. As the Frenchman noted, it hadn’t worked: Nowhere was this system of…

Feds Bust Man Behind Dallas-Based Steroids Website

If you were going to buy steroids online, Trusted Anabolic Solutions seems like a pretty good bet. According to online reviews, TAS offered a good product, discreet packaging, and fantastic customer service from someone going by “Big H.” Then, a few weeks ago, something went awry. On Muscle Gurus, jilted…

Texas Cops Seized $486 Million Through Civil Forfeiture Last Decade

Two years ago the Texas Legislature slipped into the state budget an item mandating a thorough review of certain civil forfeiture proceedings. Civil forfeiture — the process state and federal prosecutors use to seize property from suspected criminals, whether they’ve been convicted or not — is a source of perpetual…

Highland Park’s Book Fight Is About Ideology, Not Sex

From its beginning last fall, the narrative of the Great Highland Park Book Ban — and I think all spectators can agree that it’s been great — has been about sex. This is understandable. Almost all great book-ban fights are about sex — about when kids should be exposed to…

Biggest North Texas Speed Trap Cities of 2014

Everyone in Dallas drives around with a mental map showing the contours of local traffic enforcement. It shows the places where cops with itchy ticket-fingers treat minor driving infractions as tantamount to high treason and, conversely, those spots where they are too busy catching murderers or snacking on doughnuts (depending…

Grand Prairie’s Planned Indoor Ski Resort Is Just the Worst

By the time Homo sapiens had made it across the narrow strip of land then linking Asia and North America and started inching their way south, the mountains that had once dominated the Dallas landscape were a geologic footnote. Thrust upwards hundreds of millions years before by tectonic collisions, they’d…

Jaguars Strip Club Says Dallas Can’t Shut it Down Because Free Speech

Let’s set aside for a moment the niceties of due process and innocent-until-proven-guilty and take Dallas police at their word. We’ll take without further cross-examination the claim that they conducted a five-month investigation of Eternal Eden, a regular, all-night rave at Northwest Dallas’ Jaguars strip club, and that undercover officers…