Mobile: potential to move easily

Positioned to freely move forward, focused on the future

• Collaborate with IT to develop strategies for remote work for select employees to allow for the current growth while saving the county from costly renovations, and establish online discovery processes to increase efficiency and security for the county’s digital infrastructure.

• Strengthen relationships with partners inside the county, like Community Supervision and Corrections, to find ways to serve the community better by steering youthful offenders into programs that can create productive members of society.

• Strengthen relationships with partners outside the county to grow mutual assistance, like our Interlocal Agreement with surrounding counties and the DPS Crime Lab. Organizations like Baylor Scott & White help provide training for law enforcement through the Forensic Nursing program. New non-profits like UnBound Now assist with both investigation and victim coordination in human trafficking cases.

• Grow the office’s reputation for being proactive in the Legislature to advocate for criminal justice bills that promote the pursuit of justice, including revisiting increased punishment in Intoxication Manslaughter cases involving more than one victim.

Agile: able to adapt quickly

Ready to pivot quickly, addressing the issues of a rapidly growing community

• Work with current software partners to utilize the data we already collect to find ways to make prosecution more effective and efficient. That information can be leveraged to identify areas that need attention so that resources can quickly be reassigned seamlessly.

• Find ways to automate portions of workflow and allow our small staff to focus on the most important things, and not be weighed down by unnecessary time-sinks.

• Coordinate with law enforcement to maintain a real-time look on local trends in the criminal element, to enhance investigations in the early stages and encourage proactivity. If we know what criminals are doing, we can better prepare in advance for those cases arriving in court.

Hostile: prepared to make unfriendly

Primed for aggressive prosecution, creating an unattractive environment for crime

• Encourage and create topical training for law enforcement. Homegrown gangs exist in Washington County that are nothing like those from just a decade ago, and they require new perspectives in investigation. The opioid crisis is here, and treating fatal overdoses as crime scenes is a major shift in the way we approach these cases.

• Assist in practical skill development by continuing to provide training in courtroom testimony and offense report writing for law enforcement, so that cases are tried with the best possible investigation and evidence.

• Aggressively prosecute cases that represent a threat to the physical safety of the community. Violent crime has risen over the last two years, and shows no signs of slowing down. I partnered with law enforcement in years past to send drug dealers into the surrounding counties because the price of doing business here was too high. We will send a message to this growing element that Washington County will not tolerate this kind of violence.