New Violent Crime Stats, Election Day, and More Jobs Coming

Hey everyone, it's Reheel. It's been a busy week in H-Town, so let's break it all down. We have new crime statistics for 2023, plus we have two major hiring events that are positive economic signs for the city. Political contributor and Pulitzer Prize finalists Evan Mintz and culture contributor Antrichelle Dorsey joined me to break it all down. Alright, a Cinco De Mayo Friday News Roundup. That's what I'm talking about. Good morning, Evan. Good morning, Antrichelle. How are you doing, Evan? I'm doing great. Antrichelle, how are you? Ooh, I am good, it's the most wonderful time of the year. Yup, yup, it's going to be a good day. Before we jump into the news, I want to ask you about your favorite dessert because we had Shawn the Food Sheep on earlier this week on Citycast Houston, giving us the most hidden gems for dessert spots, but I just want your favorite dessert. So let's start with you, Evan. What's your favorite dessert in the city of Houston? Might be a little cliche, but I'm going to go with Chocolatouffle at Tony's. Easy. Mm, just straightforward. Hey, that's fine. Antrichelle, how about you? I came like, Grand Luxe, chocolate chip cookies with pecans, got me in a choke hold. They are made to order their hot, and don't forget the ice cream. Yes, you have to have these chocolate chip cookies with pecans. Alamo, baby, you got to do it. Alright, I like it. Mine is the Trace Laches cake at El Boillillo Bakery on Airline. Ooh, man. Oh, and then you pick up so much other good sweets over there. And the best Ponderillo's here. So all right. Got a sweet tooth going now. Let's jump into the news. Antrichelle, what was your biggest story of the week? So the biggest story of the week for me is da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, ladies and gentlemen, Metro is hiring and they are pulling out all the stops. Metro is looking for operators to man their parking ride express bus services. Now, if you have not known, they have stopped their in-house services for Metro. They have had a contract with AFC transportation and first class transportation. These two companies have provided bus operators with the transit system needed them. Now that's over. Metro is not looking for new bus drivers as well as new mechanics and they are pulling out all the stops with incentives. Now AFC transportation and first class transportation have been using their own buses to transport our Houston Metro's parking ride users. And now they're looking to hire an abundance of drivers and mechanics. So if you're looking for a job, you need to go see Metro. Hey, go. Metro don't trust you. You know what happens. So I like that. That's a good a higher more jobs the better in the city of Houston. I actually have a job story as well that we'll get to in a second. So it's a good time to live in Houston. Any thoughts on that Evan? Now, I just always thought that the parking ride system in Metro is fascinating. People complain that Houston doesn't have a commuter rail, but you're just looking at steel on steel. If you're looking at rubber on steel, if you're looking at these commuter buses, we have a pretty robust system and it's incredibly convenient if you work downtown. It drops you off right there in front of your building. It's a hard system to replicate in other places, but it works really well. And hopefully it gets even more efficient, not only those, but also just the routes within the city with more operators, more mechanics. That means less buses breaking down. That's all good for the city of Houston. I like that one. All right. How about you Evan? What was your biggest story of the week? The biggest story of the week is that we're in the middle of election season. For those who don't know, Saturday is election day for all of the May elections. That means school boards. That means West University City Council. It also means Fort Bend ISD bond. Usually these sorts of elections don't make big news, but for those who drive through West U, you've probably seen a lot of yard signs. It's a pretty heated election for mayor between incumbent Susan Sample and challenger John Barnes. And out in Katie, the Katie school board election has turned into a heated partisan race between Republicans and other Republicans. The Houston Chronicle has had fascinating coverage of this, how an outside group called Texas for educational freedom, which wants to quote, keep liberal politics out of the classroom, has been sending hit piece mailers to voters homes, accusing candidates of being far left or woke. But the candidates who are being attacked say, I'm a Republican. This isn't me. This isn't who I am. So it's very weird and fascinating and a little disheartening to see these partisan politics end up on a board that shouldn't be partisan in the first place. For me, the Fort Bend bond election, we've talked about it on the Friday news roundup before. This is an important one. I live out in Fort Bend County. So for all my suburban folks out here, go out and vote, whether it's yay or nay, go vote and make sure you are part of that decision process. Because I don't want to hear people say, Oh, wait, what? My taxes are going up. I don't want that. Well, you have the choice. So don't forget to vote. May 6th, a Saturday election. Okay. May election, I will say that the Houston Chronicle editorial board has endorsed the Fort Bend bond saying, yes, please vote for this $1.26 billion bond. You can't complain if you don't vote. Mm hmm. All right. My biggest story of the week, Evan, and to show you're going to love this one, crime is down in the city of Houston. Violent crime has decreased by 12% from January to April. So the first quarter, the numbers are in murders and homicides decrease in the first four months by 27% kidnapping fell by 19%. Human trafficking decreased by 23% aggravated assault dropped by 12% and rape decreased by 6% across the board. The city's downward trend is better compared to last year in the same time frame. So crime overall is down in city of Houston. But one thing to watch out for. Well, rape and sexual assault cases are showing a troubling trend because of people meeting through online dating sites. So there's going to be an educational process here, making sure that citizens are safe. They know what to watch out for. But overall, crime is down in the first quarter, Evan. I mean, that's always good news, but I will say it's hard to measure crime by city because it varies zip code by zip code, block by block. You can have some places where it's gone down, other places where it's gone up, and then all kind of averages out. And so listening to individual city council members talk about this, they'll point out the top line numbers are good. But in my district, it doesn't look as great as we want it to. And that's a problem. Also always worth keeping in mind that sometimes these stats lag, that you only see the big cases come in at the end. And also just overall, as a country, and I've said this before and I'll say it again, we do a really bad job of tracking crime in an immediate, efficient way. And that's something that has to start, I think, at the very top with federal incentives for better data collection so that we can compare cities to cities, state to state, so better understand what policies work and what don't. And so we can understand in real time is crime going up or down so we can respond immediately rather than waiting for the end of the year or halfway through the year when we get these stats. Andrew, shall? Listen, I'm just going to take it back old school. Just go back to media people in the grocery store, okay? Because it seems this online dating is really getting us all in trouble. Just have your momma introduce you to somebody nice at church. They're crazy, but at least you know they've got a little Jesus in them too. I will say, I met my wife on an online dating app. It was Jay date and it turned out that our families knew each other and we met several times in the past, but we met and got our first date online. That is so sweet. I met my first husband online. Amen. Okay, that's good, but he's my ex-husband. So what that is. So we're at a 50% rate right now of it working out. Right. All right. So you can read the full report by the way in the show notes for our podcast, of course. Let's get to our most overlooked story of the week. Andrew, Shell, what do you got? Guys, this story really disturbed me. This is a new report that came out from the pediatric vehicular heat stroke data. It is showing that more children have died in hotcards in Texas than any other state over the past two and a half decades. Now, the one thing that people may not notice that even on a mild day, the temperature is inside of a car can expose serious, rich or young children because the size of their bodies and make them over heat quicker when it's supposed to heat. And even on a 70 degree day, the temperature inside a car can rise to 140 degrees Fahrenheit within 30 minutes, even if a window is cracked. We are getting ready for summer here in Houston. And although our spring game springing as it should, this story struck out more to me because even if we don't have a swelching hot summer, these children still need to be protected and we have to be careful as parents to make sure we are keeping them out of these cars. These numbers were heartbreaking. So, let me ask you both, how do you deal with it if you see somebody in a grocery store parking, and there is a child in there? What do you do? Like, I've always thought about this. Like, what do you do? Do you immediately break the window? Do you go inside? Ask, like, hey, who left their child in the car? What is your thought process? I'm going to put everyone on the spot here. Evan, you start. I think you got to go inside and ask, but there's been interesting coverage of this phenomena of people accidentally leaving their kids in the backseat of the car. A thing where you do the same routine every day and say one day, you've got your kid with you when you don't normally, and you just forget. And it's depressing and it's tragic, but how do you deal with this? And the only tool we really have is the criminal justice system, which isn't necessarily the most effective tool in this moment. There are products you can buy out there to remind you to check your backseat, little alarms that go off, but also sometimes it's just little tricks. Put your wallet back there, put your purse back there when you've got your kid in the car. So when you walk out, you know, oh, shoot, I've got to get this. You don't want to be that person who makes that tragic mistake just because you are in the zone of your daily routine. Absolutely. Listen, even in the comments, someone said, if you remember your phone, you remember your child. And I don't know, maybe nobody's child is as talkative as mine, but I can never forget that he's there, right? But as a parent, as a mother now, I am concerned. I'm concerned about everybody's child because I feel like now that I'm a part of this sisterhood of motherhood, right? I'm always thinking about somebody's child because I think if it was me, I don't know what I would do. Reheal. That's a great question. I boarded the line of being overbearing. You know, like, who baby is this to like, can someone call? Can somebody who's this or do I hover? That's a great question. I don't know. That should be on the John Kehoe next show. What would you do if you see that, right? It's different levels. If you see a sleeping baby, what do you do? If you see a kid saying, help, of course, if you see a child saying, help, we're going to do something. But what do you do? Yeah. And you know, Evan, I'm glad you pointed it out. Not all incidents where kids are left are malicious incidents. They're not on purpose. Sometimes you forget. And again, look, the first year of raising a baby is hard. You're sleep deprived. You make mistakes and you forget and it's not malicious. I've also experienced this where when I was younger, my parents, they have four kids. Our youngest sister was left on the back of a car. And we forgot her because there's three other kids making noise and annoying the parents and they get in the car. And we literally left our youngest sister on the trunk of another car. And luckily, there were some good citizens who chased us down and were like, Hey, you forgot your baby. What are you guys doing? And this is like within the first two years of moving to the United States. True story. We still give our sister a lot of crap about that. We're just teasing her. We're like, Mom and Dad tried to leave you, but somehow, you know what? Somebody found you. All right, Evan, what was your most overlooked story of the week? The most overlooked story of the week, hands down, was the fact that it was the Offshore Technology Conference. And I saw no coverage of this critically important event. I saw more coverage in the Chinese press than I did in the Houston press. Now, for those who don't know, the Offshore Technology Conference has been held since 1969. And it's a massive convening of engineers and experts to where they show off there. And this is a little derogatory. Everything is true. The toys for the boys, the big, fascinating drills and sensors and valves and just neat things that are involved in extracting energy resources from difficult situations deep beneath the sea floor. And this is in contrast to say Sarah Week, which is a little bit more about the policy experts and economists. Now, you can usually use the attendance at this event as a barometer of the city's health. For example, 2014 had the highest attendance ever of more than 100,000 people. On the flip side, during the 80s oil bust, they just canceled it. And they didn't disclose attendance numbers back in 2021. I don't think they wanted to show how few people showed up. Last year, 24,000 people, which is a little low, but also it's the age of Zoom and oil and gas investors want profit. So these conferences aren't as important as they used to be. But you really want to see this thing thrive because it means Houston is thriving. So there is one little tidbit in the press releases they put out that gave me hope. And it's that they're not just focusing on oil and gas anymore when it comes to offshore. There's renewables. For example, they handed out one of their technology awards to a design for a floating grid. So here's to hope that OTC in the future means oil and gas. It means offshore solar, offshore wind, hydrogen, everything that has to happen out there. I didn't even know it was going on this week. So you're right. Yeah. No idea. And it's huge. It's huge. Yeah. Tens of thousands of people come here. Many of them from overseas because this is where you want to come if you're going to talk about drilling. And this is also the week where you buy $400 for heaters, right, Evan? Oh, God. You should be so lucky. I will say that oil prices are plummeting this week, which gives a little shiver down my spine. But also it just adds insult to injury that it's happening during OTC week. All right. My most overlooked story of the week, and this goes back to hiring people. United Airlines this week had their biggest job fair. They plan to recruit up to 3,000 new hires for Bush Intercontinental. And they are putting out a lofty goal with their new training center now open. They want to hire 50,000 new employees company wide. So not only are they hiring here locally, but as a company, they're hiring more people. And the best part about all of this, they are hiring for tech jobs as well because they are making a huge commitment to tech within the airlines and the experience for passengers. So I just love that there's that many jobs being filled and so many applicants right now applying to not only get those tech jobs, but also flight attendant crew jobs. I love that. I love this too. Honey, I'm a United girl. I am a United club member. You understand me? I might go over there and see what's going on in there. Social media department go get me a little old job. Then where I can get some free flights. This is good. I like I hope you get and then you can give me some United club passes. Yes, we can go back and forth. We just met. I've already run out of mind for the year. I'm just glad to see hiring is happening. You know, I think that there's this concern that we're on the opening of an economic downturn. But as long as people have jobs, I'm happy. Amen to that. Answer show. What was your moment of joy for the week? You know, that brings me joy and to see that the city of Houston has so many things to do today because today is the day and they are getting so creative with these drinks and these prices are ill cheapo. I'm happy. That's my moment of joy, baby. All right. There you go. Answer show is going to be partying tonight. I love that. What was your moment of joy? My moment of joy was seeing that we were razzed by the onion, the onion, the satirical newspaper and website had an article titled New Houston law requires 10 parking spaces for each parking space. And if Houston's known for anything, it's having a lot of parking. Now, I will point out that in reality, Houston has been going in the right direction when it comes to mandatory parking minimums. We've never had them in downtown. We expanded that lack of mandates into Midtown and Edo over the past few years. We also have transit oriented developments and special parking districts that create plenty of flexibility. And I've just seen the planning commission grant some pretty good variances when developers say, we don't need this much parking. Please don't make us have it. That said, we have really strict parking minimums everywhere else that don't make any sense. And we should just get rid of them. I like that. There we go. You know what? I always want more parking though. I never want to wait for parking. Yeah, there's no such thing as free parking or paying for it somewhere else. Yep, absolutely. All right. My moment of joy. Check this out. So the Goulton super neighborhood, also known as Goulton, was identified as a big heat mapping zone. It's a hot zone pretty much, right? And there's just so much asphalt there. There's not much tree coverage, but the Texas A&M Forest Service and the Nature Conservancy in Texas, they conducted analysis and found that there's room for more than 500 trees in Goulton. So now comes the part of, can they get those trees planted and help with that heat zone and help cool down that neighborhood a little bit. So that's going to be interesting to see. I hope it gets done. There's no update on whether it's going to be locally funded. Where's this money going to come from? But I hope those 500 trees that they say that they can plant, I hope they do get planted and it also beautifies the neighborhood. Oh, absolutely. Goulton is one of those neighborhoods where I think has so much potential. It is the densest neighborhood anywhere in Houston, but it's lacking for walkability, for transit, for parks. I really think the city wants to improve the quality of life there, find a way to put in a destination park, a really nice park that people can get to and put in those neighborhood trees too. They lower temperatures, they lower heat, they lower crime, for some reason that I don't think we entirely understand, but planting trees lowers crime and it just makes it a nicer place to be. Yeah. And the air is pressure too when you have a good old, big old tree, you know, to sit up under the shade. That would be so nice. I like that. It was named one of the hottest neighborhoods in Houston. So, you know, there'll be a good start to cool it down and hopefully good things follow. So we'll see what happens, but that was my moment of joy that at least they were identified with areas to get those 500 trees in. I love that. Awesome stuff this week. Thank you, Andrew Schell. Evan, thank you so much as always for joining us. That was a lot of fun and we'll talk to you down the line. See y'all. See y'all have a good Cinco de Mayo. That was Evan Mintz and Andrew Schell Dorsey. Want more CityCats Houston? Browse previous episodes right here in your podcast, Play Your Feed. That's all for the week on CityCats Houston. Our lead producer is Dina Kespa, our producer is Carly on Jones and our newsletter editor is Brooke Lewis and the host is me, Raheel Romsnolli. We also had help this week from technical director Noah Snyderman. Our music is by the band All the Kimos. We'll be back on Monday with a look at a new school that will help fill the shortage of mental health professionals in Houston. Thank you for listening and I hope you learned something new. Evan, I think your wire is making that noise again. Oh no. Yeah, that's fine.