Public Safety

Public safety is the bedrock contract between citizens and their government. When that contract breaks down — when neighborhoods stop feeling safe, when small businesses board up windows, when homeowners install second deadbolts and triple their security camera count — everything else fails with it. Houston has spent the last several years climbing back from a post-COVID crime spike, and there has been real progress. Homicides and robberies in Houston fell to five-year lows in 2024,^{11Fox 26 Houston, "Houston crime stats: Some violent crimes increased, others decreased in 2024" (February 11, 2025), reporting on Houston Police Department's year-in-review presentation to the Houston City Council Public Safety Committee …} and HPD and the Harris County Sheriff deserve credit for it. But overall violent crime in Houston rose 4.57 percent from 2023 to 2024, with rape and aggravated assault each up roughly 9 percent.^{22Houston Police Department, 2024 Year-in-Review presentation to the Houston City Council Public Safety Committee (February 2025), and Axios Houston, "Houston homicides fell in 2024, prelim data shows" (February 20, 2025), citing Major Cit…} That rate remains elevated compared to historical norms,^{33NeighborhoodScout, Houston, TX Crime Rates and Statistics (reflecting 2024 FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data, released October 2025) — based on a national meta-analysis of FBI-reported crime data, NeighborhoodScout calculates that the cha…} and organized retail theft and cartel-linked activity continue to strain local resources. Alexander believes the federal role in public safety is to support local law enforcement with resources, training, and intelligence — and then get out of the way.

That starts with the Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant program. Byrne JAG is the workhorse of federal-to-local law enforcement funding^{44Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) Program — Byrne JAG is the leading source of federal justice funding to state and local jurisdictions, providing flexible form…} — formula-based, flexible, and trusted by police chiefs and sheriffs across the country to pay for equipment, training, and personnel. Alexander will fight to restore full Byrne JAG funding and oppose any effort to condition those grants on the adoption of progressive policing mandates dressed up as reform. Federal money should support law enforcement, not be used as a lever to dictate operational decisions from Washington. The same principle applies to DOJ consent decrees: federal oversight has its place in cases of clear constitutional violations, but the wholesale use of consent decrees to impose political policing mandates on local departments has hamstrung law enforcement in cities across the country.^{55Charles Fain Lehman, Manhattan Institute, "Is the Chicago Consent Decree Working? Consent Decrees for Police Reform: The Chicago Experience" (July 2023) — finds that across measures from police killings to complaints against officers, th…} Alexander will push back hard against that overreach.

Houston sits at the nexus of Gulf Coast cartel logistics routes, which means federal resources for anti-gang, anti-cartel, and anti-trafficking task forces have an outsized impact here. Alexander will fight to expand FBI and DEA task force capacity in the Houston metro and push to designate the major Mexican drug cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations so that intelligence and law enforcement coordination can be brought to bear on the supply networks. Fentanyl killed more than 48,000 Americans in 2024 alone, with the synthetic opioid supply still overwhelmingly sourced from Mexican cartel networks using precursors trafficked through the Southern border. It deserves to be treated as the national crisis it is.

Repeat violent offenders are a small fraction of the population responsible for a disproportionate share of serious crime — a finding that has been replicated across criminological research for more than fifty years. And yet the policy response — at the federal level and in too many local jurisdictions — has drifted in exactly the wrong direction. Cashless bail policies, charging-decline practices for "low-level" felonies, and the systematic release of repeat offenders back into the same neighborhoods they prey on have produced predictable results. Harris County itself has become a national example of what happens when the bond system fails: local television investigations have documented case after case of repeat violent offenders released on personal recognizance or nominal bonds — including one defendant granted sixteen separate bonds by a single judge — going on to commit new violent crimes while awaiting trial.^{66Fox 26 Houston, Breaking Bond investigative series (2022-2025), documenting Harris County cases in which judges granted personal recognizance bonds or nominal bonds to repeat violent offenders who subsequently committed additional violen…} According to the Houston Police Officers' Union, 162 homicides have been committed in Harris County since 2021 by defendants who were out on bond at the time of the murder.^{77Houston Police Officers' Union, public statement on Judge Hilary Unger's grant of bond to capital murder suspect Dremone Francis (February 26, 2025), as reported in Fox News, "Houston police union slams 'rogue' judge for letting man accu…} The Texas Legislature passed bipartisan bail-reform legislation in 2021, and Houston's own Senator Joan Huffman led a follow-on reform package in the 2025 session — recognition that the existing framework is failing the public. Alexander will support federal legislation that holds repeat violent offenders accountable, restores meaningful pretrial detention for serious felonies, and provides federal support — not mandates, but support — for state and local efforts to break the revolving-door cycle. There is nothing compassionate about a justice system that protects criminals at the expense of their next victim.

Most importantly, Alexander will reject the policy framework that hollowed out American policing in the first place. No defund-adjacent legislation. No mandatory de-escalation standards that expose officers to liability for doing their jobs. No federal mandates that treat police departments as the problem rather than the solution. The men and women who put on a badge in Houston deserve the training, the equipment, the respect, and the legal protection to do the job — and they deserve a representative in Congress who has their back, on the record, every time. Alexander will be that representative.