Show Us The Proof
Harris County claims that this crime prevention program spending millions of your tax dollars is saving peoples lives, but they refuse to prove it. The secrecy must stop. The people paying the freight should demand they SHOW US PROOF.
Show Us The Proof
“Whatever we do, whether it’s drinking or whatever, we just gotta do it responsibly,” Chico Tillmon said.
I’m glad Chico Tillmon turned his life around.
A former criminal, a gang member, now Dr. Chico Tillmon is called the Credible Messenger.
“Street intervention is the credible messenger that goes into the community, works with individuals at the highest risk, and gets them a pathway to success,” Tillmon said.
Sharing his story of redemption, trying to convince other criminals to not seek vengeance when they are shot.
“He has an impact on the streets. With it, he has an impact in academia as well”
He’s a program director at the University of Chicago Crime Lab.
And boy has Chico cashed in on crime, and he likes it, just listen to the good doctor last month in Atlantic City.
“I got to quantify what I do, because the more I’m doing, the more money I can ask for,” Tillmon said.
We don’t know what Chico charges now… but back in 2023, Tillmon was already being paid a lot more than most folks make.
295 dollars an hour.
“Tillmon and his company were hired during the COVID epidemic, when the federal government pumped a billion dollars into Harris County. We could have used a lot of that money to raise deputy salaries then,” Wayne Dolcefino told the camera.
But instead, Harris County paid Tillmon, first under a $48,000 contract, but the money kept coming.
$250,000 eventually went to Tillmon and his small Illinois company here in the suburbs of Chicago.
The company is inside Tillmon’s house in Lynwood, Illinois.
The work began in November 2020, building a program Harris County called “RISE” – Relentless Interrupters Serving Everyone.
Soon, Tillmon was analyzing Harris County crime data to tell the county stats about bad crime areas.
$6,500, kind of sounds like work the county constables and sheriffs could have already done.
The biggest invoice was $30,000, for one night, that’s how much Harris County paid Dr. Tillmon to premiere a video about himself, at the Houston Crime Violence Prevention Conference at NRG, it is a video that Tillmon now sells online.
And then Chico took part in a panel discussion.
“Wait a minute… we paid this guy to premiere a video for his company… that’s dumb,” Dolcefino told the camera.
$30,000 for a few hours’ work, not bad.
“But you notice we haven’t, in the last couple of years, heard a lot about the success of this crime prevention program,” Dolcefino told the camera.
But we did talk to Chico on the phone.
He said it was effective to deal with citizens at the highest risk of committing violence.
In November of 2023, Precinct One Commissioner Rodney Ellis had called a press conference.
“To some, this is just one stop in that cycle of violence… we’re trying to stop that cycle in its tracks,” Rodney Ellis said.
The idea was to reach shooting victims when they were at the hospital, give them an alternative to payback.
Look at the press release from Ellis at the time.
He claimed those intervention programs had prevented 26 shootings already.
Two and a half years later, when we talked to Chico, he said he didn’t have any firsthand knowledge of prevented shootings in Harris County.
But he described what he thought Ellis may have been talking about.
Quote: “If you mediate a conflict between two individuals who have a history of resolving things violently, that’s a mediation that prevented a shooting.”
“So we called the Harris County Health Department because we want to, and you want to, find out about all the people we supposedly saved,” Dolcefino told the camera.
The Health Department wouldn’t give us the facts about the people we supposedly saved — even though we are paying for it.
We were told to file a formal request for records, so we did.
And we got a response from the County Attorney, Christian Menefee, claiming we were asking for confidential health records.
But we weren’t asking for records about the people shot — just information about who they saved. They wouldn’t be hospital victims because they were saved.
Chico told us Harris County should be able to provide these records with documentation, but they haven’t.
According to Rodney Ellis, we spent 45 million bucks treating 700 gunshot victims at Ben Taub Hospital alone — just in 2021.
Taxpayers paid 84 percent of the cost of treating shooting victims.
So…
Do the math — that means the county paid an average of $54,000 for every single gunshot victim.
Even if we believe what the county says, that all these people were savings, that saved the county only $1.4 million.
And the RISE program was budgeted at $4.3 million using federal funds.
When that money runs out this year, will Harris County continue to spend money they don’t want to justify?
“Public health approaches require that we look at the root causes of violence,” Barbie Robison said.
When the RISE program started, the head of the Harris Health Department was Barbie Robinson.
We didn’t know then that Robinson was trying to help her buddies get county contracts.
Robinson’s corruption indictments were eventually dismissed.
And the DA, instead of telling us what they found in the first place, is now fighting our attempts to see what they knew. And you are paying Barbie’s legal fees.
“I guess this must be some other falsely accused person in the public health department,” Lina Hidalgo said.
But Harris County commissioners are shoveling out
$205,000 just for her.
“My heart goes out to the employees who had to go through this,” Hidalgo said.
We know that she hid other income she didn’t disclose on sworn county disclosure forms.
Her relationship to two companies awarded county contracts is suspect at best.
We do have the training summary for this Crime Prevention 101.
On page 12, they talk about kids with an incarcerated father. Kids who are involved in gang activity.
Suggesting they could instead be reconnected to his passion for basketball or music.
Chico says that’s just real-life talk when you’re trying to reach violent folks on the street.
But has Harris County paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to Tillmon for that special insight?
“The more money I can ask for,” Tillson said.
I wouldn’t spend another dime on these social crime prevention programs, until we get factual data on the crime we prevented and have given our deputies the pay raise they deserve.
“Let’s expose is and the best disinfectant is sunlight to all the county commissioners,” Mattress Mack said.
Keep up with us on social media:
