New police chief
A challenging task awaits Art Acevedo, and here are our best wishes and advice.
Almost a year has passed since the Houston Police Department was last commanded by a permanent chief, so it’s with both pleasure and a sense of relief that we’re finally welcoming Art Acevedo to the helm of HPD.
The new chief takes over one of the toughest and most important jobs in our city, so we’re not only counting on him, we’re also rooting for him to become a great leader of our city’s police force. And like a lot of other people who’ve bent his ear since he moved into his new office, we’d like to offer Chief Acevedo some unsolicited advice.
As our new chief probably knows, the police department he’s now commanding has historically been a source of both pride and shame for our city, sometimes cheered and sometimes reviled. After a series of harrowing police brutality cases in the late 1970s, HPD underwent an unprecedented era of reform and emerged with a reputation for community-oriented professionalism that profoundly changed public attitudes about Houston’s police force.
Given that history, we’re encouraged Acevedo was unafraid of making unpopular decisions during his tenure as Austin’s police chief. And that brings us to one of our most important pieces of advice for the new chief: Don’t let the police union run the police department.
The union does indeed have its finger planted on the pulse of rank-and-file officers and often brings important issues to the chief’s attention. But its recommendations, no matter how sincerely they’re offered, are generally focused on the interests of members. The chief must have a broader perspective, protecting his officers while giving taxpayers the best results for their investment and ensuring that justice is meted out fairly.
Chief Acevedo is probably just finding his way around police headquarters — an old building we really need to replace — but we hope he’ll meet soon with Harris County’s newly elected district attorney and sheriff. Kim Ogg and Ed Gonzales have both been passionate advocates for citing and releasing lowlevel offenders who needlessly crowd our jails.
With a little ingenuity, the three of them might even free up enough law enforcement resources to catch more burglars, far too many of whom are breaking into our homes and automobiles without any fear of ever getting caught. We want to call the new chief’s attention to a particularly sorry data point. Only 5 percent of burglary cases in Houston were cleared in 2015. So far this year, that number is up to 7 percent, but that still means roughly 93 percent of burglaries in our city go unsolved. We hope the chief agrees that’s utterly unacceptable, and we need him to do something about it.
We also need him to clean up the mess surrounding the handling of body camera videos. Prosecutors, defense attorneys and journalists all complain they can’t get their hands on video evidence. And all too often, officers’ cameras were turned on too late to record critical incidents. This technology was supposed to increase transparency in law enforcement, but it doesn’t do any good at all if the video is unavailable.
Mayor Sylvester Turner is already tackling the most complicated issue facing HPD, the pension fund problem that threatens our city’s financial future. The plan the mayor and pension fund leaders have agreed upon will apparently cause a potentially serious staffing issue, because it has led some highranking officers to decide they’ll leave HPD. Although it’s troubling to lose professionals with decades of invaluable experience, we hope the new chief will see this as an unprecedented opportunity to reshape a department whose organizational chart seems top-heavy with assistant chiefs.
Finally, we encourage the chief to take a look at some incisive work done by a couple of citizen task forces that recently studied Houston’s public safety and criminal justice systems. Shortly after he was elected, Mayor Turner assembled some of our city’s best and brightest minds to come up with recommendations for his transition. They worked hard on these reports, and their insights on everything from body camera policies to Stingray technology to attracting more diverse cadet classes deserve consideration.
If Chief Acevedo looks in the lobby of the police headquarters building, he’ll find a wall lined with photographs of former HPD chiefs dating back more than a century. And if he looks alongside Memorial Drive just outside downtown, he’ll see a monument to the Houston police officers who’ve given their lives in the line of duty.
They’re both sobering reminders of the solemn responsibility Chief Art Acevedo has just assumed, the duty to command the police force that protects us all. They’re also reminders of why we all need to wish our new police chief the very best of luck in his new job.