County OKs extra prosecutors for DA
Ogg granted approval to hire additional staff to handle the fallout from Harding Street raid
A month after Commissioners Court rebuffed her last plea for more staff, Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg won approval to hire more prosecutors to handle fallout from the botched police raid in January that left a south Houston couple dead.
Ogg’s request included the same nearly $2 million price tag for seven lawyers and three investigators she had requested in June, but this time the proposal included an outside consultant to review the methods prosecutors will use to tackle the aftermath of the deadly bust.
“We now have the horsepower to get to the bottom of the Harding Street raid and related concerns,” Ogg said in a statement issued by her office Wednesday. “The public deserves answers sooner than later.”
The new hires — approved for one year as of now — will more than double the size of the office’s Civil Rights Division, which handles officer-involved shootings, use-offorce incidents and in-custody deaths.
Ogg’s previous three requests for more staff generally sparked contentious debates, lengthy public comment and pushback from criminal justice reformers, but this week’s request slid through with a short discussion and unanimous approval by the five-member court.
Almost all of the presentation and questions from court members focused on details of the Harding Street review and how
attorneys will make use of the outside consultant’s recommendations.
“The notion of an independent review is important,” said Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis, “just so the public has confidence in what we do. They don’t necessarily appreciate the idea of us investigating us.”
According to Ogg Chief of Staff Vivian King, the consultant will have three main tasks. In addition to reviewing the district attorney’s approach to handling an investigation, the expert also will write a report summing up everything the office does in the course of the probe, and author what King referred to as an “autopsy” outlining what went wrong leading up to the fatal Houston Police Department raid.
The whole review process could take two to three years, King said.
Prosecutors first got involved in the matter after Houston narcotics officers burst through the door of 7815 Harding Street on Jan. 28 looking for heroin dealers. The raid sparked a shootout, and homeowners Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle were killed in the gunfire. Five officers were injured, and police did not recover any of the heroin they were looking for, leaving instead with a user-level amount of cocaine and marijuana.
In the weeks that followed, two officers at the center of the raid retired amid questions about
whether the confidential informant used to justify the exercise existed. The Houston Police Department launched an internal probe, the FBI began a civil rights review and the district attorney’s office started combing through more than 2,200 cases handled by the former officers.
Prosecutors also are taking a look at 14,000 offense reports and a trove of new confidential informant data belatedly turned over by HPD.
Tuesday’s funding request marks the fourth time this year Ogg has asked to add attorneys to the more than 330 on staff. In February, she pushed for a broad $21 million increase to add more than 100 lawyers to the office.
At the time, Ogg justified the expansion by citing overwhelming caseloads for her trial bureau prosecutors in court. That claim generated outcry from justice reformers, and a data analysis by the Houston Chronicle and The Appeal later showed the figures appeared to overstate caseloads.
Two months after that request failed, Ogg came back to ask — successfully, that time — for four more prosecutors in the environmental crimes division on the heels of two massive chemical fires, one of which yielded criminal charges.
Precinct 1 Commissioner Rodney Ellis “The notion of an independent review is important, just so the public has confidence in what we do. They don’t necessarily appreciate the idea of us investigating us”