Police watchdog
An independent review board needs teeth to hold law enforcement truly accountable.
The national reaction to the brutal killing of George Floyd has propelled the issue of police reform to the top of the political agenda.
Congressional Democrats have already filed legislation, Republicans are in the process of crafting theirs, President Donald Trump is expected to announce executive orders soon and Gov. Greg Abbott said discussions with lawmakers ahead of next year’s session are in progress “to make sure that we prevent police brutality like this from happening in the future in Texas.”
Harris County and the city of Houston also are considering proposals designed to provide more oversight, transparency and accountability to law enforcement agencies.
Given the unknowns of the coronavirus pandemic, the pressures of the economic downturn and the dynamics of an election year, it’s difficult to say how long the political will to act on police reform will last. But local officials can make one thing a priority to assure that whatever new policies are adopted will be properly enforced and maintained.
It is past time for Houston and Harris County to have truly independent and effective law enforcement oversight boards with powers to properly monitor, thoroughly investigate and to recommend the discipline of officers who fall short.
For Houston, that means upgrading and strengthening an Independent Police Oversight Board that is too often stretched thin, short of resources and lacking authority to truly investigate. For Harris County, it means creating a new panel to oversee the sheriff ’s office and the eight constables, all of whom are independently elected.
It won’t be easy and it will almost certainly cost more money. But it could save lives, boost public confidence in law enforcement and help departments remove or avoid hiring bad officers.
Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner signed an executive order on Wednesday requiring officers to de-escalate confrontations, give a verbal warning and exhaust all options before using deadly force. It also mandates that officers intercede when they witness misconduct, bans the use of chokeholds and firing at moving vehicles, which were already HPD policies but now cannot be changed without the mayor’s consent.
Harris County Commissioners Court on Tuesday approved 10 police-related items, including a promise to study how to create a civilian oversight board with subpoena power, adopt a countywide use-of-force policy for officers and establish a database of use-of-force incidents.
These are good starts, but only good starts. Truly independent oversight of police conduct is a necessity.
The police killing of Eric Garner in
New York, the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and the suffocation of Floyd in Minneapolis, among many others, have led to civil unrest in part because of frustration and mistrust in the criminal justice system.
Police review boards have been around since 1948 with various approaches from strongly investigative to monitoring and advisory and hybrids in between.
The Houston Independent Police Oversight Board was created in 2011 by Mayor Annise Parker, partly in response to the public outcry after surveillance video showed police officers beating then-15-year-old high school sophomore Chad Holley during an arrest in 2010.
The board is made up of 29 members appointed by the mayor, “reflecting the demographic and geographic diversity of the city ... experts in criminal justice, including retired judges and prosecutors, civil rights attorneys and academic experts or scholars.”
Although Parker said the board would help restore trust in the police department, skeptics have long complained that its volunteer makeup and lack of financial support have made it ineffective. A budget amendment proposed by At-Large council member Letitia Plummer that would have given the board subpoena power in 2021 failed Wednesday when Turner said he would not support it and no other council member joined her cause. Turner is mistaken. These changes are needed.
The board doesn’t receive direct complaints, but reviews internal Houston Police Department investigations that include issues of excessive force, misconduct, discharge of a firearm and events involving serious bodily injury or death and the mistreatment of citizens. That too often leaves the board reviewing the department’s version of events without the resources or subpoena power to dig deeper.
That is particularly troubling in light of how many cases we have seen across the nation in which the official report is contradicted by video evidence, either body cams or cellphone images taken by private citizens.
The volunteer model is appropriate for a civilian review board, but that parttime nature makes it difficult to be proactive in reviewing everything from recruitment and hiring to issues of bad behavior and mistreatment of the public. It is time to invest in a paid executive and staff to make the board truly effective.
Police reforms are overdue and welcome, but they won’t accomplish much if no one is making sure they are being implemented and enforced. Law enforcement has a long way to go to restore the public’s trust.
The residents of the Houston region deserve a police watchdog with teeth.