No backing out

Banning no-knock warrants, other reforms in Houston task force report deserve support.

This one won’t collect dust, we’re told. The report released Wednesday is a living document, we’re told, that will lead to fundamental change in policing that has been more than a century in coming for Houston and even longer for America.

It must be true this time. Because the 153-page report of Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Task Force on Police Reform is not just infused with the concerns of the living but the painful memories of the dead.

The names of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Nicolas Chavez are only briefly mentioned, yet the tragic details of their deaths at the hands of police loom over each of the document’s 104 recommendations.

The image of Floyd struggling for his last breaths as a police officer gouged a knee into his neck haunts the report’s sections on community policing, use of force, accountability and training, even while noting that the former Minneapolis officer charged with killing Floyd was himself a field trainer.

The injustice of Taylor’s fatal shooting during a flawed police raid in Louisville, Ky., shapes a bold, wise and welcome recommendation for an outright ban on “no-knock warrants” in investigations of all non-violent criminal cases, eliminating drug raids where they are most often used. The change resonates even more locally where a botched and bogus raid at 7815 Harding St. in southeast Houston killed Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle in a hail of bullets from police.

The video footage of Chavez being shot 21 times by Houston police even as he was on his knees and surrounded by officers provides the somber backdrop for proposals to improve crisis intervention, release police bodycam footage to the public in a consistent and expedient way and overhaul a civilian Independent Police Oversight Board that has too often become a rubber stamp for HPD decisions.

The need for massive changes in the way policing is done in America, including in its fourth-largest city, is obvious.

The task force report is not the solution, but it lays out an ambitious blueprint that must be taken seriously as a starting point to address some of the issues that have roiled the nation in recent months.

“Everybody has said something has to be done,” task force chairman Laurence “Larry” Payne told the editorial board this week. “We cannot be having this conversation going forward for years to come. There has to be some significant change now.”

The report, compiled by a 45-member task force over 90 days and delivered to Turner on Wednesday, offers a broad range of recommendations that will eventually require buy-in from the mayor, city council, the police union, civic leaders, lawmakers and residents.

No one is pretending that will be easy. The editorial board supports the panel’s recommendations for strengthening the oversight board with professional staff and investigators, a process for releasing police camera footage to the public in a timely fashion and for improved training, more community input, and expansion of services to deal with the mentally ill and domestic crises.

More details are still needed to evaluate other recommendations.

In accepting the report, Turner was receptive to the proposals but cautioned that it will take broad public support to get anything done. “This isn’t just about police,” he said. “This is about all of us.”

Some of these proposals will cost more money — even millions of dollars — and will necessarily open the contentious debate over police funding that has become a wedge issue on the state and national levels.

The Houston Police Officers’ Union, in the middle of negotiations over a new contract, will no doubt be wary of what changes will mean for salaries, benefits, promotions and protections of officers’ rights. The union rarely gives in on such important issues without getting something in return.

But what’s equally clear is how much the public debate over policing has shifted, and how overdue major reform is. This time, the suggested changes involve more than policy. They target culture, in ways that some officers may find uncomfortable but in some ways they may embrace, such as incentives for involvement and residence in the city they serve.

But Payne and others on the task force rightly warn against using selected issues to reject the whole.

“To sit back and pick apart one or two is to miss the point,” the task force says in its report. “As many leaders have already noted, it is far too easy for people from both sides — the community and the police — to hide behind cynical soundbites, incendiary social media posts, or provocative headlines. Rising above these all-tooeasy, idle responses will take hard work. But it is necessary work.”

Payne said he and other members of his group are committed to seeing the process through to avoid the fate of other task force reports gathering dust in City Hall storage rooms.

“We’re not going anywhere,” he said. “We’re not handing it off to the mayor and then everybody sings Kumbaya and it goes and sits on a shelf somewhere.”

We applaud the task force for months of thoughtful study and problem-solving aimed at changing the culture of policing in Houston. They have given Houston a road map for dealing with a critical, urgent problem that is truly a matter of life and death. This may be our best chance for getting something done, saving lives and making our city safer at the same time.

Ignoring it is not an option. Not this time, and after this deadly season of tragedy, protest and awakening, not ever again.