An able partner
With a new police chief picked, Turner needs to make good on his reform promises.
Houston has a new police chief after Mayor Sylvester Turner announced Troy Finner as the city’s top cop, less than a week after Art Acevedo said he was heading to Miami.
Naming someone to fill the departing chief ’s shoes was only part of the problem facing Turner, however. He’s got to make good on promises to reform policing in Houston — a major commitment that only gets harder with the exit of an ally in Acevedo and the closer Turner gets to the end of his own tenure in January 2024.
We expect Finner will be an able partner with Turner as the mayor seeks to keep police reform on track, but they face a long list of must-dos that have so far been left unaddressed in the six months since the mayor’s handpicked Task Force on Policing Reform issued its recommendations.
Out of those proposals — 104 in total — the task force identified more than 40 that could be implemented within 90 days. So far, relatively few have been achieved. Those include a cite-and-release program, which allows officers to ticket instead of arrest people accused of certain misdemeanors, and the creation of a “safe harbor court” that helps people who cannot afford to pay fines resolve their cases without fear of arrest.
Before the report’s release, Turner had already signed an executive order banning choke holds in most cases, and formalized Acevedo’s new policy of banning no-knock warrants without permission from top leadership. The city has also used USA CARES Act funds for additional crisis intervention response teams, which pair police with mental health clinicians for crisis calls, but that is one-time money.
The mayor deserves credit for these steps, but he must do far more to keep his commitments. Police reform has been a long time in coming; it need not get here any slower. Public safety is not just about how many officers are on the street, it’s about the trust a community has in its police force. That trust will never develop until abusive cops are held accountable and everyone in the community — regardless of their skin color or wealth — can expect to be treated with respect.
In that regard we are heartened with Finner’s priorities, which he laid out in a press conference Thursday.
“At the very top of my agenda is going to be reducing homicides, reducing violent crime; at the same time building that trust in the community,” he said.
The new chief comes with some baggage. Given his role as one of Acevedo’s top assistant chiefs and his speedy selection, many may view him as a placeholder, a convenient collar for a term-limited Turner to pin an extra star on and who will be promptly replaced by Houston’s next mayor. But his record of service and his stated priorities make it just as possible he will use the time left in Turner’s term to run the department in a way that would give the next mayor, whoever that is, reason to keep him on.
To do that, Finner must focus on the role he can play as a strong advocate, as Acevedo did, for police reform. What he does in the department — the signals he sends to officers, the public and up the line to the mayor — will be critical. He can even do his predecessor one better and increase transparency at HPD, such as by releasing the kind of videos of encounters with police that Acevedo declined to do.
The new chief has a job to do, but so does the mayor. Turner needs to act beyond giving assurances that task force recommendations will be implemented soon.
How Turner keeps his oft-made promises on police reform will play a big part in his legacy. He and his new chief can work together to implement the big items on the task force’s police reform agenda — from working with police unions to make officers more accountable to strengthening the oversight board with professional staff and investigators. Doing that will both burnish his legacy and leave Houston much better off than when he was first elected in 2015.