DA eyes HPD’s probable cause practices
Houston police amended sworn probable cause summaries without documenting or swearing to the changes, appearing to violate a 2017 federal court settlement that reformed the local jail’s intake system, according to the Harris County District Attorney’s Office.
The Houston Police Department agreed to stop the practice after an investigation by the district attorney, general counsel Scott Durfee said in a letter to the appointed court monitor for the consent decree. The letter was sent Oct. 25 to Sandra Guerra Thompson, a University of Houston professor.
“I have been told that the Houston Police Department’s intentions were benign,” Durfee wrote.
HPD supervisors had been changing the summaries “routinely” in the district attorney’s Intake Management System, where authorities upload probable cause documents, the general counsel said. Those summaries of initial findings in a case are read to magistrates, who decide whether probable cause exists and an arrest should continue.
Police told the DA’s office they were correcting “what they believed were non-substantive errors” to ensure the summaries were accurate and complete, Durfee said.
In a statement Friday, the Houston Police Department outlined plans to address the situation.
HPD and the District Attorney’s Office are “working closely with the Federal Monitor to develop and implement operational changes to the procedure for amending” Intake Management System statements, the police department said. “In the interim, HPD has discontinued the practice of making non-substantive changes to the DIMS statement. HPD stands ready to have filing officers attest to the facts in instances where the discontinued procedure for amending the DIMS statement was used.”
The local prosecutor’s office first learned on Oct. 13 that thepolice department had been changing parts of statements without documenting or officially swearing to the amended summary, as required in the settlement Lomas v. Harris County, Durfee said.
They investigated further and penned the letter to the court monitor.
It was not immediately known on Friday how long police department supervisors had been changing probable cause summaries as described in the letter.
The District Attorney’s Office was working with Guerra Thompson on the way corrections are made to the sworn summaries, said Dane Schiller, a spokesman for the office.
“Changes we have seen so far in our ongoing review are minor,” Schiller said. “They include replacing juvenile victims’ names with initials and removing identifying information for victims, such as Social Security numbers or driver license numbers to protect privacy and prevent identity theft. Full information is still available privately to defense lawyers and the court in the original offense reports.”
Guerra Thompson declined to comment and directed questions to Civil Rights Corps, which sued the county in the Lomas case.
The group is now seeking evidence for further examples of what occurred, founder and executive director Alec Karakatsanis said.
“We’re still wrapping our heads around the DA’s letter, which I think raised a lot more questions than answers,” Karakatsanis said.
The allegations are troubling, he said, because Harris County law enforcement personnel for years “blatantly” violated the U.S. Constitution by not having sworn probable cause statements at all — the very issue Lomas sought to address.
HPD’s actions could make a difference in appeals, civil litigation that follows criminal cases and the prosecution of police officers, Karakatsanis said. While there’s nothing wrong with learning more about a case over time, HPD’s former practices raise concerns about officers’ credibility, he said.
“It’s an ethical issue and it’s also what we call a Brady violation,” Karakatsanis said. “(Defendants are) entitled to know if cops have gotten it wrong in their case, if cops have lied.”
The District Attorney’s Office is determining whether prosecutors can find individual cases where the summaries were amended, Durfee said. If they can, the office plans to notify people with pending cases or cases resulting in conviction, probation or pretrial diversion, he said.
Prosecutors are checking whether other agencies are able to edit probable cause documents without documenting the change, but said they believe the cases are isolated to HPD’s computer system.