HPD to shut investigative unit in favor of beefing up patrols
The Houston Police Department is shuttering a highly praised investigative unit focused on nonlethal crimes in a bid to reduce response times and increase police visibility throughout the city.
Critics called the closure of the Investigative First Responders Division a shortsighted move that could mean fewer solved cases of burglary, theft, assault and domestic violence and eliminate an important training ground for promising investigators.
The move comes as city officials battle a $160 million budget deficit amid calls from Mayor Sylvester Turner and his transition team for more police officers on patrol, better non-emergency response times and improved clearance rates for burglary and
theft.
The division should be closed by July 1 “to make good on a promise to our citizens to add more officers to respond to service calls,” Acting Chief Martha Montalvo said in an emailed statement.
The division’s 70 officers will be moved into patrol positions, along with about 100 others from administrative positions in patrol, uniform/supply and special operations. Overall, the changes will mean four more patrol officers per shift available at each of the 14 police stations across the city.
“Not that these individuals haven’t done a great job, it’s just that I need more visibility in terms of responding to calls for services, visibility in providing services,” Montalvo said this week in speaking to a neighborhood political group. “We are now transitioning.”
The police department has seen its staffing shrink in the past two years, from 5,400 officers and 1,300 civilian staff to the current 5,200 officers and 1,100 civilians, Montalvo said. About a third of the uniformed staff is eligible for retirement.
Lower-priority crimes
Created in 2009 following a two-year pilot program, the IFR Division was a hybrid patrol-investigative division, in which uniformed patrol officers continued to investigate the calls to which they initially responded. The calls were typically crimes that investigative units would have given lower priority, such as lessserious assault, theft, or domestic violence cases.
The division had been part of a philosophy by the department to create a career path for investigators and fight crime more effectively with a smaller force. It was designed to free up senior investigators to tackle more complex cases.
The division handled 6,562 cases in 2011, clearing 5,085 of them, or about 77 percent.
Last year, the division’s investigators handled 5,145 cases and cleared just over 3,000, or about 60 percent.
Officials attribute the decline in the clearance rate to the unit investigators tackling more complex cases as they became more experienced, said HPD spokeswoman Jodi Silva.
As a candidate for mayor, Turner pushed for the hiring of hundreds more officers. Since assuming office, he has pushed for an additional academy class, which would provide the department with an additional 100 officers.
Still, critics argued that the shuffling of staff is a hollow move aimed at addressing image problems while providing little overall benefit toward fighting crime in the city.
“If the mayor’s priority is to in- crease visibility on the street, then he may accomplish that,” said former Houston Police Chief Charles A. McClelland, whose tenure from 2009-2015 was marked by controversy over revelations that tens of thousands of burglaries and other crimes were not being investigated because of insufficient manpower.
“But again, investigative first responders are uniformed officers driving a marked car ... and they’re available to respond to the highest emergency calls.”
It also ignores the fact that police officers mostly respond to crimes that have already occurred, he said.
“Only 5 percent are in-progress calls,” he said. “In the overwhelming majority, the crime has already occurred.... Now, it does make people feel better, from a customer service standpoint.”
Houston Police Officers’ Union President Ray Hunt has long argued the department is understaffed by as many as 1,500 officers.
“We oppose any abolishment of a complete division that we believe was productive,” Hunt said. “However, it’s not like we’re going to lose productivity … It just means you’re going to beef up patrol and beef down investigation of burglaries. The focus for right now for this mayor and this chief ... is getting people to the streets and getting those calls for service answered.
“It may be a little longer for your case to get worked, but your initial response is going to be quicker,” he said. “So it’s just shifting the manpower.”
Widespread praise
The division has drawn praise from experts, academics and law enforcement officials as an innovative approach to crime-fighting that helped build up the department’s skilled investigative ranks.
Former City Councilmember Ed Gonzalez, who chaired the council’s Committee on Public Safety and Homeland Security and was among the first sergeants to help staff the new division, said he was “saddened” by the news.
“Sometimes there are very limited openings in investigative divisions; part of it was a way to groom younger talent, provide incentives to officers to perfect their craft, get hands on cases they could work more proactively,” he said.
“Traditionally, what happens, if you’re a patrol officer, you knock out a report and it goes to the concerned division. Many times those reports, because the division was so overwhelmed with a lot of work — this would be a way officers at the initial phase could do a little more work than they were able to do traditionally.”
The program helped those officers gain more experience and strengthen their resume when they applied for transfer to a higher-profile job in units such as the homicide or robbery division.
Dennis Kenney, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, was the lead researcher of a 2010 study published in Police Quarterly examining the pilot program.
The study found the division helped HPD improve its investigative capacity and effectiveness without negatively affecting workload among the remaining patrol staff. Officers in and out of the division felt it helped solve crimes.
The division’s work, however, fostered jealousy among regular patrol officers and contributed to perceptions that the unit focused more on investigations than on patrol work, some said.
Kenney’s study found that IFR investigators typically handled about one fewer call a day than their counterparts. Response times to emergency Priority 1 and 2 calls remained relatively unchanged at the stations where IFR investigators were posted, though response times increased for nonemergency Priority 3 and 4 calls, according to the study.
“Doing away with (the IFR division) is a bad move,” Kenney said this week after learning about the plans. “It’s stepping back from an innovative path to a fairly standard, sort of uninspired form of policing.”