HPD corruption
Will indictments in the Harding Street raid convince Acevedo there’s a wider problem?
After a troubling audit of his narcotics division in July, Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo told this editorial board: “Sloppiness does not equate to corruption.”
Maybe not. But now that a dozen police officers have been indicted — two of them on murder charges — corruption may be putting it mildly.
Today marks two years since the botched Harding Street raid left two innocent people dead and five officers wounded and we still don’t know the extent of the dirty dealing within the Houston Police Department.
What we do know is that Acevedo should stop depicting this tragedy as the product of a few rogue officers. He should acknowledge publicly the scope of this scandal, and root out its causes, if he wants to rid his department of any residual rot.
With the charges announced this week, the indictment count stands at 12 — with seven of the current or former officers facing the possibility of life sentences, if convicted. Hardly a bushel but far from one or two bad apples.
Most striking among the new indictments announced Monday by Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg, is a murder charge against Officer Felipe Gallegos of the narcotics unit. He is the second officer charged with murder in the deaths of husband and wife homeowners Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas, who were killed Jan. 28, 2019, during the raid.
Initial reports painted a picture of veteran narcotics officers executing a no-knock warrant being met with gunfire as they burst into a heroin dealer’s den. That story quickly fell apart as investigators discovered no heroin on site and announced they were looking into squad leader Gerald Goines for lying about buying drugs from the home.
That investigation spread, resulting in state and federal charges against Goines and his partner, Steven Bryant, including two state counts of felony murder for Goines. A reevaluation of his conduct led to an ongoing review of thousands of cases handled by Goines and his colleagues. Ogg’s office has recommended charges be dismissed in dozens of cases where defendants were convicted solely on Goines’ casework.
The new indictments charge eight of the current or former officers with engaging in organized crime in working together to steal overtime, just one layer of illegal activity that prosecutors allege provided cover for dirty officers and sowed the ground for Harding Street.
“The consequences of corruption are that two innocent ordinary people were killed in their homes, four police officers were shot, one of them paralyzed,” Ogg said Monday. A fifth officer was injured during the raid, but was not shot.
She promised to hold errant police officers accountable, and so far, she’s kept her word. Those charges must still be tested in court, but for a city and county long reputed to look the other way when law enforcement turned criminal, accountability is welcome news.
Acevedo told the editorial board Wednesday he will follow suit, launching an internal investigation into the active duty officers who were charged by Ogg for stealing overtime, as well as cast a wider net to ensure the practice hasn’t spread.
“We’re set to meet with the DA’s office to discuss opportunities for other measures we can take to also put safeguards in place,” he said. “We have to hold people accountable.”
This is an important step — one Acevedo could have initiated much earlier if he’d acknowledged the likelihood of a broader problem and probed more deeply within his department.
Acevedo has resisted calls for an independent audit. But until he’s willing to say the word “corruption” it’s hard to have confidence in his internal review.
A partial audit of the narcotics division, released in July after months of delay, already hinted at widespread problems within the narcotics unit. Covering three years’ worth of casework by Goines and Bryant, it found hundreds of administrative errors, missing case review sheets and incomplete reports, unauthorized payments to confidential informants and discrepancies in evidence handling.
Even as the report pointed to systemwide issues that went beyond poor record keeping, Acevedo remained steadfast in his defense and downplayed the problems as “sloppiness.”
Now, the chief should make good on his vows of transparency and tell it to us straight. Everything he doesn’t know, he should entrust an independent auditor to find out.
If Houston police officers did indeed murder innocent people, we should spare no expense, and no ego, to ensure it never happens again.