Houston police are supposed to enforce safety
On Dec. 4, 2021, Houston Police Officer Orlando Hernandez was driving his cruiser in hot pursuit of carjacking suspects. Michael Wayne Jackson was walking to get a haircut.
Normally, their two paths never would have crossed. Hernandez, though, was maneuvering his 6,300pound SUV between 80 and 100 mph down a rain-slicked road in Sunnyside with a posted speed limit of 40 mph. When you’re driving that fast, each incremental increase in speed cuts your reaction time to mere milliseconds. So when a lane full of cars stopped at a red light obstructed Hernandez’s route, his only option to avoid a massive collision was to swerve his cruiser to the right and jump the curb, striking Jackson before slamming into a Dumpster.
Jackson was pronounced dead at the scene.
“He never knew what hit him,” Jackson’s brother, Timothy, told Chron.com months after the crash. Hernandez was suspended for 30 days. A grand jury declined to indict him on a charge of criminally negligent homicide.
Sadly, Jackson’s death is hardly an outlier. Houston police officers in high-speed chases have a disturbing track record of reckless driving. One in three of those chases end in a crash, and those collisions too often leave innocent bystanders dead or injured.
An investigation by the Chronicle’s Andrea Ball and Caroline Ghisolfi found that HPD’s high-speed chases have increased by 47 percent between 2018 and 2022. During that period, officers engaged in 6,303 chases — more than in Dallas, San Antonio and Austin combined — killing 27 people and injuring 740. At least 240 of the dead and injured were bystanders.
As recently as June, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner talked up traffic enforcement as a much-needed area of improvement for his department. Perhaps he should also take a hard look at how his own officers contribute to our city’s unsafe streets.
These officers, after all, are supposed to be on the front lines supporting Houston’s Vision Zero Action Plan — which aims to eliminate fatalities and serious injuries caused by traffic collisions — by proactively going after aggressive drivers who speed, tailgate, and swerve in and out of lanes. We welcome that level of enforcement in our car-centric city, but not at the expense of public safety. HPD’s high-speed pursuits are deadly, damaging, and costly. Police estimates put the total cost of damage for their high-speed chases at up to $10 million over the past five years, although the actual amount could be much higher when factoring in medical bills for crash victims, loss of income, and funeral costs.
To his credit, Finner, who has led the department since 2021, is not shying away from this problem. He told the Chronicle that he would announce “some enhancements to our pursuit policy” in the near future, including having supervisors and middle managers “terminate pursuits when it’s appropriate.”
That didn’t appear to happen when Jackson was killed. A federal lawsuit filed on behalf of bystanders killed or injured in Houston police chases alleges that Hernandez and his partner initiated the chase themselves. Hernandez did not have a visual on the carjacking suspects, nor did he request permission from his field supervisor to engage in the pursuit. HPD’s pursuit policy allows officers to continue a high-speed chase if the nature of the suspected criminal activity “is such that the need to immediately take the suspect into custody” justifies the risk to the public. That’s too vague to enforce.
It's hard to believe all of the high-speed chases in the past five years meet that criteria. While Finner attributed at least some of the increase in pursuits to more criminal defendants roaming the street free on bond, the data complicates that narrative.
Officers contribute to deadly trend of reckless driving on roads.
In fact, only nine cases in the past five years involve suspects with previous warrants. The majority of chases stem from traffic violations and pursuits of misdemeanor crimes. As the Chronicle noted in its investigation, people have died in HPD chases that started over reports of an open container of alcohol or a driver doing donuts in an empty parking lot.
We believe Finner’s commitment to curbing high-speed pursuits is genuine, and we expect that the department’s revamped pursuit policies will reflect that. He can start by reviewing the sensible policies that other police departments in major cities have on their books. In Austin, for instance, officers can’t pursue drivers for nonhazardous traffic violations or when there are dangerous conditions such as wet roads. In Dallas, officers can’t drive more than 20 mph over the speed limit on certain roads and are required to stop at intersections. Adding both of those provisions seem like marked improvements over HPD’s current laissez-faire policy. The department could also explore using technology such as GPS darts with wireless transmitters that officers can fire at vehicles to track them down later in lieu of an immediate chase.
Nobody wants police officers to turn a blind eye to crime, and even minor offenses can have devastating consequences for civilians. Yet at the very least, HPD officers must understand that the vehicles they drive can be just as deadly as the guns in their holsters. We want, and expect, every officer to weigh whether pursuing any and all criminal suspects is worth the potential loss of life and physical damage that might ensue from a high-speed chase.