How Houston police officers are (not) held accountable for bad shoots

The Houston Chronicle's Lise Olsen and her colleague James Pinkerton have been pulling back the curtain on Houston PD police shootings over the past year. We've known for a while that HPD officers are almost never indicted for shooting people no matter what the circumstance, even when the officers' story blatantly contradicts known facts. Now we know that Houston officers are rarely disciplined in such cases, even when grave errors lead to deaths of unarmed victims. From Olsen's 12/29 story:

Only five of 40 cases involving police shootings of unarmed individuals since 2010 have resulted in disciplinary action against officers after police chiefs found that they violated policy, a new Chronicle analysis shows. None of the officers were criminally charged, and none of the disciplinary actions were announced to the public. Because the department's internal affairs probes are cloaked in confidentiality, the analysis required cross-matching data from the city, HPD and the Harris County District Attorney's Office. 

All five officers were disciplined for policy violations that occurred when they shot people while off-duty. 

One failed to train with the weapon he used to shoot an innocent man. Another exhibited a lack of "sound judgment" by shooting a fleeing man in the back while working an unapproved security job out-of-uniform. A third had been repeatedly disciplined for working an unauthorized apartment security job when he confronted and killed a wrecker driver. The fourth was found to have been intoxicated at the time he shot two people, among other policy violations. Still, as in all other intentional shootings, these were determined to have been "justified."

Even when disciplinary actions were taken, they seemed aimed more at providing cover for the shooter than punishing misconduct. Check out this example:

Officer Christopher Slater, who fired his weapon across a busy street and hit an unarmed 29-year-old, Gerard Barnett, in the back of the leg. Federal court records in a related civil rights lawsuit show the officer gave different versions of why he shot Barnett. The officer initially claimed Barnett had pointed a weapon at him. No gun was found, and Barnett's hands bore no sign of having fired a weapon. Still, the officer insisted someone else must have picked up the gun after Barnett fell. 

After interviewing suspects and reviewing surveillance video, HPD's own investigators concluded Barnett was an innocent bystander. Video cameras and other witness statements indicate that Barnett had been filling up a car with gas at a Citgo station when shots rang out and he ran to get out of the line of fire, according to documents made public in a related federal court case. 

Slater received a written reprimand in February 2010 - but only because he had "failed to qualify" with the gun he used by not practicing often enough at the department's firing range, his personnel file shows. In 2013, the city of Houston approved a rare $90,000 settlement for the man he shot. 

Despite that settlement, the Houston Police Department has never updated its account of the April 2009 shooting that claims Barnett pointed a weapon at Slater, who was off-duty and out-of uniform at the time of the incident. 

Barnett, reached by phone, said most of the settlement money went to pay a lawyer who finally agreed to take his case. Barnett has been able to work but has never been able to afford surgery. The officer's bullet remains embedded in his thigh.

Olsen highlighted the recent testimony of an expert witness who "analyzed 670 internal affairs reviews of HPD officers who had discharged their weapons between 2006 and 2016." He testified that, "HPD investigators relied too heavily on statements given by officers who'd been coached what to say by union lawyers," she reported.

Another recent Olsen story highlighted that, even though Harris County does not prosecute police officers for bad shoots, other jurisdictions are beginning to do so. That article opened:

Prosecutors in all but one of Texas' biggest counties have launched a spate of police officer prosecutions in the shootings of unarmed or mentally ill people over the past three years that parallels a similar rise in police prosecutions nationwide. 

Harris County, which leads the state in police shootings by a wide margin, is the exception. Prosecutors have presented evidence in more than 200 officer-involved shootings to grand juries that happened here since 2012. One of every five individuals shot by police was unarmed. But in every case, the officer was not indicted, records show.

One HPD officer cited was drunk when he shot an unarmed man but that fact was never presented to the grand jury by the DA's office.

Olsen's story goes on to demonstrate how difficult it is to secure convictions in cases against police officers, which nationally succeed only about a half of the time. "Out of the 78 police officers charged with murder or manslaughter in shooting-related prosecutions tracked since 2005, only 27 officers were convicted; 29 were acquitted or had charges dismissed; 22 cases remain pending as of November," according to an academic Olsen quoted who tracks them. Considering police kill nearly 1,000 people per year nationally, those are paltry numbers.

This fact bite in part shows favoritism toward police by prosecutors, but it's also a function of the plea-mill system into which the modern criminal justice system has devolved. For the most part, prosecutors don't try cases any longer - they cut deals and dismiss the hard ones. And these are hard ones. Police union attorneys are always willing to roll the dice with a jury, hoping sympathy for the profession will trump the facts. It's a smart strategy: Often, it does. 

Great coverage of an important issue. For more reporting on shootings of unarmed people, see the Chron's Unarmed series as well as Grits contributor Eva Ruth Moravec's Point of Impact series.