Houston PD should shut down Narcotics Division based on problems revealed in (redacted) audit

Readers of this blog know Grits is a solutions-oriented guy, so stick with me because I've got one here.

The audit of the Houston PD Narcotics Division was finally released last week, albeit with officer names annoyingly redacted.

Sam Walker, an old-school criminologist from the University of Nebraska who's seen a lot of dysfunctional agencies in his day, declared that, “The number and variety of errors looks like an operation completely out of control,” reported St. John Barned-Smith in the Houston Chronicle.

State Rep. Gene Wu held a press conference to decry the redactions and declare the audit a "whitewash." But for a whitewash, I thought it aired a lot of dirty departmental laundry. 

Having now read the document, IMO Sam Walker called it: What we learned was that the Houston narcotics squad was an essentially unsupervised. No one was watching the store.

This audit doesn't provide a smoking gun to prove that other officers in the division abused their positions in the way Gerald Goines and Stephen Bryant allegedly did. But it showed that, if that were the case, processes were so lax that supervisors likely would never have caught them. Houston narcotics officers have grown accustomed to operating in a system with virtually no meaningful oversight over their work.

The HPD narcotics division includes about 175 officers broken out into squads of 8-12 officers. The audit analyzed cases from the two officers at the center of the inquiry - Gerald Goines and Stephen Bryant - as well as batches of cases from several other squads, revealing hundreds of problems with the casework.

It's filled with juicy tidbits, especially about Goines and Bryant. Goines most common casework error should have been a red flag: "failed to tag the drugs into the evidence box at the end of his shift 48% of the time."

Goines and Bryant also both routinely committed to informant payments without supervisory approval and got payments approved after the fact, which takes the supervisor out of the decision making loop and is contrary to policy.

About a third of the time, case files included no "Case Review Sheets." This is subtly important because it's how the police bureaucracy exercises supervisory control over the casework. Both a sergeant and a lieutenant are supposed to sign off on that document to ensure the investigation's completeness. But a third of the time, it doesn't exist. This was true across squads, to a greater or only slightly lesser extent.

When the casework was there, some squads had more than 25% of their cases dinged for lack of "thoroughness." Reports and case tracking were routinely late - sometimes many months late. 

The whole thing was a byzantine mess revealing few systems in place that anyone felt obliged to adhere to, and an overweening focus on the lowest level drug busts, mainly in black and brown communities. If you're a cop in the Narcotics Division and weren't doing crappy work, you likely were sitting next to someone who was and never said anything. There's not much to salvage here.

So here's my solution: Why not simply eliminate the HPD Narcotics Division altogether? Absorb those officers into other work (we're always hearing HPD is short-staffed, anyway) and stop pursuing low-level buy-bust cases in minority neighborhoods as a primary enforcement strategy. 

There's strong evidence that drug enforcement in Houston is discriminatory. The datasets aren't exactly a match because some drug arrests are made outside of the Narcotics Division. (See the correction below.) But according to the Texas Criminal Justice Coalition's Harris County data dashboard, between Jan. 1, 2016 and May 2018 (the last month available), Houston PD was responsible for charges against nearly 1,000 people with possession of a controlled substance either less than a gram (904) or one to four grams (87). Of those, 75.78% of the cases involved black defendants. 

Indeed, these days, when you send people to prison for a drug crime, you're risking their exposure to the COVID 19 virus. We've already seen examples of Texans sent to prison for short, treatment-focused sentences who died of COVID while they're there.

Grits' advice to Mayor Turner and Chief Acevedo: Cut your losses. Trying to solve the management problems demonstrated in this audit would require shifting more cops away from police work and toward paper pushing, and for what? Who imagines that these penny-ante drug cases are contributing significantly to public safety? Better instead to eliminate that division and focus on other, less corruption-prone public-safety strategies with a better record of success. 

When you find yourself at the bottom of a hole, Will Rogers quipped, the first thing to do is stop digging. That advice resonates here. Between hundreds of innocent people set up over faulty field tests or narcotics officers making up informants in cases (including potentially George Floyd's!), drug enforcement in Houston has been a constant source of managerial grief  and heartache.  Why not just have those 175 officers spend their time doing something else? Why not?

CORRECTION: Thanks to Dr. Katharine Neill Harris, a drug-policy researcher from Rice University, for catching an error. In querying TCJC's Harris County Criminal Justice data dashboard, I somehow dramatically understated the volume of drug arrests in Houston. From January 1st 2016 to December 31st, 2018, there were in fact 15,754 possession cases made by Houston PD for less than four grams. Of those, 56.5 percent of defendants were black, according to the TCJC dashboard. Grits apologizes for the mistake. Not sure what happened there.