Support Your Local Police
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(Page 6 of 6)
After Lynn, Hofheinz again reached below the assistant chief level to select Captain B. G. (Pappy) Bond, a porcine, humorous officer with shrewd instincts who had earned a reputation in the department as a skilled bureaucratic politician. During Bond’s tenure (he resigned last spring to run for mayor, then changed his mind and accepted a job as security chief of Tenneco), Hofheinz occasionally tried to restrain the police. He spoke out, for example, in support of officer Nichols and may have influenced Bond not to follow the investigating committee’s recommendation that the rookie be fired. After Radinsky’s death, Hofheinz said that officers needed better training in when to use their weapons, a position Bond first contradicted, then supported. But at 61 Reisner Street, police construed Hofheinz’ remarks to mean that cops needed better training in how to use their firearms, which wasn’t true, they joked, because “we’re hitting everything we’re shooting at.”
Many of Hofheinz’ critics – not his political enemies but his disappointed friends – say that while his sentiment was admirable, sentiment is not policy. They blame the mayor for failing to take action; one frequently cited incident involves a bill introduced during the legislative session this year by State Representative Craig Washington, a talented criminal lawyer and an outspoken critic of police treatment of blacks. Washington wanted to create a civilian review board for Houston, but Hofheinz strongly opposed it: “We already have civillian review,” he said with circular logic. “We elect the mayor.” Without support from city hall, the controversial bill had no chance; most of the Harris County delegation shunned any association with it.
Hofheinz concedes that he leaves office with the police department “still not supervised by civilian control as it ought to be” and that there is “a pattern of cover-up and police excess.” But he insists that he has made improvements since the Short era. Relations with minorities are better (they could hardly have deteriorated), there are more women, black, and Chicano officers, and the spying has ended. But to work more fundamental changes, to reshape the hostile attitude of the cop toward the city he polices, is quite another matter. Part of the problem, Hofheinz says, is an optional state civil service law that voters in Houston (unlike those in Dallas) have adopted; it “makes every cop a king” and makes it “extremely difficult to discipline a police officer unless he’s caught red-handed.”
Ironically, part of Hofheinz’ problem may have been one of the “reforms” he most often cites: more than one-third of the 2800-member force, 946 officers, has been recruited since January 1974.
“One of the worst things that can happen to a police department is for it to grow too fast,” says Hofheinz’ predecessor Louie Welch. He should know: during the last four years of his term, the force grew by 736 officers. The rookie officers, Welch says, are almost inevitably the ones put on the street at night, when most of the crime occurs. Often they are put there without the restraining supervision of a seasoned officer, most of whom have been pressed for years by their wives to get off the night detail, Welch continues. As a result, many rookies never get the crucial in-service training of working with a veteran police officer, even though police, like members of most other professions, learn the largest part of their job outside the classroom.
All this was beginning to become obvious late in Welch’s administration, when a growing number of brutality complaints led him to remove investigations of serious complaints from the police department and turn over that responsibility to the city legal department. This was done “out of necessity,” says Welch, because the police department couldn’t be trusted not to cover up to protect its own officers.
Most of the time, though, Welch has nothing but kind words for the force: he calls it “an unusually good department,” says recent developments are “bad on its morale,” and concludes that claims of brutality “come in waves and many of them have absolutely no foundation – these are just things that every cheap criminal and their defense lawyer jump on.” The former mayor’s attitude reflects what Hofheinz says is the crux of the police problem: the dominant attitude of the city’s business leadership (including Welch, who is now president of the local Chamber of Commerce) that the police should be supported even when they are wrong, and that in any situation where the facts are in dispute, the police should be believed without question. Criminal attorney Percy Foreman attributes the widespread business community support for the police to studied indifference. He says, “There is so much money to be made here that people in leadership don’t have time to think about anything but that.” Sometimes business attitudes hearken back to sixties-era confrontation politics – and us versus them mentality. For example, one executive of a major Houston corporation maintains that police display no excessive brutality – a view that implicitly accepts, and even encourages, a certain amount of brutality to preserve the status quo and keep them in their place.
Among those who have looked kindly on the police is the judiciary, or at least the judges who have transferred police brutality cases out of Harris County to friendlier climates. The 1970 beating death case in the Galena Park police station was tried in New Braunfels, a German-American hamlet and retired military stronghold likely to view the police side of the story with great favor. (“I knew we had the case won,” the police defendants’ lawyer, Racehorse Haynes, has said, “when we seated the last bigot on the jury.”) Similarly, the Torres case will be tried in Huntsville – where the main industry is the Texas Department of Corrections.
Influential members of Houston’s large and powerful law firms also take a charitable view toward the police. Gibson Gayle, immediate past president of the State Bar of Texas and a partner at Fulbright & Jaworski, is “pretty well pleased as a resident of this community with the job that they do.” A. Frank Smith, managing partner of Vinson & Elkins, rates the department as “good” and says the instances of brutality are isolated. Hugh Patterson, a politically potent senior partner at Baker & Botts, says “I don’t think members of the Houston Police Department are any more prone to violence than the ordinary citizen in this part of the country, and I think they are racially tolerant.”
One of the strongest supporters of the police in the business community is N. W. (Dick) Freeman, retired board chairman of Tenneco, who says bluntly, “I think the police department should be congratulated rather than condemned.” Another strong and important backer of the police, and the leading political Tory in town, is Everett Collier, editor of the Houston Chronicle. Collier believes that the police “stick together, but not to the degree that they would hide a violation of the law.”
The simple fact is that there is little realization among the leading citizens of Houston that when you give a man a uniform and a gun without leadership and without the training to handle it, you may have a dangerous situation on your hands. Nothing can be done until this lack of awareness (or indifference) is erased. What to do then is another question: perhaps a police-citizen review board would help, perhaps more training in self-restraint, perhaps a special prosecutor to look into past and future cases of police misconduct instead of the current system that uses assistant DAs and grand juries who get most of their evidence from the police themselves. But clearly community attitudes must be changed before police attitudes can be.
The police do a necessary and sometimes dangerous job, and many do it well. They must face danger, endure abuse, and abide the frustration of sometimes seeing those they capture go free. But it is a job they choose freely, and in many ways it is a very good one. Few men can have as much responsibility and discretion as a police officer who is essentially his own commander in the field.
When police anywhere, as a number in Houston have, come to respond to their frustrations by dishing out their own retribution – verbal harassment, beatings, and worse – respect for the crucial job they do plummets and their own isolation from the community increases. It is true that most Houston officers are good men and women who do not engage in such behavior. But it is a truth that is negated because the best officers almost without exception cover up for the actions of the worst. As a result, those charged with enforcing the law become participants in what is really systematic lawlessness.
Police brutality isn’t limited to Houston, of course. But the sheer volume of incidents, the apparent shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality, and the almost total absence of civilian control does appear unique among American cities. On the other hand, as Houston officers stress, there has been relatively little evidence of widespread corruption of the kind that seems endemic among the police rank-and-file in cities such as Chicago and New York. Still, who is to say that if police in Houston are free to break one law, they won’t break others?
That most of the incidents of brutality involved people actually involved in crimes or believed to be criminals should make absolutely no difference to the police. But it does. As the head of the Houston Police Officers Association, Detective R. C. Rich, says about the Torres incident, “I’m not saying what happened to him was right, but he was out there violating the law and his own people called in on him. If he hadn’t been out there drunk and raising hell, nobody would have messed with him.”
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