The number of homicides in Houston rose nearly 25 percent during the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period last year, despite a multimillion-dollar police effort in the city’s most crime-ridden areas.
The Houston Police Department investigated 90 homicides through Friday, compared with 73 in the first quarter of 2005, police say. That puts the city on track for the deadliest year in more than a decade and would erase the last of the gains made in the 1990s, when the city’s homicide tally was cut in half.
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But a Houston Chronicle analysis of 326 homicides that occurred in the city last year shows that those trends were obvious long before the first evacuee-related slaying and the year-end spike that prompted Police Chief Harold Hurtt to direct resources and public attention to these problem areas.
Hurtt last week admitted that HPD was slow to identify the patterns. But he blamed a staffing shortage that grew worse over the last year and outmoded tools for crime analysis.
“We were behind the curve as far as resources,” he said. “We need to do a better job of continuously identifying and even forecasting trends. But you need (technology) and you need personnel to be able to respond.”
And Mayor White said Harold Hurtt was “the most successful major-city chief in the country“??? If Chief Hurtt was THE most successful major-city chief Houston could choose, then Houston has some big problems.
Chris Baker and blogHOUSTON have been calling this quite awhile now. Local media have been reporting sporadically on the police manpower shortage, but there have been enough stories that if MayorWhiteChiefHurtt were paying attention, Chief Hurtt wouldn’t be blaming outdated forecasting tools for his inaction (wink, wink).
City officials’ constant focus on world-class this and world-class that hasn’t helped. And red-light and surveillance cameras aren’t the answer either, unless the city wants to play defense. Actual police officers ARE a deterrent, and when the city gets serious about a world-class safety strategy, then all the pretty, fluffy stuff (downtown park, for example) might be worth discussing.
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