Last week, the Chronicle ran a letter from a police officer critical of Chief Hurtt’s temporarily suspended no-chase policy:
THE Aug. 28 letter from Sondra Tucker “Hurtt’s on the right track” was hard for me to understand. Having been a policeman for more than 20 years, I have learned that most car chases do not even involve the owner of the car.
So trying to get the license plate number and picking up the criminal later wouldn’t work. Most chases involve a stolen car with some other crime preceding the taking of the car.
Also, when a person gets away with criminal activity, they often try again. Police officers do not always know when they are chasing a car if a felony has been committed by the driver.
Most officers have common sense and we have hired them to protect us. Why not let them do their job? We don’t want to handcuff our police and then complain about their inability to catch criminals.
No one wants anyone to be hurt, but if we don’t allow the police to chase criminals, the criminals will use this as a successful evasion tactic when the chance arises.
JAMES BERRY Huntsville
No disagreement here.
Later in the week, Councilmember Michael Berry and union chief Hans Marticiuc wrote an op-ed on the no-chase policy. Here is an excerpt:
[T]he two of us, and many others, were surprised and disappointed when [Chief] Hurtt last week announced that he wanted to ban Houston Police Department officers from pursuing so-called “Class C” minor traffic offenders. In announcing this “no-chase” policy, the chief cited legal liability and public safety concerns related to high-speed chases, and said officers could offer pursuit only if they know the person behind the wheel is a felon.
Otherwise, officers would be required to try to take down the license plate number, and someone else would theoretically follow up later and try to enforce the law. With staffing shortages at HPD, and legal concerns over issuing an arrest warrant based solely on a license plate number, this raises serious problems.
We were also disappointed to hear about this proposed new policy because we believe it sends exactly the wrong message, at the wrong time, to the wrong people. At a time of rising crime, it tells dangerous felons with weapons or drugs in their car to hit the gas, not the brake, when ordered to stop.
Both the chief and the Chronicle’s Editorial Board seem to think that the question is whether to pursue a chase versus letting a minor traffic violator go. Would that it were so simple.
Criminals who flee from police typically do so to hide a more serious crime, and failing to pursue them deprives officers of a key crime-fighting tool.
Their op-ed, which should be read in its entirety, goes on to give examples of the current chase policy working well against bad guys.
Unfortunately, unless Houstonians raise heck (because Mayor White doesn’t like negative publicity), Chief Hurtt’s suspended policy is coming back. It will be officially “vetted” before Councilmember Adrian Garcia’s committee (which begs the question — why can’t the police chief’s sanctuary directive from 1992 be discussed similarly by Council, but we digress), but Chief Hurtt has made it clear that he intends for his new policy eventually to take effect, and Mayor White doesn’t seem to disagree substantively with his handpicked, soft-on-crime police chief on the policy.
BLOGVERSATION: Cigars, Donuts, and Coffee.
(Old) Forum Comments (14)
