KHOU-11’s Karla Barguiarena reports that HPD is cracking down on crimes committed by the homeless:
For months, HPD says they’ve been inundated with complaints about crime committed by the homeless.
“You have everything from crimes being committed to cars being broken into, urinating, defecating in a public place,” Captain Gregory Fremin said.
Officers said squatters building shacks on abandoned downtown properties are another problem.
Walter Brooks says he and a handful of others have been living underneath a billboard for five months.
Until now, only two officers have been assigned to deal with the issue on a full-time basis.
The new plan calls for all downtown officers to keep an eye and ear out for homeless crimes while investigating other cases.
Right.
They might start by clearing out the growing homeless encampment under the Spur 527 overpass near Richmond in Midtown (the gateway in and out of downtown). Or the vagrants who have made certain abandoned buildings in Downtown/Midtown their home. Indeed, one doesn’t have to look around much in Downtown/Midtown to find any number of places that could be cleaned up, if MayorWhiteChiefHurtt are indeed serious about the problem.
But we strongly suspect that this is just another one of those empty PR announcements that will have no effect on anything. We’ll start to believe otherwise if the growing Spur 527 Homeless Encampment is cleared out anytime soon. (I’d take a photo of it, but one homeless person recently informed me angrily that I was not allowed to photograph near the encampment).
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