HERE’S ANOTHER SERIOUS PROBLEM that Mayor Annise Parker has inherited from the Bill White/Harold Hurtt dynamic duo (as reported by Moises Mendoza and James Pinkerton for the Chronicle):
In the Houston Police Department’s fingerprint lab, counter tops rot, leaky chemicals spill out of their packaging and some equipment doesn’t work.
Four years after police became aware of troubles at the police facility that processes fingerprint evidence, and months after its problems first came to public light, parts of the lab remain in disarray, internal police documents show.
The documents obtained recently through an open records request also provide a glance into how HPD commanders allowed the problems at the lab to fester over the past decade.
This is a nice job of watchdog reporting, using public information requests to track/document an ongoing problem.
Incidentally, the comments from blogHOUSTON fav* Martha Montalvo later in the story are worth reading. Unbelievably, she was reportedly one of the names that was considered to replace Harold Hurtt as chief a few months ago!
* We are being facetious, for those who aren’t inclined to follow the links.
