Earlier in the week, the Chron‘s Bradley Olson blogged about efforts to fix some of the problems with the Mobility Response Team, another of Mayor White’s Ready-Fire-Aim! programs that wasn’t quite ready for primetime at launch:
City Council members got a lengthy presentation today from the Houston Police Department on its plans to reform the “Mobility Response Team” program, which Mayor Bill White has called a “traffic SWAT team.”
A series of Wayne Dolcefino reports on lengthy breaks taken by mobility officers during peak traffic hours, exaggerated accounting for their work and a stunning set of clips showing them doing little to nothing (including one while an elderly woman struggled to cross the street just a stone’s throw away) prompted HPD to conduct a thorough investigation.
At an unusually well-attended (by council members, that is) Public Safety and Homeland Security Committee meeting, Assistant Chief Vicki King outlined more than a dozen training, supervisory and accountability reforms they are in the process of implementing for the program.
The Undercover Man’s followup reporting on the (not-unimportant!) story he broke is here. He adds that HPD’s investigation into the problems he documented should be completed in May.
