After a week of being blasted by the city’s television media not to mention talk radio, MayorWhiteChiefHurtt now say they have a plan to deal with HPD’s manpower shortage.
No, not simply an ordinance to require apartment complexes to pay for private security. That laughable “plan” of MayorWhiteChiefHurtt was ripped so badly that they’ve come up with this:
Police Chief Harold Hurtt will bring officers out of retirement and hire recruits before they’ve completed training as part of a series of initiatives announced Friday to address a manpower shortage that has plagued the Houston Police Department for more than a year.
Responding to a week of criticism that followed a deadly Thanksgiving holiday weekend with 14 homicides across the city, Hurtt also said he will adjust schedules and quadruple the department’s overtime budget to get more officers onto the streets immediately.
Flanked by his command staff at a news conference, Hurtt acknowledged that the job would not be easy.
In the last two years, some 700 officers have left the department, many through retirement.
“We have lost 700 people-plus and the population’s increasing — we just picked up another 150 to 200,000 people from Louisiana. So we have some significant challenges,” Hurtt said.
Houston Police Officers Union President Hans Marticiuc called Hurtt’s initiatives “a step in the right direction” but said he was “uncomfortable” with rehiring as many as 50 retired officers.
Hurtt’s handling of the shortage became the subject of intense criticism Monday, when the union released a report indicating that response times to some 500 calls about property crimes and assaults from three police districts took officers anywhere from 90 minutes to 12 hours.
Hurtt’s handling?
Mayor White’s press shop is certainly effective at protecting the mayor from criticism, even though Mayor White, Chief Hurtt, and the City Council have all done their part to ignore HPD’s manpower shortage, as we’ve noted here repeatedly (and as Chris Baker has been noting on his radio program for several years now).
It’s amazing how quickly MayorWhiteChiefHurtt can put together a plan, however, when the city’s mainstream media do their jobs and focus attention on the problem.
