To Regain Public Confidence Houston Police and Crime Labs Must Adhere to the Highest Standards of Competence, Independence and Integrity
By: Houston Criminal Attorney John Floyd and Paralegal Billy Sinclair
Houston’s Mayor Annise Parker announced recently that she will replace the city’s outgoing police chief, Harold Hurtt, with someone from within the command rank of the Houston Police Department (HPD). We do not view this as a compelling promise of change. The HPD under Hurtt’s leadership was rocked by one “evidence gathering” scandal after another. It would be foolish to assume all these scandals were attributable to Hurtt’s management style alone. The scandals actually revealed a systemic problem within the HPD from its top command echelon down to the rank and file patrol officers. Thus, tapping someone within this problematic agency does not invite encouragement that integrity and professionalism in the department will improve immediately after Hurtt’s welcomed departure.
The latest HPD scandal, examiners not properly analyzing fingerprint evidence or failing to examine the evidence at all, will cost taxpayers nearly $3 million to fix. This will require a team of outside consultants, who are already running the fingerprint unit’s day-to-day operations, to re-examine some 5,000 of what the Houston Chronicle called “violent crime cases as well as sift through a backlog of thousands more violent and property crime cases that have been waiting to be reviewed.”
As a result of this fingerprint scandal, one part-time employee was forced to resign under pressure and three others were placed on administrative leave. To make matters worse, the HPD recently submitted a report to the City Council informing its members that it will probably cost taxpayers an additional $2 million to hire new examiners to run the department’s fingerprint unit.
To be fair, the HPD is not the only law enforcement agency to experience a “fingerprint analysis” problem. The Houston Chronicle recently reported that the Los Angeles Police Department earlier this year acknowledged its fingerprint unit was a “sloppy operation” in which files were “left lying around, prints sometimes lost and at least two people had been wrongly identified as criminal suspects because of botched fingerprint analysis.” It was a similar story in 2007 involving Florida’s Seminole County Sheriff’s Department, prompting the sheriff to discipline numerous employees after it was discovered that, as the Chronicle reported, “analysts [were] cutting corners and pegging fingerprints to the wrong suspects.”
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