Doug Griffith of the HPOU Joins Houston Morning News, August 1st, 2024

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Five fifty three is our time here in Houston's Morning News. Right,
we have a forty three page report presented to the
City Council last night. Here you're talking about it with us.
It was presented by the way, by Acting Police Chief
Larry Satterwhite on the use of the sl code the
lack of personnel inability to investigate you to a lack
of personnel. Doug Griffith joins us with the Houston Police

(00:20):
Officers Reunion to react to all this. I don't know
if you've seen the report at this point yet, Doug
or not. But can we gather from the report who
ultimately was responsible for doing this.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Yes, sir. According to the research that the city has done,
they believe that it was a former assistant chief that
went in and developed this code after a just text
report from twenty fourteen. In the twenty fourteen report, they
discussed that you have to capture the data on how
many cases are unworked because of a lack of manpower.

(00:55):
So the original code was developed as a way to
show that we were short of manpowered in investigative divisions.
The problem is that it morphed into every aspect of investigations,
which it should have never done. It was supposed to
be for property crimes only property crimes, financial crimes, things

(01:16):
in which there was not a person on person crime.
The problem is we had people in place that were,
you know, for whatever reason, let it expand into sex crimes,
family violence, major assaults. It should have never happened.

Speaker 1 (01:34):
Murders in there, tooders in there.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
Yeah, well that's that's a little odd because they're not true,
like I went up and shot someone. Murders. These are odd,
like it was a vehicular crimes incident and it turned
into an investigation that led to a murder charge, So
there is a little bit odd.

Speaker 3 (01:54):
So the intent was really to highlight the fact that
there was a lack of enough personell in order to
follow up on crime, but it had the unintended effect
of looking like crime numbers were coming down, in which
the mayor touted for months and if not years.

Speaker 2 (02:12):
Correct correct, And that's part of the problem is people
have to understand. The community's going to have to understand
we have over two hundred less officers today with over
four hundred less billion positions available today then we had
ten years ago. So the problem is going to continue.

(02:33):
We're not going to be able to investigate every crime
that comes across the desk. We've got officers that are
swamped with forty cases a week a week, so there's
no way to properly investigate a lot of those crimes.
So we have to come up with some other way
to start working these, especially the personal partner crimes. Understand,

(02:54):
we're still not going to get to a lot of
these property crimes because we have thousands of those cases
every month, as well as like the breaking into vehicles,
we have thousands of us every month. There's absolutely no
way we're able to investigate all of those. Well, the
thing that's just the reality of the situation.

Speaker 1 (03:12):
Yeah, and the thing that's said about all of this, Doug,
is that the answer to the problem is, of course
hiring more officers. But that's been an ongoing problem that
doesn't seem to be going away. It's not because we
won't pay police officers. It's just that we don't have
enough people who want to do the job.

Speaker 2 (03:26):
That's it. You know, over the last couple of years
you've seen the decline across this country. Because it is
a noble profession, but officers are vilified on a regular
basis over one incident that may take place across the country.

Speaker 3 (03:42):
Or the courts let the guy go. You make the
arrest and the courts let the guy go.

Speaker 2 (03:46):
More frustrating, Well, we have you know, we have cons
of that. We've screamed about that for years now.

Speaker 1 (03:51):
All right, Doug, Well, keep fighting the good fight and
we'll chiep checking in with you. Doug Griffith of the
Houston Police Officers Union, it's five fifty seven.