Doug Griffith - President, HPOU Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Seven two or time here on the Houston's morning news. Yeah,
what if what happened in New Orleans were to happen here?
How prepared would we be? How concerned is the Houston
Police Department? How prepared is the Houston Police Department to
handle something like this? Doug Griffiths joins us President of
the Houston Police Officers Union. You know, I feel like
it's a little bit of a wake up call for us, Doug,

(00:21):
when we found out that this guy is, you know,
from Beaumont originally and lives lives in North Houston, he
could have very easily done what he did here instead
of doing it in New Orleans.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
Absolutely, when you have clowns like this that that just
have no regard for anyone else except themselves, then you're
going to have incidents like this. I would like to
think we're extremely prepared. I know, I'll work a lot
of these events that we have downtown. We placed dump
trucks in front of certain areas, we have police cars,

(00:53):
we have everything possible. The issue is that we have
these people that are helping on doing as much destruction
as possible, and you can't think of every single scenario
they can circumvent things like you wouldn't believe because their
mind doesn't think like the average person, and so it
is very difficult when you have such a big event

(01:16):
to prepare for every single contingency. I'm sure that they
haven't had any issues like this in New Orleans and
weren't expecting this might a drop up on the sidewalk,
and I'm not exactly sure how you prevent that other
than putting another police car on the sidewalk, But it's
often difficult, depending upon what the intersection looks like, to

(01:39):
completely one percent for proof.

Speaker 1 (01:41):
Yeah, well, they had a lot of barricades that I
would call the old school barricades, you know, the red
and white stripes, and they're made out of wood, and
if you want to break through them, it's pretty easy
to break through them. I know that they had supposedly,
we're getting upgrades that they were going to have or
supposed to have in place in time for the super Bowl,
because that's obviously a huge Clearly they weren't ready, at

(02:03):
least they weren't ready yet.

Speaker 2 (02:05):
Well, you got to think berber Streets. You know, we
don't have anything like Bourbon Street here. Berber Street's one
of those places where everybody's always in the street walking around.
You have very little traffic at those So those ballards
that they put up there are nice, so people cannot
drive in that area.

Speaker 1 (02:23):
Now.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
I don't understand how they were broke or how they
were you know, what was going on with those, but
I do know that that is usually a very secure
locatient and for him to be able to stircummit that
it took a lie.

Speaker 1 (02:37):
Yeah. Does what are called hard targets and what are
called soft targets and soft targets I guess for terrorists
is something that they don't think there's a big enough
presence there in order to deter them from trying to
commit the act that they commit. You know, I've only
been I would have to say, other than you know,
obviously Astros games. The only big event I've been to

(02:57):
here in Houston was the National Championship college football game
last year, and I'm trying to remember back. I mean,
there was a good sized police presence, but there was
nothing there that I could see that would it would
prevent me if I were a terrorist from driving in
right next to anergy and detonating something and killing thousands
of people.

Speaker 2 (03:18):
Well, the road itself is as close as you're going
to be able to get NRG. When you go to
a football game, a lot of people don't even pay attention,
but they have big blocks, cement blocks that they put
in place so that people cannot get through. The only
thing that's going to get through there is like one
of these little polaris or something like that. So they

(03:39):
harden every single target that we have in Houston. We
have events in twenty twenty six. They're already planning for
the World Cup. So understand they plan these events years
in advance. They know they're coming, so they do everything
they can. The problem is these you know, radicalizing the rules,

(04:00):
will find ways to go around that, and we just
have to try to think of every scenario. It's tough,
but if you've got someone that's going to drop a
roder truck full of explosives down right next to a building,
you do your best to shield that building. But understand,
there's still ways that these people come up with to

(04:21):
try to hurt someone.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah, in the under the best of circumstances, you know,
there's always a way around most of the fortifications. You're right, Doug,
Thank you was always appreciated. President of the Houston Police
Officers Union, Doug Griffith,