|
By Tom Kennedy
New Mayor Annise Parker got her first close-up experience with Houston police officers in the Homicide Division in 1976 and 1977.
She was a Rice sociology major in need of research sources for a term paper in a Criminology class. Her topic: homicides in Houston.
Parker recounted this early experience during an interview for the HPD history. She was city controller at the time.
She recalled:
"I spent a lot of time in the Homicide Division going through case files. I would sit in there and watch them bring in suspects to interrogate. I was just a nerdy student going through files.
‘70s Reference Points
"I could hear prisoners shouting, ‘Are you going to throw me in the bayou?' They were trying to bait them (the officers)."
The bayou reference came from the Buffalo Bayou drowning case involving Joe Campos Torres. The record shows Torres was beaten and drowned while in HPD custody. It proved to be one of the most significant events in history and initiated a tireless effort to improve police relations with the growing Hispanic community.
Parker also picked up on the fact that the department of the 1970s was under-educated.
She said that "police were not on my radar screen" until her experience in Homicide when she learned that you only needed a high school diploma to become an officer.
"I wasn't having a lot of interaction with officers in their jobs. I was looking at it from the back of the house. It was a term paper. I don't remember how it was arranged. The professor got me in. They treated well and everything. I became intrigued about the department."
Parker also became active in the Gay Political Caucus, which formed in 1975. Her work with the newly active and often high-profile organization intensified in 1979, a year after she graduated from Rice and worked for a local oil company.
"I began to get active in the organization," Parker recalled. "They had a police committee to deal with police issues. I gravitated to that with Ray Hill, the self-appointed guru of police matters; Tom Coleman, an attorney; and Lee Harrington, an early president of GPC.
"I was involved in policing issues. At some point Lee worked really hard to get a sensitivity class for police cadets out at the academy."
But that was still down the road.
Between 1972 and 1976 Mayor Fred Hofheinz opened up City Hall to more minority groups. The GPC began to openly complain about gay bar raids and other gay-related police activity.
"Most of what we dealt with was bar raids," Parker recalled. "People were still being picked up for dressing as the opposite gender. We were trying to help get them out of jail, trying to stop police raids in the community."
Some years passed. Jim McConn succeeded Hofheinz in 1977. Police Chief Herman Short, one of the toughest and most highly respected (and criticized, depending on your viewpoint) chiefs in HPD history, was succeeded, respectively by Carrol Lynn, Pappy Bond and Harry Caldwell.
Caldwell opened more doors for Hispanics in the wake of the Torres debacle.
Enter Chief Brown
Yet history shows that heretofore closed HPD doors weren't knocked ajar and opened wider until Kathy Whitmire became mayor and named Lee Brown, an outsider from Atlanta, as her first police chief.
Parker, the city's first openly gay mayor, said she believes Brown's appointment was a real turning point in the city's police history. She said, "Brown came in with the mindset that all communities in Houston would be policed differently than before. He was the first police chief to come out and visit the gay community."
Whitmire and Brown never favored the concept of a citizens' review committee with subpoena and instead formed the Police Advisory Committee "where organizations like the NAACP, GPC, Hispanic and Asian groups were invited to meet on a monthly basis to talk about community issues."
Initially the issues were emotional but gradually greater understandings and solutions developed.
Often the discussions focused not on incidents but the policy issues behind them. Parker recalled the issue of death notifications "how families are notified after the death of a young family member. The funeral home would call the family and say something like, ‘Your loved one is over here on the slab.'
"We worked through a policy for that. We reasoned that it ought to be the Police Department doing the notification rather than the funeral home. There had been an inconsistency of how the family was told. The funeral home wants the business; the department does the notification.
"We looked at other cities and the policy may have evolved from what other cities were doing."
The Police Advisory Committee became the Citizens Review Committee (CRC), a 21-member group of citizens from all communities throughout Houston. Three panels of seven individuals review the politically sensitive police discipline cases.
Mayor Whitmire appointed Parker to the CRC; she later became a panel chair.
As part of her budget philosophy, Whitmire closed the police academy in 1987 and 1988. HPD's personnel numbers have yet to recover.
Now her latest successor has unique policing perspectives.
Building the Bridges
"When the academy opened back up," Parker recalled, "the department decided it would do community awareness training. They put together panels on blacks, Hispanics, gays and the Asian-American community.
"I was not on the initial committee to work up a pilot. The department later invited me to conduct the session on gays."
In hindsight, Parker believes the "gap" at the academy "made a natural breaking point in the department." She said the Chief Brown's attitude made a huge difference. Changes such as requiring cadets be 21 with two years of college instead of 18 with a high school diploma had made a significant education difference in HPD and community perceptions of police officers.
"It was easy to make changes because of the break," the person who became Houston's mayor on Jan. 2 said of the academy gap. "It broke the chain. There was a new experience in education. The classes taught at the academy changed and the department decided to actively recruit minorities. There was also a better understanding of communities in Houston.
"Instead of having police officers teach about the gay community, etc., civilians would teach about their own communities."
By and large, the interaction between Houston police officers and members of Houston's gay community grew to the point of fostering a greater understanding and stronger community support.
When Kathy Whitmire - the mayor police officers grew to despise the most over the years - and Lee Brown discuss the change, they use the "us" and "them" references.
Instead of us (the city and its police) versus them (minority communities, including gays), it is now a more inclusive "us" that has grown to include leaders in the gay, black, Hispanic and Asian-American communities.
Today, more than 40 percent of HPD consists of officers of color. A recent study by the Badge & Gun showed that more than 51 percent of the department has at least one college degree, thus earning salary enhancements granted through the Union's contract with the city. And, yes, there are gay officers in HPD just like there are in each of America's big-city departments.
By the time Parker ran her first successful City Council campaign in 1997, she had at least 10 years of experience dealing directly with Houston police matters affecting community perceptions and policing policies. That record, coupled with her research experience in Homicide, made Parker a well-versed candidate regarding HPD issues.
Over the years she has worked with each chief and his/her highest-ranking community liaisons. The six-year District C City Council representative and six-year city controller said other chiefs such as Betsy Watson, Sam Nuchia and Clarence "Brad" Bradford (now a new council member) had the guts and gumption to steer policies away from the old days of the 1970s and 1980s when officers would line up gays in bars and "go fishing" for possible criminal charges.
"Brown and Watson and Nuchia and Bradford understood that the department was policing a diverse community," now-Mayor Parker said.
Parker credited Nuchia and Bradford for halting the "fishing" expeditions and instituting policy changes that enabled the department to recruit more gay cadets.
As she begins her mayoral tenure, Parker can accurately refer to herself the same way she did in the HPD history interview. She said she "helped start" the Montrose police storefront back in the 1980s. It was one of the first - if not the first - in the city.
More importantly, Annise Parker is the only Houston mayor who spent three years teaching sensitivity training at the police academy.
She also is the only one who can accurately claim that she served as a sturdy and consistent bridge builder between HPD and members of a community once considered the "them" in every emotional us-versus-them conflict that cropped up.
|
