Houston Chronicle by St. John Barned-Smith July 1, 2020
HPD narcotics audit shows sloppiness, lack of oversight, and hundreds of errors
Unauthorized informant payments. Missing case review sheets. Incomplete offense reports. Hundreds of other administrative errors by undercover Houston Police narcotics officers.
When internal auditors probed the Narcotics Division’s street level drug-suppression squads, they found widespread sloppiness and lax supervision.
The document — which the Houston Police Department released in a post on Twitter after a series of critical stories in the Chronicle about the department’s lack of transparency and after District Attorney Kim Ogg announced new charges against six former police officers tied to the Harding Street raid — is the widest internal examination, to date, of problems within the police department’s embattled narcotics division.
Chief Art Acevedo ordered the investigative audit after last year’s Harding Street drug raid, which ended with the deaths of homeowners Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle. Four officers were shot, including Gerald Goines, the officer who led the operation. Goines was later accused of lying about the drug buy he based the operation on and is charged with felony murder and other crimes. His former partner, Steven Bryant, faces charges of tampering with a government record.
Acevedo repeatedly declined to release the document publicly, despite calls to do so, until Wednesday night. He said in a later tweet Wednesday night that Ogg’s office had ask that he withhold the audit as recently as last week.
More:
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/HPD-narcotics-audit-shows-sloppiness-lack-of-15381193.php
