4.21.24 – Newsmax
Houston police union leaders have warned the city’s safety is jeopardized by criminal suspects who’ve been freed on bond amid an ongoing shortage of police officers.
In an interview, Houston Police Officers’ Union Executive Director Ray Hunt told Fox News “I have never in my lifetime – and I’m a lifelong Houstonian – seen this many suspected murderers and capital murderers who are walking the streets of Houston out on multiple bonds.”
“I would not let my wife or my kids walk down the streets of Houston at midnight under any circumstances,” he said. “It is not safe in major cities in 2024, and it’s not safe here.”
Houston police department data showed that in January, there were 5,187 officers — 2.2 officers for 1,000 residents, ABC News reported earlier this month.
“We’re in a perfect storm right now,” union President Douglas Griffith told Fox. “We had the George Floyd come down. We can’t hire. We can’t retain our officers. The people are leaving left and right.”
Hunt argued: “Who in the heck wants to be a police officer in 2024 when every single thing that they’re doing is going to be second-guessed … I could not encourage any of my family to come be a police officer in 2024 with the situation that’s going on.”
Griffith asserted the Houston City Council was alerted about department shortages a decade ago in the wake of a Sam Houston State University report showing an alarming city shortage of officers.
Hunt told the outlet the report noted that in 2014, “if Houston was staffed like Chicago, we would have 9,602 sworn officers. At that time we had about 5,600 — 4,000 short. Now we have just over 5,000. We’ve already lost officers since then.”
“A survey of investigative division commanders revealed excessively high numbers of cases with leads that were not investigated in 2013 due to lack of personnel,” Hunt argued. “Everyone knew that we were shorthanded, and now everyone wants to say, Wow, these officers are lazy. They’re not doing your job. Completely untrue.”
Griffith told the outlet the court system is also to blame for “not doing their job.”
“Their contention is that we can’t hold somebody. We have to give everybody a bond, yes, the first time. Once they violate that bond, they can be held in jail until they go to court again,” he told the outlet.
“And we get people on six, seven, eight, nine bonds at one time. And that’s a problem that we have to fix in the courts. And with the DA’s office, you try to make sure that these public offenders can’t be continued to roam the streets and victimize our citizens.”