PART 2 OF A TWO-PART SERIES

HOUSTON -- The goal is simple:  Cool down hot spots for crime, certain neighborhoods, by blanketing that area with cops.

But leading criminologist Professor Larry Hoover says the technique is “very risky”.

Hoover is the director of the Police Research Center at Sam Houston State University. He’s been studying CRUs or crime response units deployed in cities like Chicago, Dallas, and Houston.

So why is there a risk?

“The danger with these crime response units is overzealous enforcement,” Hoover said.

“The danger is pressure on these units to produce arrests” where the emphasis becomes the “quantity of arrests, not quality of arrests,” he said.

Consider what the 11 News Defenders observed in a ride-a-long with the Houston Police Department's own CRU:  Citizens stopped, cuffed, and searched for things like riding a bicycle without a light or even jaywalking.

In addition, 11 News obtained internal HPD e-mails, where a sergeant told his supervisor regarding officers in the CRU: “They are running and gunning just to keep their stats up without regard to quality cases.”

But HPD assistant chief Kirk Munden said that claims is unsubstantiated.

“I investigated it, and found that to be untrue,” Munden said.

In fact, Munden said Houstonians should be proud of the CRU.

“We need to applaud them for what they’re doing,” he said.

He also claims citizens welcome or ask for the presence of the CRU in their neighborhood.

“There’s a lot of crime going on, there are problems that the community has asked us to address,” Munden said.

But Pastor Brian Allen, of the Miracle Land Church in Southeast Houston, tells a different story.

“You don’t have to shake down every single person you see to do that,” Allen said.

Allen is someone HPD suggested with speak with as he did indeed ask for and receive help from them in ridding vagrants urinating on Church property.

“There’s nothing wrong with having a special unit”, he said.

But the Pastor said he is also disturbed by some of the CRU’s aggressive tactics, something he had just become aware of.

“Are we going to mistreat people? Are we going to harass people?” Allen questioned.

“Yes we want the problem cleaned up, but we don’t want people’s rights violated in doing the cleaning up,” he said.

But HPD stands behind petty stops for things like jaywalking—saying they can lead to arrests for weapons and drugs.

“They use legitimate probable-cause to conduct criminal investigations,” Munden said.

“They’re arresting lots of felons and they’re doing a good job at it.”

That’s true, but there’s a catch: Most of those arrests are for minor narcotics cases and they result in little jail time.

11 News analyzed nearly a thousand CRU cases and the median jail sentence was just 90 days. Add in good behavior, and criminals could be back out on the street in 45 days.

www.cjcenter.org/college

CRU Expert Weighs In: Larry Hoover, PhD is Director of the Police Research Center at Sam Houston State University and has studied crime response units nationwide, including Dallas, Chicago, and currently Houston’s Crime Reduction Unit.
WHAT WORKS
THE DANGERS
ANOTHER LOOK: CHICAGO P.D.
DOCUMENT: Research Summary

“They’re back out again in terms of that revolving door,” criminologist Hoover said.

Hoover explained how the CRU method is supposed to work.

“What you’re attempting to do here is to deter serious crime by making arrests for petty offenses.”

Hoover said his research of CRUs in other cities shows in the long run such a method sometimes reduces major crime by 20 percent. But once again, there is a danger.

“It is also a high risk form of policing. There’s always a risk of crossing constitutional lines or community standards,” Hoover said.