Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990: A Change Did Come (review)

In the early twentieth century, the rapidly developing city of Houston served as a magnet for rural poor hoping to improve themselves on the ground floor of a growing economy. This was particularly true of African Americans, who saw no future in the rural South and migrated to the city not only from rural Texas but from adjacent southern states. Rapid growth put a strain on the city's public services, particularly its police department.

The Houston Police Department's effort to maintain the status quo and its ultimate entry into the modern era are the themes of Dwight Watson's Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930–1990: A Change Did Come. Although there have been many books about ethnic issues and urban law enforcement, they are either generic or deal with more famous cases elsewhere; Watson's book is devoted exclusively to Houston. For those who want to pursue the matter further, his work is enhanced by an introduction that is almost a bibliographical essay of works on race as they involve urbanization and law enforcement.

Reading between the lines, one sees that Houston itself was in the throes of an identity crisis. It was southern, yet it was not. It was bound to maintain the customs of the South, yet, with its rapid growth, it could not. Blacks were excluded from the public mainstream but were welcomed (or at least accepted), in the local economy in positions ranging from low-end employees to valued customers. Business welcomed the influx of unskilled labor to counter unionization, while the public sector looked on it as a liability that created the need for new services.

Amid these changes, the Houston Police Department was expected to maintain the racial and social status quo of the Old South. As Watson notes, the department was "the gatekeeper of the social order" (p. 38) and kept the gate long after demographic and economic growth, and slow, grudging social readjustment forced changes elsewhere in the city. The custom of hiring, firing, promoting, and demoting based on political patronage reinforced the HPD's view of itself, prompting it to oppose any effort at modernization or professionalization. Demands for reform by ordinary citizens, who—ultimately—are its employers, were viewed as subversive.

Watson chronicles the social, economic, and political background that made the HPD the bastion of obsolete values. He shows that while the rest of the city slowly and inexorably changed, partly under federal mandate, and partly to meet its own economic and social needs, the department became more intractable, until it functioned as an autonomous duchy, subject to no control but its own.

The HPD's cavalier attitude toward blacks extended to other minorities, culminating in the beating and drowning death of Jose Campos Torres in 1977. Watson shows that this galvanized the erstwhile fragmented Hispanic community and introduced triracialism into the Houston political scene. It also unified a citizenry that was fed up with the department's determination to block change. The showdown came with the appointment of Atlanta public safety director Lee P. Brown as police chief. Brown had two strikes against him—he was an outsider and he was black. Yet, with the backing of Mayor Kathleen Whitmire and the city's black council members he began the slow, often bitter, process of change. As Watson notes in his title, "a change did come," and by 1999, "HPD could claim that it had had a second minority police chief, one woman as chief, and one judge as chief" (p. 152).