Campbell: Acrimony between Chief, officers nothing new
Chronicle reader representative James Campbell expands on an earlier blog post in his weekly column for the Chronicle today:
LONGTIME residents of Houston have seen this dance before: Mayor hires a new police chief — Harold Hurtt — from out of town. On arrival, the new chief and the police union join hands for a brief chorus of Kumbaya and pledge cooperation in the interest of maintaining law and order and keeping the citizenry safe from the bad guys.
Then the honeymoon ends. Katrina happens and brings New Orleans' bad to mix with our bad. Crime seems out-of-control — or at least, in some areas. Manpower is lacking. The already sagging officer morale sours more when the chief issues a decree that has more to do with professionalism than fighting crooks. The backbiting starts. The union claims the troops have no confidence in the chief. The chief claims the union's charges are unfounded, and so on and so on ... To borrow a Yogi-ism, "It's déjà vu all over again."
The rest of the article recaps past tension between police chiefs and officers in Houston, with the implication that the current acrimony is nothing new.
The one thing missing from the column is any assessment of the past performance of the Chronicle editorial board, which has been strongly supportive of the current bumbling police chief and runs an editorial today that parrots Chief Hurtt's comments from a few days ago (it doesn't take into account the Chief's new babysitter, since that happened on Friday afternoon and "today's" editorial was surely written by then). Has the editorial board been as supportive of other police chiefs under fire? That would have been a handy addition to Campbell's column.
Posted by Kevin Whited @ 07/30/06 04:36 PM | Print | Comments (2)
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