"Houston Blue" offers the first comprehensive history of one of
the nation's largest police forces, the Houston Police Department.
Through extensive archival research and more than one hundred
interviews with prominent Houston police figures, politicians, news
reporters, attorneys, and others, authors Mitchel P. Roth and Tom
Kennedy chronicle the development of policing in the Bayou City
from its days as a grimy trading post in the 1830s to its current
status as the nation's fourth largest city. Combining the skills of
historian, criminologist, and journalist, Roth and Kennedy
reconstruct the history of a police force that has been both
innovative and controversial.
Readers will be introduced to a colorful and unforgettable cast
of police chiefs and officers who have made their mark on the
department. Prominent historical figures who have brushed shoulders
with Houston's Finest over the past 175 years are also featured,
including Houdini, Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, O. Henry,
former Texas Ranger Frank Hamer, hatchet wielding temperance leader
Carrie Nation, the Hilton Siamese Twins, blues musician Leadbelly,
oilman Silver Dollar Jim West, and many others.
The Houston Police Department has been at the cutting edge of
police innovation. It was one of the first departments in the South
to adopt fingerprinting as an identification system and use the
polygraph test, and under the leadership of its first African
American police chief, Lee Brown, put the theory of neighborhood
oriented policing into practice in the 1980s. The force has been
embroiled in controversy and high profile criminal cases as well.
Among the cases chronicled in the book are the Dean Corll and Dr.
John Hill murders; controversial cases involving the department's
crime lab; the killings of Randy Webster and Joe Campos Torres; and
the Camp Logan, Texas Southern University, and Moody Park
Riots.
Roth and Kennedy reveal that most of modern Houston's issues and
problems are rooted in many of the challenges that faced police
officers in the nineteenth century. Anyone who drives in Houston
will not be surprised that the city's reputation for poor drivers
was already cemented in the 1860s, when ordinances were passed to
protect pedestrians from horse-drawn carriages. Likewise, the
department's efforts to overcome funding and manpower shortages,
and political patronage, are a continuing battle that began a
century ago. In the end it is a story about the men and women in
blue and the role played by the Houston Police Officers Union in
creating a modern 21st-century police force from its frontier
roots.
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