Black people in Houston are 22% of population yet account for 63% of police use of force deaths

The officers who cause physical harm while on duty are likelier to be white. Out of 281 cases, around 49 percent were injuries caused by white cops, only 2 percent by Black ones.

Reports indicate that the homicides and excessive force used by Houston police officers disproportionately affect its Black residents.

According to The Houston Chronicle, data from the Houston Police Department’s transparency hub, a publicly accessible online database, reveals that Black residents are 22 percent of Houston’s population, yet are 72 percent of people who have had severe bodily injuries at the hands of police. Blacks make up 63 percent of Houston residents who have died as a result of police use of force since 2020.

A total of 28,945 occurrences of Houston police use of force were reported in that time period, and nearly 55 percent of those incidents involved Black citizens.

“For us to be targeted 72 percent of the time shows the major biases and racism that we’ve been trying to get away from since slavery supposedly has ended,” said RoShawn Evans, the organizing director of Pure Justice, a Houston-based nonprofit aimed at reforming organizations that perpetuate injustices.

Police officials responded to inquiries about the city’s use of force statistics by stating that discrimination, including racial profiling, is forbidden and that the department would immediately investigate any claims of it. They noted that anyone who feels they have been the target of force due to racial or other profiling should file a report.

Evans questioned that strategy, noting that locals frequently don’t trust the police to conduct their investigations and contending that the procedure of filing a complaint is daunting because it often necessitates visiting police stations.

The officers who cause substantial physical harm while on duty are likelier to be white. According to the data, of the 281 cases in the database, around 49 percent were injuries caused by white cops, as opposed to only 2 percent by Black ones.

​​The figures are in sharp contrast to the department’s diversity figures, which show that about 24 percent of the department’s 6,147 employees are Black, exceeding the citywide population by 2 percentage points. Thirty-five percent are white, exceeding the citywide population of 23 percent; 31 percent are Hispanic or Latino, lagging the citywide population of 46 percent, and 8 percent are Asian, exceeding the citywide population of 6 percent. 

Since 2022, there have been 7,062 reported cases of use of force, and according to the data, almost 54 percent of those incidents involved Black residents.

A white police officer killed Jalen Randle, a 29-year-old Black man, in Houston in April 2022. His mother, Tiffany Rachal, questioned why the Memphis Police Department acted so quickly and looked into the Black police officers involved in Tyre Nichols’ killing but failed to do the same when the culprit was white.

“Why is it always, when it comes down to white men,” she asked, “you have to wait for the video to determine whether something is wrong or right?”

In April, a Harris County grand jury decided not to charge Shane Privette in the fatal shooting of her son.

In recent years, law enforcement officials have started to address these systemic problems, for example, by attempting to diversify the police department’s ranks and implementing new training to prepare officers for what they might encounter.

Douglas Griffith, head of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, is among the specialists who believe that diversifying Houston’s police department would give administrators a greater understanding of the people they serve.

However, Griffith noted that due to contemporary conditions, police are pushed to address social issues that other organizations could better handle. He pointed out that the department’s records show that police are routinely assigned to patrol high-crime areas, which commonly also have high poverty percentages.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau, the poverty rate for Black Americans was around 19.5 percent in 2020, compared with 8.2 percent for non-Hispanic white Americans.

Professor Howard Henderson of Texas Southern University concurred largely with Griffith’s argument and expressed that use-of-force results would change if elected officials focused on problems other than policing, such as better social services, access to a safety net and mental health treatment.

As a mental health practitioner, activist Vanesia Johnson has spoken with cops who have brought up the stigma of seeking mental health help.

“You have unprotected communities with no power, and you have police going in with a whole different approach based upon their experience and understanding,” said Johnson, The Chronicle reported, “it’s a recipe for dehumanizing people and causing further harm.”

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