220 use-of-force fatalities in Texas and 440 in California from 2005-2015 were not registered with their states as required by law
By Lise Olsen
Houston Chronicle
October 10, 2016
HOUSTON -- Hundreds of Texas and California police departments violated state laws that required them to report officer-involved shooting deaths in the past decade, according to a new Texas State University study.
Registries created by statute in both states failed to capture about 220 use-of-force fatalities in Texas and 440 in California from 2005-2015, the study found.
Two Texas State professors, Scott Bowman and Howard Williams, and co-author Jordan Taylor Jung developed the lists of reported fatalities by comparing each state's custodial death registries to fatal shooting cases culled from media reports, police news releases and other sources. In interviews, the Texas and California attorney general's offices and police officials in both states confirmed many cases were missing.
Texas and California are the only states to require the reporting of all in-custody deaths, including deaths in jails and officer-involved shootings. In each state, the attorney general's office collect reports. Failing to report a death at the hands of a police officer is a misdemeanor in Texas; there is no penalty in California.
Failure to report hundreds of deaths -- because police officials ignored or misunderstood the reporting laws -- has effectively undermined ongoing efforts to identify the causes of fatal police shootings and identify potential reforms, experts said.
"We're not really blaming anyone -- this is an incredibly complex problem," said Williams, who began his research after retiring as police chief in San Marcos last year. "But it's really hard for us to go back and change policy, improve training or purchase new equipment "when you simply lack the data to even know what's going on."
HPD missing 16 cases
More than 40 unreported Texas shooting deaths occurred in Harris County. Julian Ramirez, an assistant district attorney who heads the civil rights division of the Harris County District Attorney's Office, told the Houston Chronicle that he would review the list of unreported local deaths and consider whether enforcement action was warranted.
In response to the study, the county also has begun periodic reviews to use its own officer-involved shooting registry to remind agencies to file required reports to the Texas Attorney General's Office, he said.
The Houston Police Department had the most unreported cases of any Texas departments, with 16 fatalities missing from its custodial death registry. Among the missing deaths were those of two mentally ill people shot and killed in 2007.
One, a 42-year-old woman, was shot to death after entering police headquarters on Travis Street at 2 a.m. with a knife. She began stabbing herself before allegedly charging toward an officer with the cry: "Shoot me, kill me. I want to end this." The other unreported case involved a schizophrenic man whose mother claimed she pleaded with officers not to fire, but "they didn't listen."
In a statement, HPD officials said they would work with the district attorney's office and, if appropriate, rectify missing cases from 2006 to 2015."Because of the timeline involved, this effort will require retrieval of cases from archive and a personal inspection of the file," the department said.
The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department and the Fresno Police Department failed to report the most officer-involved shooting deaths of any California agencies, an analysis of Texas State data shows. After reviewing a list of its 34 missing cases, Nicole Nishida, an L.A. County sheriff's spokeswoman, said the department had failed to file any required reports from 2006 to 2011 because of a "clerical error" related to a change in a reporting form. But the agency then failed to report four more deaths in 2013 and 2014, records show.
"We are currently undertaking efforts to systematically update the data to the (California Department of Justice) following their reporting protocol," she said in an email.
Amanda Woog, a University of Texas-based researcher who founded the Texas Justice Initiative to publish and distribute information on all of the state's 7,000 custodial deaths from 2005 to 2015, independently reviewed and confirmed Texas State's findings. She said she hopes that 139 Texas agencies with one or more missing cases will quickly address the flaws.
"In order to obtain a full picture of how and why people die in the hands of law enforcement we have to have a complete data set," she said.
In addition to requiring reports on use-of-force and in-custody death, both California and Texas also recently passed new laws requiring departments to report all shooting incidents, whether those shot survive or die. In Texas, the new police shooting law took effect in 2015 and the attorney general's office has contacted all departments and tried to boost compliance with both laws, said Kayleigh Lovvorn, an office spokeswoman. But enforcement falls to individual district attorney's offices.
Nothing 'malicious'
The Texas State study cited a dozen fatalities unreported by the Harris County Sheriff's Office. One of those involved the 2015 death of a 24-year-old shot by an off-duty deputy outside the Chapa nightclub in northwest Houston.
A sheriff's spokesman, Ryan Sullivan, said the homicide happened in Houston and was investigated by HPD. But under Texas law, the officer's employer generally files a custodial death report and the sheriff's office did not do so. Sullivan said that was the only report that had not been filed under Sheriff Ron Hickman, who took office in May 2015.
Brenda Gonzalez, a spokesman for the California Attorney General's Office, said via email that the office already has been asking police agencies to file missing reports as part of a new OpenJustice data portal initiative, but she emphasized that California's custodial death law has "no explicit enforcement mechanism."
In all, 180 California different police agencies failed to file reports on citizens shot and killed by police. Fresno Deputy Chief Robert Nevarez pledged that his department would belatedly provide missing custodial death reports for 24 deaths. He said analysts in his agency unintentionally misinterpreted state law for years, wrongly assuming it applied only to jail deaths and not officer-involved shootings.
"At this time, it doesn't look like anything intentional or malicious -- it was an interpretation of what should have been reported," Nevarez said.
More than 100 missing cases in each state involved small departments. One unreported fatality involved a man killed by a Houston SWAT sniper in the suburb of Jacinto City.
Jacinto City Police Chief Joe Ayala said he summoned HPD for backup after a domestic incident escalated into a shootout. Afterward, there was a mix-up about which agency should report the death.
But in both California and Texas, so many cases went unreported that it is hard to explain away the failures on misunderstandings, researchers said. Some departments "could intentionally be trying to keep some narratives from getting out or hiding the fact that they have a large number," Bowman said.
Williams and Bowman are continuing to press for more information. Both seek to move beyond statistics to study cases more deeply and devise recommendations to avoid shootings, particularly of the unarmed and of the mentally ill.
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