"PROFESSIONAL COURTESY" WITHIN THE POLICE SERVICE AT WORK

The stores at Houston’s Baybrook Mall have agreed on a policy that calls for all shoplifters who steal $50 or more of merchandize to be arrested and charged with theft, without exception. And that’s the way it’s been until one of the thieves turned out to be a police captain’s 17-year-old daughter, an adult under Texas law.

Normally, when shoplifters are caught by store security personnel, they are taken to a holding room where the necessary paper work is completed while waiting for the arrival of Houston police officers who will transport the thief to jail or to a juvenile detention facility. Usually two HPD officers handle that chore.

On May 14, 2009, security personnel from the Sears store at Baybrook mall detained a 17-year-old woman after they caught her stealing $69.94 worth of clothing. When the Houston police officers arrived she must have informed them that she was the daughter of HPD Capt. Victor Rodriguez because more officers showed up at the holding room. And sometime after that Capt. Rodriguez arrived in uniform at the room now packed with his thieving daughter, police officers, Sears security personnel and a team of managers from all over the mall that are present during every shoplifting detention.

Capt. Rodriguez tried to talk the Sears mangers into letting him take his daughter home. The managers did just that because, as they told investigative reporter Stephen Dean from Houston’s Ch. 2 TV station, they felt intimidated by the presence of the uniformed Rodriguez and all the HPD officers.

This case is an enlightening example of "professional courtesy" within the police service at work. When those HPD officers found out that they were faced with arresting the daughter of a brother officer, a captain no less in this case, they must have notified a supervisor because why would more officers arrive at the scene if they hadn’t done that? And then someone had to call her father. Rodriguez was not assigned to the Clear Lake police station which handles Baybrook mall arrests. The good captain is in charge of HPD’s property room which is located in downtown Houston, about 25 miles from the mall.

What can be said about this act of "professional courtesy?" For starters, it unnecessarily tied up several cops for quite a while on a simple shoplifting case, even though HPD has a shortage of officers. Then a captain left his assigned duty and sped some 25 miles in a police car so he could keep his daughter from being arrested. Finally, one thief ended up being treated differently than all the other thieves who have been caught up under similar circumstances. As a matter of fact, only 20 minutes after Rodriguez was allowed to take his daughter home, Sears security personnel detained a 14-year-old girl for shoplifting and HPD officers then transported her to a juvenile detention facility.

Not surprisingly, HPD and the city tried to cover up the way this whole case was handled. Stephen Dean has revealed that an official HPD spokesman contacted him on behalf of the department and asked that the entire incident not be reported on any newscast, describing it as a "personal and private family matter." According to Dean, the city of Houston Legal Department also took the unusual step of filing paperwork with the Texas Attorney General in Austin, asking that the basic police report of the shoplifting incident be withheld from release. Unfortunately for HPD's image, someone at the department slipped Dean a copy of the report.

A day after being contacted by Dean, Sears filed a theft charge against the captain’s daughter. HPD has started an internal affairs investigation, but only after the matter became public. And you can bet that Internal Affairs will be trying to find out who slipped Dean that report.

Capt. Rodriguez maintains he did nothing wrong in persuading HPD officers and mall personnel to let him take his daughter home. "I did what any parent would do." That may be so, but unlike any other parent, Rodriguez was acting under the color of authority while in uniform, and that simply made it wrong.

And that’s why the police concept of "professional courtesy" is a gross perversion of the professional courtesy practiced within the medical and legal professions. There was absolutely nothing professional about the police procedures in this case.