CODE COPS

Is a special police unit breaking criminal havens -- or just plain
harassing?

Mary Bentley chased gang members out of her Spring Branch neighborhood
almost four years ago, but she believed they had come back when she
turned down her narrow street on a dark night almost a month ago.
There was no gunfire or graffiti, no mysterious hand signals or
symbolic colors -- only a two-door car filled with teenage kids parked
in her path on the way to her modest frame house in Westview Terrace.

Bentley, a retired accountant who has lived in the same home for 30
years, was returning from an evening prayer meeting. The headlights of
her car crossed the idling auto that refused to move.

Rather than confront the occupants, Bentley put her car in drive,
steered into the shallow ditch and pulled around the car. She was
greeted by whoops and laughter from the crowd.

"They stood there and laughed at me," says Bentley. "It's the kind of
insolence and rudeness that you just don't find in normal neighborhood
children."

Even Bentley will admit that the incident, a car temporarily blocking
a street, and her suspicions of gang activity would hardly draw a
serious response from ordinary law enforcement. But her complaint
didn't go to regular officers. She took it to the Houston Police
Differential Response Team, a special and sometimes controversial
patrol unit that some critics brand as the Robocops.

Officers with DRT have broad power to target suspected criminals with
a varied arsenal of civil as well as criminal authority. In Bentley's
case, DRT targeted the house with the wayward youths. Those police
made regular surveillance runs and on-site inspections, snooping for
illegal activities as they checked for the simplest of city code
violations that could merit a citation.

They informed the landlord of the rent house of suspected drug
activity or prostitution. Within weeks the problem was gone. That's
because the occupants of the house were gone.

Such tactics have endeared DRT to many residents in the areas served
by the program. However, what its defenders view as dynamic
enforcement action has been labeled by opponents as nothing more than
heavy-handed police harassment.

Some members of the Houston Property Rights Association wonder if it
is the forerunner to a police-state mentality, an assault on
fundamental personal privacy rights.

Assistant Police Chief Jerry DeFoor, the creator of the four-year-old
DRT, says the team only follows the law. It issues tickets only for
valid -- if often petty -- violations in inspections that can yield
evidence of serious crimes. Repeated citations, he says, "are used as
leverage to get the criminal out of his lair."

Bentley calls DRT's work the broken-window strategy.

A minor infraction that is no more than nuisance, such as a broken
window or junk car, can be DRT's excuse to look for further
violations. The approach makes sense to Bentley, who says a growing
number of rental properties over the last decade has brought unwanted
crime to her older working-class neighborhood located just west of
Loop 610.

DeFoor began the program when he was a captain assigned to the North
Shepherd substation. DeFoor had been involved in neighborhood watch
and other HPD programs aimed at improving relations with residents.
His theory is that police can rid an area of most crime if they can
get rid of the kind of environment that breeds it.

He says the police storefront program officers initially planned to
take the omnibus role of the later DRT, but the work of storefront
officers evolved more toward public relations and community service,
giving grade-school lectures and being accessible at meetings.

"When you're a police officer out there, you're trying to improve the
quality of life," DeFoor says. "I wanted to train the officers to
think outside the normal parameters -- the expected calls and normal
reports -- to think about the bigger issues involved and identify the
ongoing problems. We needed to strategize and collaborate with
community people, and from that devise some way of intervening in
whatever issue was causing this crime issue."

The DRT pilot project began with nine officers taking on a wide range
of code enforcements. They serve as liaison to five state and federal
agencies that can prosecute serious environmental violations.

The project was started in a neighborhood behind Northline Mall and
eventually rolled out to five north Houston neighborhoods without
police storefronts. More than 200 officers have now completed the
36-hour training, and the program is being expanded citywide.

DeFoor says the record-keeping is only now being standardized, so
there are no statistics available. The only capital cost has been the
construction of a 43rd Street storefront office.

He cites several early successes. Harris County Probation Department
probationers were called out to cut a weeded public lot on T.C. Jester
north of Victory Drive, a place were burglars had hidden the discards
of stolen property, he says. That ended burglaries in the Inwood
Forest neighborhood, he says.

Bentley tells of pre-DRT police taking more than a year to build a
case against the occupants of rental property who were involved in
drugs and prostitution. In 1998, when similar problems reappeared, a
DRT unit needed only two weeks to rid the neighborhood of the
offenders, she says.

Councilman Bruce Tatro joined in the praise for the program. In a
message to Bentley, he said, "My personal experience has been that HPD
DRT works, and Neighborhood Protection is merely an ideal means of
becoming frustrated with the inability of the city to effectively
address code violations."

Not everyone is so enamored with the DRT program. Critics say DRT
allows police officers the wide latitude to be judge and jury by being
highly subjective in issuing citations for violations.

Lawn grass that is over nine inches high -- normally only a concern of
a community association, not a sworn police officer -- makes an
occupant subject to a citation. Officers have ticketed owners for
frayed wiring or exposed garbage. Other popular strategies include
issuing citations for illegally operating a repair shop or leaving
spilled oil on the ground. Or a business owner might get hit with
tickets for failing to have a fire extinguisher.

Some meetings of the Houston Property Rights Association have featured
regular protests about DRT tactics. Those critics complain that
regular city building inspectors will often work with owners to
informally solve problems, or will issue only warning tickets, but
that the police unit is purely in an adversary mode.

Beyond that are deeper concerns about the program and fundamental
constitutional rights. Inspectors have access to private property,
where they may find other violations or even get affidavits for later
use in obtaining criminal search warrants. One critic complained that
DRT is no more than a sanitized version of the old police practice,
largely abandoned decades ago, of hassling unwelcome residents into
moving elsewhere.

Allan Vogel, who owns a home in Westview Terrace, says he was
repairing his dilapidated house with a work crew when he got into an
argument with a building inspector. Later that day three DRT officers
arrived in a squad car and demanded his identification and birth date,
presumably for a background check.

When he hesitated, he says, one officer told him that "maybe a couple
of thousand dollars in tickets would get your attention." Officers
left without any action, but he says, it felt like "casual
intimidation."

Vogel compares DRT's tactics to past vagrancy laws that were
overturned by the courts. "They are often harassing people who are
especially vulnerable because they are poor," he says. Vogel fails to
see how police "should be proud of chasing down petty violations
instead of real crime."

He says the program amounts to "micromanagement" and "groupthink"
about how an individual homeowner should fix property. "They can stick
their foot in the door to intimate and threaten you in some cases."

DeFoor insists that the program's operations are aboveboard and
strictly legal. Officers do not act unless there is strong reason to
believe the location is being used for criminal activity, he says.

While DRT, and its targets, have kept a relatively low profile in the
initial years of the program, the units are setting their sights
beyond traditional criminal activity. Residents learned that DRT will
be diverting focus temporarily to crack down on local auto businesses
- -- used car dealers, auto repair shops, parts stores and salvage yards.

DeFoor estimated that hundreds of these businesses are operating
without licenses. Not only do some of these shops deal in stolen
vehicles, they also fail to pay sales taxes, licensing taxes and
franchise fees, DeFoor says.

To go from dope dealers to used Dodge dealers seems unusual for the
team tagged Robocops, but Councilman Tatro and DeFoor say it is warranted.

And Bentley would be betting on success for them.

"The majority of criminal types are very rude, very inconsiderate
people in the neighborhood," Bentley says. "It never occurs to them
that anyone is going to come down on them.... That's the benefit of
DRT."