(The Center Square) – Houston Mayor John Whitmire is continuing to clean up “the mess” he says he inherited from his predecessor and previous police chief. The latest includes 400,000 pounds of marijuana that’s been stored in Houston Police Department evidence rooms “that only the rats are enjoying,” Whitmire said a recent news conference.
“For many years we’ve recognized that the property room and the evidence kept there has not been given the attention and the priority that it needs,” Whitmire said. After he came into office last year, evidence oversight was first moved to forensics. Officers are now working to destroy evidence that’s no longer needed for cases.
“The problem has been so much evidence is kept in storage that is no longer needed that has no impact on the resolution of that charge, that conviction or even that innocence,” he said. Despite evidence no longer being needed due to cases being closed, more than 1.2 million pieces of evidence remain in storage.
Officials uncovered a “broken system of maintaining evidence,” Whitmire said. “We have 400,000 pounds of marijuana in storage. The rats are the only ones enjoying it.”
Houston’s new police chief, Noe Diaz, said, “For too long, HPD hasn’t been responsible for our property room. We have notes from a 1947 homicide that we still keep. … We have instances where we have kilos of cocaine from the ’90s where people have already been sent to prison, have already been released from the sentence and we still store it … at a tremendous cost to the community.”
The massive amount of evidence being stored, including 2,000 backpacks and 4,000 bicycles, limits space for new evidence, pulls HPD staff from the streets and creates a health and safety issue for staff, he said. “It costs a lot of money to destroy the evidence,” several million dollars, he said.
One of the biggest challenges facing the HPD is the volume of marijuana that is being stored dating back to the 1980s and 1990s. Texas Department of Public Safety has allowed them to use state facilities to destroy hundreds of pounds of marijuana, Diaz said.
Diaz showed bags of cocaine that were still being stored after a man was convicted and sentence to 20 years in prison in the 1990s and was already out of prison but the cocaine was still being stored. “This is not something we can continue to do as a professional police agency,” he said.
“Rodents, bugs, fungus, all kinds of things love drugs,” Houston Forensic Science Center President Peter Stout said. “It is a challenge storing large quantities of drugs.”
Despite HPD using professional exterminators, it’s been difficult to remove the rodents and other pests. “I mean, think about it, they’re drug addicted rats, they’re tough to deal with,” Stout said.
The news came one year after Whitmire was sworn into office to lead the largest city in the state. Within one week, he began reversing a political logjam that existed for years under the previous mayor, The Center Square reported. This included reaching an historic agreement with the Houston Fire Department after years of litigation with the previous administration and the HPD chief being forced to resign after more than 264,000 crime reports, including violent crimes and sexual assaults, weren’t investigated.
In his first year in office, Whitmire also proposed a new budget with no tax and fee increases while addressing a $160 million deficit he inherited. He also worked with the District Attorney’s Office to address public corruption and is still calling for whistleblowers to come forward.
