Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990: A Change Did Come.

Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990: A Change Did Come. By Dwight Watson. Centennial Series of the Association of Former Students. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. Pp. viii, 208. $44.00, ISBN 1-58544-437-5.)

Race and the Houston Police Department, 1930-1990: A Change Did Come tells the story of the U.S. police department that according to the author, in 1979 was the "national poster child for aberrant police behavior" (p. 129). Author Dwight Watson argues successfully that the Houston Police Department of 1990 had been significantly changed from the 1930s Jim Crow force. It was larger, was equipped with communications technology, and, at least since 1983, had been recruited, trained, and managed by one of the foremost police professionals of the twentieth century, Lee P. Brown. Brown began reorienting the force to serve, rather than simply control, the African American and Mexican American communities.

The monograph is organized chronologically, but the story is not one of steady progress. Focusing on the interplay of race relations and the police, Watson finds that repeated attempts to improve the department's effectiveness and reduce its reliance on excessive force were defeated by the ingrained rural traditions of Jim Crow. Enforcing segregation took priority over all other police functions. Black police officers, who had served in small numbers since Reconstruction, were harassed by white police, denied promotion, limited to patrolling black neighborhoods, and until 1959 barred from arresting any white person. This police conservatism, Watson argues, was increasingly a hindrance to the Houston elite's commitment to urban modernization.

Watson makes effective use of city documents, newspaper reports, and his interviews with participants to chronicle the institutional and political history of a force that was chronically understaffed, poorly trained, and afflicted by endemic corruption and stunning brutality. His descriptions of the contradictions besetting black police officers are particularly insightful. Eschewing sensationalism, he provides evenhanded accounts of the armed police assault on students at Texas Southern University in 1967, the 1971 police killing of a twenty-one-year-old Black Panther Party activist, the 1975 and 1977 police killings of two white teenagers, and the 1977 police killing of Jose Campos Torres. These deaths galvanized grassroots political organizing in Houston against police brutality and in favor of a civilian review board.

Watson argues, however, that it was the federally mandated change in the system for electing city council members that finally doomed Jim Crow in the police department. Changing from at-large elections to a combination of district and at-large elections for city council meant that African Americans and Mexican Americans had new political power in the city. Katherine J. Whitmire, the city's first female mayor, took the decisive step of hiring an outside professional, Lee P. Brown, as police chief.

Race and the Houston Police Department. 1930-1990 is a rare addition to the literature on police history, which has mostly neglected southern cities. While the police department takes historical shape, however, the racial communities remain amorphous in Watson's narrative. His analysis of political divisions among blacks in Houston rests too often on national generalities. The Mexican American communities are not brought into the story until the 1970s, although the author mentions that by the 1930s there was a "Latin Squad" for surveillance (p. 111). Among the whites of Houston, Watson refers to a powerful elite, but he does not analyze their understanding of race or address how it impacted their policies. It is an indication of the author's success that the reader is left wanting to know more.

GERDA W. RAY

University of Missouri, St. Louis