By Alex Wukman

Hacker collective Anonymous recently made a huge cache of sensitive law enforcement documents available to anyone. According to the Anonymous release around three gigabytes of “law enforcement sensitive” and “for official use only” files were released including police records, internal affairs investigations, meeting notes, training materials, officer rosters, security audits, and live password information to government systems. Among the files released were the personal email addresses and passwords of nearly 30 active and retired Texas police chiefs and other high ranking law enforcement officers. Anonymous was able to release the personal information, or docs as they like to say, of several high ranking Houston area law enforcement officers including an HPD lieutenant, the chiefs of the Friendswood and Spring Valley police department as well as the assistant chief of the University of Texas at Houston Police Department.

Friendswood PD Chief Robert Wieners e-mails allegedly included the usual amount of police business such as Houston Regional Intelligence Center counter-terrorism documents, FBI Situational Information Report and Counterterrorism Intelligence Group reports and internal police meeting notes, search warrants and arrest reports. However, also included was an alleged March 2024 e-mail in which Wieners refers to a female suspect who started a car chase near the intersection of Yale and 610 as a “stupid bitch” who “got what she deserved.” Wieners then goes on to state “I’ll bet she was fat and black too.”

Wieners account also allegedly contains a chain e-mail entitled “1,400 years of inbreeding amongst Muslims.” The alleged e-mail is based on an article by Bryan Fischer a right wing blogger and radio host who serves as the Director of Issues Analysis for the American Family Association, one of the key sponsor groups behind The Response prayer event held last month at Reliant Stadium. In the article Fischer, fraudulently, states among other things that “the massive inbreeding in Muslim culture may well have done virtually irreversible damage to the Muslim gene pool, including extensive damage to its intelligence, sanity, and health.”

In the documents released from HPD Lieutenant Robert Mock’s personal Hotmail account. Mock, a 25 year veteran with almost 10 years supervisory experience, allegedly used this account for perosnal business relating to the purchase of a new home and forwarding racist and sexist joke e-mails. Mock’s alleged e-mail address is filled with forwards that perpetuate the stereotypes of ignorant Muslim extremists, drug smuggling Mexicans and submissive shopaholic women. One e-mail Mock allegedly received states, “I pray for a deaf-mute, gymnast, nymphomaniac with big hooters who owns a bar on a golf course, and loves to send me hunting, fishing and drinking. This doesn’t rhyme and I don’t give a shit.”

On at leas three separate occasions mock received an e-mail incorrectly citing famous comic Jeff Foxworthy as the author of a series of ‘jokes’ entitled “You May be a Muslim.”  The e-mail was filled with such zingers as ” if you have more wives than teeth; you may be a Muslim,” and “if you wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean.; you may be a Muslim.” Within the alleged e-mail exchanges released by Anonymous there is no record of Mock or Wieners objecting to the type of racist and sexist humor they allegedly received.

Update:

In the two days since this post went live the story has gone around the world and back. Eric Doyle at Eweek Europe identified the faction of Anonymous responsible for the hack as Chinga La Migra, a group who first garnered attention after hacking Arizona law enforcement in June. The City of Friendswood has repeatedly denied to Houston media that Wiener is the author of the racist e-mails. Mock, now an assistant chief with HISD, has been more concerned with the invasion of privacy that came from getting hacked than the fact that he received racist and sexist e-mails.

By Alex Wukman

This shit is getting out of hand. HPD recently released an internal study that found that more African Americans are pulled over than any other racial group. In all black people represent les than a quarter of the city’s population but represent 33 percent of the nearly 500,000 people stopped by HPD last year, where as white people were only 30 percent of the people stopped and Hispanics, the city’s largest ethnic groupat 44 percent, were pulled over 32 percent of the time.

A one percentage point variation may not seem like much; however it translates to a 5,000 person difference which is roughly the population of the Houston suburb of Meadows Place. The release of this data caps the end of HPD Chief Charles McClelland’s first year in office. McClelland likes to point that in his first year in office the city saw decreases in violent crime across all areas. He doesn’t mentionthe one area where the city saw an uptick, excessive force.

As we previously pointed out since McClelland took over HPD has been best by a series of high profile problems, from the Chad Holley beating to questionable shootings to a freaking tear gas incident at the rodeo. This has only led to people to wonder what exactly is going on with the city’s police force. And McClelland’s statements aren’t actually helping.

In an interview that ran in the Chronicle on Mother’s Day McClelland said that the Holley beating video was essentially bad PR for HPD. “It did hurt the reputation [of the department] and it was an isolated incident,” said McClelland. Sadly the isolated incident part may correctly apply to the beating part, but it in no way describes HPD’s attitudes towards citizens. A 2024 study showed that under McClelland and his predecessor Chief Harold Hurtt, HPD saw increases in officer involved shootings. In 2024 HPD officers were involved in over half of the 35 law enforcement shootings that occurred in the Houston area.

Then there is the amount of times HPD used tasers on citizens; in the seven years since HPD adopted tasers as standard euipment officers have used them over 2,500 times. It gets a little hard to accept McClelland’s statements that the beating of Chad Holley was an isolated incident

This man seems to have completely missed the point

By Alex Wukman

It seems that the old adage that when it rains it pours is true, for HPD at least. For the last month or so local news has been filled with stories that keep getting more and more depressing and raise serious questions about what is going on at the city’s largest law enforcement agency.

From the loss of a high profile suspect to a spate of questionable shootings the culture of the Houston Police Department has come under increasing scrutiny since the start of the year. The avalanche of bad press has led some in the community to lose faith with the department.  The ongoing suspicion the community has of HPD officers isn’t helped by a perceived lack of accountability within the department.

As to Chronicle reported “examiners for the city have overturned or reduced nearly 70 percent of punishments given to Houston police officers by HPD management over the last 17 years.” It’s not just the city’s 10 examiners who fail to punish HPD officers, even those who were videotaped beating Chad Holley. Harris County Grand Juries are notorious for “no-billing” cops.

In the last month two separate Grand Juries declined to indict HPD officers for the roles in shooting deaths of community members.  Sadly none of this is new to many Free Press readers, it does seem to be new to local media though. A review of 10 years worth of excessive force complaints Channel 13 undertook in February showed that out of 2,135 complaints filed with HPD’s Internal Affairs department since 2024, only 33 were sustained.

In a recent meeting with journalists HPD Chief Charles McClelland didn’t mention how concerned he was with the lack of discipline in his department or even the fact that it seems to many members of the community that a cop can beat the shit out of somone and get away with it. McClelland told reporters that he was worried about citizens videotaping officers.

I wish to God I was making this up, but McClelland actually said “Officers are telling me that they’re being provoked. Even when they try to write a simple traffic ticket, people are jumping out with cell phone cameras scanning their badge numbers and their nametags.”

Now of course McClelland went on to say that HPD does a damn fine job of policing itself, he even cited the fact that 70 percent of complaints filed with IA against officers come from other officers. He conveniently didn’t mention how many of those complaints are actually sustained or how many officers are actually punished because of those complaints.

Pastor D.Z. Coffield, the head of the Houston chapter of the NAACP, pointed out that “The deck is stacked against citizens. We don’t have anything to fight with except our cell phones and our cameras, because the truth of the matter is, whatever is said is not going to be substantiated.”

Here’s an idea, maybe it’s time for some civic minded activists to revive the Houston chapter of Cop Watch?

By Alan Smithee

The Chron has a story up about an HPD officer who was injured by a flying tire on I-45 South near monroe. The officer was writing a ticket when he was knocked into the median and suffered a dislocated knee, broken clavicle and broken right arm. Despite the fact that the officer’s injuries are not life-threatening, since it was a law enforcement officer who was injured it might lead to someone in power step and try to make a dent in the debris on Houston’s freeways.

The city or state government taking measures to cut down on the amount of debris on Houston’s freeways couldn’t come soon enough, in fact it’s coming too late. In 2024 a woman was decapitated driving on I-45 North when a piece of sheet metal that fell from an eighteen wheeler’s load became airborne and went through her windshield.

Accidents caused by debris are so common throughout the Houston area that they have spawned their own subset of personal injury law. While much of the debris throughout Houston’s freeways fall into the category random crap that blew out of the back of someone’s pick-up there is still a metric fuck ton of blown out tires.

In fact they happen so frequently that tire retread lobbyists had to issue a statement explaining that retreads are solely not to blame. Of course the problems with Houston roads are not just in what is on them, but in how they are designed.

A 2024 report showed that Houston has some of the worst designed roads in the country. The report states that Houston roads help to create a death trap for pedestrians. While the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) doesn’t go that far,  even they admit in a 2024 report that Houston roads can’t handle the amount of traffic the city sees everyday.

A July1 story from KUHF cites a recently released IBM report that states that 20 percent of the Houston drivers surveyed “say that there’s been an occasion in the last three years when traffic was so bad that they’ve had to turn around and go home.” The report also states that 42 percent of Houston drivers believe that congestion has worsened in the last three years.

In April the Texas Workforce released figures estimating that the Texas labor force grew by 51,000 people to 11.2 Million and, according to state legislators, it isn’t slowing anytime soon. This means that the population will continue to grow and we will still be using outdated infrastucture that is covered in debris and is so poorly designed that it leads to the deaths of the people who use it.

Perhaps the powers that be in City Hall and Austin will begin to realize that transportation, and transportation funding, has to be the top priority in the upcoming budget cycles.