A Houston Police Department policy requiring officers to make at least one traffic stop per shift was formally rescinded last week after some City Council members said they never voted for it and appeared unaware it was still on the books.
City officials said a “general order” was given in 2022 encouraging Houston patrol officers to pull over one motorist per day. The policy was enacted during a crime wave of catalytic converter theft and fraudulent paper license tags during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Council Member Tiffany Thomas said.
Mayor John Whitmire repeatedly told members of the public at a May 28 council meeting that the measure was a directive of a previous administration led by former Police Chief Troy Finner, who reported to the late former Mayor Sylvester Turner.
“Because this was brought to our attention, it was rescinded this morning,” Whitmire said in the meeting. “It’s not the practice of the City of Houston under this current police chief or my administration.”
Speakers at the council meeting claimed that a “high concentration of people of color are being pulled over for no reason at all,” but the council didn’t need convincing that the policy was no longer a good one. State law prohibits quotas for citations but not for traffic stops.
Prior to the meeting, Police Chief Noe Diaz said in a memorandum to Mayor Whitmire that the quota directive no longer aligns with best practices for patrol.
“Effective immediately, we are rescinding this directive,” the May 28 memo states. “New guidance will be distributed to all patrol stations, emphasizing officer discretion.”
The City Council supported the chief’s decision, effectively outlawing the quota. Council members Thomas, Edward Pollard, and Tarsha Jackson put the item on the council agenda and said they were encouraged to do so by community advocates. Pollard pointed out that no current council members ever voted on a quota policy.
Thomas, who was elected in 2020, said the policy was implemented to address safety concerns raised by residents who wanted increased police patrols because of rampant illegal activity. Since then, license plate reader cameras and other safety measures have been installed throughout the city so the traffic stop quotas are no longer needed, Thomas said.
“We get to revisit and interrogate the systems and the policies and the ordinances that we have on the books and change them at the right time,” she said. “We have done that with the influence of [community] organizations and frankly with the support of the police union.”
Joy Davis and other members of the advocacy group RISE Houston said “non-safety traffic stops” are purported to be routine encounters but are also “about surveillance, control and intimidation.”
“For folks already known to law enforcement because of their advocacy, their organization, and their refusal to stay silent, these stops become tools of harassment and tools of retaliation,” Davis said.
Christopher Rivera, outreach coordinator for Texas Civil Rights Project and a member of RISE Houston, said traffic stops increased 27 percent from 2022 to 2023, with non-safety traffic stops like broken tail lights or tinted windows increasing by 49 percent.
“Traffic stops can escalate from routine to very dangerous for Black, brown and low-income individuals,” Rivera said. “When we took a look at the racial disparities of these types of stops, we know that Black drivers were searched, stopped, arrested and experienced use of force at higher rates compared to other racial demographics.”
Racial profiling data from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement shows that of HPD’s 2024 traffic stops, 34 percent involved Black drivers, 32 percent involved Hispanic drivers and 30 percent involved white drivers.
Council Member Thomas said every council member should be concerned about policies that negatively impact minority communities. She said she gets anxious when she sees an officer in her rearview mirror because she’s been driving with a cracked windshield.
“We often say at this horseshoe that our public safety officers risk their lives every day,” she said. “But no one’s talking about the anxiety and the risk of the people on the other side. We support law enforcement officers to the point that we value them with a pay raise — a meaningful pay raise — but we also want to focus their time and their effort on the things that matter: property crimes, violent crimes, domestic violence, you name it. These are the serious issues in our city.”
