Sometimes I read something in a news article and I have to do a double-take to consider whether the person being quoted is really capable of saying something like that.
Chief Diaz of the Houston Police Department is quoted as stating the following.
On Wednesday, Espinosa was removed from the City Council chambers after Diaz suggested Emmanuel may not have autism.
“Although the mother stated in this incident that Emmanuel was autistic, detectives reviewed the prior incidents and identified Emmanuel as not being autistic with any medical or cognitive issues,” Diaz said.
That last part didn’t sit very well with the head of FIEL. He lost his cool and had to be removed from the city council chamber.
My youngest child is autistic. I could have saved several thousand dollars by going to HPD to have his condition analyzed, rather than at Texas Children’s Hospital.
HPD needs to advertise that their detectives are specially trained to identify children or people who have certain mental conditions. Do they pay those detectives more?
Chief Diaz needs to pay those detectives thousands of dollars more and utilize them in the areas where they are supposedly the best, because solving crimes is not one of the strengths of HPD.
News out of Houston is compounding the issue of unsolved crimes after the Houston Police Department announced that, since 2016, its work on more than 264,000 incident reports had been paused using this code: “Suspended — Lack of Personnel.” Officers stopped investigating cases, even though many had substantial evidence.
HPD is quick to tell us most were property crimes, but too many of these dropped cases involved violence and victims — including 4,017 cases of adult sex crimes. To date, HPD has cleared, suspended or inactivated more than 85% of those. More outrageous was the subsequent discovery that 1,147 of those cases contained sexual assault kits with, so far, a confirmed 97 DNA links to other cases from known sexual predators. The investigation is ongoing.
I wonder if the council members and the mayor are considered experts, as they were supposedly given a video of an interview with Emmanuel.
