© 2024 Texas Public Radio
Real. Reliable. Texas Public Radio.
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Houston Police Say Crime Went Down During Harvey. Is Looting A Myth?

Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo.
Jorge Sanhueza-Lyon/KUT News
Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo.

From Texas Standard.

Two months after the storm, there may be cause to rethink what many of us thought we knew about Harvey. Most folks assume that during times of disaster you do see major spikes in crime, but that’s actually not what happened in Houston.

Robert Downen, a reporter for the Houston Chronicle, has found some surprising numbers that counter a common narrative.

After digging through Houston Police Department data, Downen found that crime actually went down on August 27, the worst day of flooding. “Police wrote only 50 reports for major violent and non-violent crimes,” he says. “Which is down from the average 300 written the same day in 2016.”

The dip in crime might surprise some of us, but not Houston’s Police Chief Art Acevedo, who calls Houston a chronically “under-policed” city.

“[He] credited it to kind of this ‘all-hands-on-deck’ approach that his department had,” Downen says. “He said it was the first time that Houston really had officers deployed across the city, and they also had a variety of other police officers from other departments who kind of came in to augment where they could not get to in the city.”

There’s a lot of talk about looting after storms, but it turns out, lower crime rates might actually be the norm.

“The point should be, we shouldn’t just assume that these things are inextricably linked, he says. “There’s this idea that crime is always going to follow storms, and that is frankly – according to most research – not really true. In fact, what most researchers actually say is that there’s this certain sense of goodwill and altruism in communities that actually helps deter violence and other crimes in the wake of these things.”

Written by Jen Rice.

Copyright 2020 KUT 90.5. To see more, visit KUT 90.5.

Rhonda is the newest member of the KUT News team, joining in late 2013 as producer for KUT's new daily news program, The Texas Standard. Rhonda will forever be known as the answer to the trivia question, “Who was the first full-time hire for The Texas Standard?” She’s an Iowa native who got her start in public radio at WFSU in Tallahassee, while getting her Master's Degree in Library Science at Florida State University. Prior to joining KUT and The Texas Standard, Rhonda was a producer for Wisconsin Public Radio.