Claims of excessive force and a culture of silence plague Harris County Jail as officers face allegations of abuse and cover-ups in this KHOU 11+ investigation.
It’s a warm morning in Houston and Elton Spicer wipes his bald head with a cloth. He’s elbow deep in an antique oven, scrubbing away years of grime.
Officers entered Spicer’s cellblock a short time later, prompting Spicer to take off his shirt. He said he did so fearing officers would deploy oleoresin capsicum, or “pepper” spray. But in use of force reports, detention officers took it a different way, writing inmates were “removing their shirts and getting ready to fight any officer that entered the cellblock.”inmates inside the cell block, jail surveillance video shows.
Then, Spicer was dragged into the hallway with blood and pepper spray covering his face. He said he still has loose teeth because of what happened. Nearly a quarter, 24%, were for head punches that Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez agreed were not warranted and experts said go against best practices. Even with those risks, head punches for things that didn’t pose a risk of serious bodily injury happened four times a week, a KHOU 11 Investigation found. They include inmates struck more than 10 times, struck while already on the ground, and inmates struck for refusing orders, slapping hands, making verbal threats, throwing food, spitting, pushing or lunging. Or, in Ana Cervantes’ case, grabbing a detention officer.
Cervantes eventually pleaded guilty to her original DWI charge and attempted assault on a public servant after she found herself sitting in jail for months. “I said can I get a blanket? Can I get a blanket?” Williams said. “He was using profanity at me. He was yelling at me. He was like you know, ‘you sit your ass down.’”
“I just can’t comprehend it. That’s not assault. The assault came when the officer started throwing blows at the individual’s head,” he said. “Having someone spit on you is disgusting and awful, and I've experienced it myself,” Sinclair said. “But it’s not justification for force at that level.” “That's using verbal tactics, the tone of your voice, the rate of your speech, to see if you can de-escalate the situation,” Sinclair said.
Batts spent two and a half years working inside the Harris County jail. He said he never punched an inmate. Use of force reports and his personnel file confirmed that. Batts said he witnessed a “very abusive, toxic” culture in the jail, where some officers were proud of punching inmates In that video, an inmate stood up from a chair in the Joint Processing Center waiting room and began taking off his shirt and quickly crossing the seating area. Right as he made it out of the line of chairs, a detention officer knocked him out cold with a single blow to the head.“I mean, they would literally be talking about in the parking lot or they would sit over here and talk about it in the break room. Like, hey, ‘I did this and this and that.
She and Sinclair, the former state corrections head, agreed that no accountability creates a cycle of officers seeing the behavior and thinking it’s ok or even expected. However, Sheriff Gonzalez maintained that use of force is one of his “highest concerns” and said he has taken some disciplinary action in the past.
After the video was leaked, Twitty was charged with assault. His case is still pending and his attorney, Terrence Jewett, said the problem is systemic. “A better decision would probably be to remove an individual in that type of situation off the floors,” Gonzalez said. “They should have been pulled off the floor.”
Brown declined to comment when investigative reporter Jeremy Rogalski caught up with him outside a court hearing. Brown was arrested for a 2022 incident, where, in his use of force report, he admitted to punching an inmate at least nine times, including seven times on the ground after the inmate threw milk at him.
“Everybody makes mistakes. You understand what I'm saying?” Biggles said. “I don't want to see no other mother go through what I went through just because our children got in trouble doesn't mean they're animals, or that they should go in and not come back out.” “I knew it wasn’t an accident at that very moment,” Biggles said. “It came to me instantly. Something went wrong in there. Somebody did something.”Sections of the report were highlighted by KHOU 11 Investigates below.
He also was slammed into the wall and slammed into the ground. Simmons was cuffed and taken to the clinic. “They could just keep doing it over and over again, and nothing's gonna happen because nothing happened to him, and nothing happened to him. Nothing gonna happen to me either,” Biggles said. “If there was accountability and we wouldn't be here right now. We wouldn't be having this conversation, and my son would probably still be running around doing what he doing, but they’re not being held accountable for the things they do.
“I'm very clear that there's room for improvement in all this and we want to run a safe and respectful jail,” Gonzalez said, “and I think that we could obviously do better when it comes to de-escalation, making sure that we're better training our personnel and better, support them as much as we can. Sinclair, the consultant who used to run the Washington State prison system, agreed that the sheriff’s office has a lot of work to do, and he had a message for Gonzalez.
“We want to have more cameras in our building, so it's all with an eye towards holding people accountable if they do wrong,” he said.“If we need to elevate more and make sure that we're sending a stronger message both in our training, through our follow up training through our frontline supervision and through our punishment or discipline, handed out to our employees, then we're we want to do that,” Gonzalez said.
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