Lack of Videos Hampers Inquiries Into Multiple Houston Police Shootings

If the police shooting of Omar Ventura on a February night five years ago had been captured on video, it would have been chilling to watch.
An off-duty Houston police officer would have been seen coming out of a bar at closing time after a night of heavy drinking. The video would have shown the officer, Jose Coronado Jr., firing his gun while trying to break up a brawl. Mr. Ventura, who was unarmed, would have been seen falling to the ground dead and his brother, also unarmed, writhing in pain from a bullet wound.
But there was no video of that shooting or of most of the dozens of other questionable shootings of unarmed people by Houston police officers during the past decade. None of them led to either the criminal prosecution of an officer or significant discipline by the department.
The police in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, found themselves on the defensive after a series of articles by The Houston Chronicle two years ago detailed a pattern of questionable shootings. The numbers have remained grim, according to police and court records obtained through an open records law request and documents recently made available as part of lawsuits filed against the Police Department.
Since 2005, the police have shot 268 people, 111 of them fatally, records show. The rate of shootings by police officers was higher in Houston between 2010 and 2014 than in New York or Los Angeles, and the Houston police killed more people than the Los Angeles police despite having half as many officers, according to police data. (Officers in Chicago, the nation’s third-largest city, killed civilians at a higher rate than the Houston police did over that period, records show.)
Despite the troubling statistics, the Houston police have largely avoided the intensive public scrutiny directed in recent months at other large departments, including those in Chicago, Baltimore and Philadelphia. The reason, critics say, has been the lack of videotapes capturing the most questionable shootings of unarmed civilians.
Without videotaped evidence to contradict police accounts, shootings are far less likely to galvanize the public and to result in disciplinary action against the officers involved, criminologists say.
The victims of police shootings in Houston include Brian Claunch, a double amputee in a wheelchair who was holding only a pen when an officer shot him in 2012, and Jordan Baker, an unarmed man fatally shot after the police stopped him while he was riding his bicycle in 2014, records show.
In the case of Mr. Baker, a surveillance camera video captured his initial interaction with a police officer but not the shooting itself, which the police said took place after the 26-year-old reached for his waistband. Janet Baker, Mr. Baker’s mother, said she believed the police had begun to follow her son because he was an African-American man wearing a hooded sweatshirt.
“He was guilty of the wrong garment choice,” she said. “The police were always looking for a way to exonerate the officer, and our family was left to pick up the pieces.”
Since 2005, the Houston police have shot at more than 460 people, and nearly one in five were unarmed, according to department records.
“Even when there is data on the number of police shootings, it’s not nearly as compelling as watching something happen on video,” said Seth W. Stoughton, a law professor at the University of South Carolina and former police officer. “From John Crawford to Tamir Rice to Eric Garner, it is the video that has kept public attention on policing.”
  Pat Sullivan/Associated Press Charles A. McClelland Jr., who is retiring as Houston’s police chief this week, said the lack of video evidence had not influenced his decisions. Charles A. McClelland Jr., who is retiring as Houston’s police chief this week, said the lack of video evidence in Houston had not influenced his decisions in clearing hundreds of officers in department shooting investigations.
“The law gives wide discretion to a law enforcement officer to use deadly force,” he said, adding that the F.B.I. had also investigated some of the shootings. “The person does not have to be armed, and that’s a difficult concept for the public to understand.”
Chief McClelland, who has spent six years as chief and 39 years with the department, said most officers would have body cameras within 18 months. Currently, only about 100 of the department’s 5,200 officers have cameras, and about 200 cars are equipped with dashboard cameras.
To reduce officer-involved shootings, Chief McClelland said, the department is contemplating ways to reorganize training to emphasize de-escalation, tactical retreating, and cover and concealment.
“Many times we know an incident might be lawful and justified, but we don’t want it to happen again,” he said.
On Thursday, Martha Montalvo, an executive assistant chief, was appointed interim chief while the department conducts a national search for Chief McClelland’s permanent replacement.
After about one in seven police shootings since 2005, Houston officers told supervisors that they had fired at someone who was unarmed because the person had “postured in a threatening manner,” according to police records. That explanation, according to the records, has become increasingly common in recent years — and without video evidence is nearly impossible to refute. The vast majority of unarmed shooting victims have been African-American or Latino.
Lawyers for the families of those who have been killed by the police say it is so routine for Houston officers to go unpunished after shooting unarmed individuals that some officers no longer take such shootings seriously.
The department denied that claim. But in one case, moments after a fatal police shooting in 2012, officers engaged in a conversation over the department’s text messaging system that suggested that some officers do take shootings lightly.
“Hey, bro, can you guys go at least two weeks without a shooting?” one officer asked a colleague, according to a transcript of the messages.
The response — referring to the southern area of the city where the shooting occurred — was: “That’s how we roll at South Central, bro. We too hard!”
The first officer replied, using the acronym for dead on arrival: “Ha, ha, ha. Right. Is he D.O.A.?”
Upon hearing that the victim had not yet died, the first officer playfully warned his colleague about the frequency of officer shootings. “Man, bro, you better be careful — the list is shortening of officers who haven’t gotten into a shooting yet.”
Officer Coronado was a five-year veteran of the department at the time he was drinking at Sherlock’s Baker Street Pub on Feb. 19, 2011.
After being asked at the bar’s 2 a.m. closing time to leave, Officer Coronado, who had consumed several drinks during the evening, tried to take his beer with him, according to court records. After the bouncer turned him away, the officer quickly downed nearly a triple shot of Jameson Irish whiskey and a beer.
The bouncer and the bartender told investigators that Officer Coronado had been clearly intoxicated, with slurred speech and glassy eyes, according to police and court documents.
The bartender said that when she offered Officer Coronado a glass of water, he “growled” at her that he did not want it, according to bar employees.
A fight was taking place in the parking lot when Officer Coronado left the bar, and he became involved in it. After he fatally shot Mr. Ventura, Officer Coronado said he had opened fire because Mr. Ventura had reached for his waistband as if he had a gun. But witnesses said that Mr. Ventura’s hands had been extended in a nonthreatening manner, and that Officer Coronado had not identified himself before shooting, according to department records.
After Officer Coronado killed Mr. Ventura and shot his brother, Rolando Ventura, in his left arm, the officer “was stumbling” as he walked away, Rolando Ventura said in a recent interview.
Officer Coronado was not disciplined for the shooting, but was suspended for 30 days for acting in an official capacity while drinking, and for using an unauthorized firearm. The Ventura family has sued the department.
Rolando Ventura, 32, who has a scar that runs along his forearm from the shooting, said neither he nor his brother had posed a threat to Officer Coronado.
“I know there’s good officers, but you just never know if there’s going to be a good police officer or not when you see one,” he said.
Officer Coronado wrote in a brief email just before the fifth anniversary of the shooting: “I am still haunted by it.”