The Houston Police Department is poised to do what no other civilian police department in the United States has yet to publicly do. On the desk of the Chief of Police is the authorization to begin training officers to staff checkpoints at key infrastructure points throughout the city.
Although the talk about creating such a group has been discussed among supervisors of the Special Response Group for years, only in the last few months have those talks become reality. This idea received support of the former Chief of Police Harold Hurtt, but wasn’t signed before he retired on December 30, 2009 due to it being under review by departmental lawyers. Now under the just-named Chief of Police Charles McClelland, it stands ready to be signed and implemented almost immediately.
The Special Response Group, which was created in 1992 to deal with protestors at the Republican National Convention is the main crowd control unit in the Houston Police Department. They receive 40 hours of training annually in riot control and mass arrest scenarios. This group has a sub-group called the Hard Team, which receive an additional 32 hours of more intense training per year. This training includes pain compliance techniques, dispersal of chemical agents, rubber bullets, crowd control grenades, as well as many other less-lethal munitions. Now, the Hard Team is poised to get another sub-group called the Checkpoint Team...
