http://www.chron.com/CDA/umstory.mpl/metropolitan/2323151

Dec. 27, 2003, 8:38PM

DEADLY PATTERN
Officer's six shootings raise questions about HPD
policies
By LISE OLSEN
Copyright 2003 Houston Chronicle

As traffic whizzed by on Interstate 45 in the twilight
of April 19, 2000, Lanny Blaine Robinson lay dead in
the back seat of a Chevy Malibu, killed by seven shots
from a police officer's automatic.

Robinson, who'd been recruited to help with an
undercover drug buy, was the second man killed in the
line of duty by veteran narcotics officer Mark
Prendergast. It was at least the eighth time
Prendergast had fired his gun and the sixth time he'd
hurt or killed someone -- more than any other active
Houston Police Department officer, according to
records kept by the Harris County District Attorney's
Office from 1980 to 2003.

The 2000 shooting of Robinson, whom Prendergast and
his partner said had pulled a knife on them while
riding in the back seat of their car, is the subject
of a civil rights lawsuit in federal court in Houston.
The suit calls the shooting "unjustified" and the
ensuing probe a "cover-up."

Prendergast has never been indicted or found to have
violated department policy, and the city says it has
never paid a dime to Robinson's mother or to any other
person shot by Prendergast. And his line of work is
admittedly dangerous.

"He's been undercover for 15 years and he's dealing
with bad guys," said Hans Marticiuc, president of the
police union that has represented Prendergast. "And it
doesn't give me one bit of headache that a bad guy was
shot when it was justified.

Like Prendergast, about 25 current and former officers
have been involved in two or more shootings in the
last two decades, the district attorney's office
records show. A Chronicle analysis of those records
found that out of more than 700 HPD officers involved
in shootings that resulted in injuries or deaths since
1980, around 90, or 8 percent, had been involved in
more than one incident.

Several experts interviewed by the Chronicle said that
officers with multiple shooting incidents could
indicate a more systemic problem in a police
department.

"That's an immediate red flag," said Sam Walker, a
police accountability expert at the University of
Nebraska at Omaha. "Something should be done."

Other experts echoed Walker's assessment. "The
majority of officers are involved in no shootings in
their career, so an officer being involved in eight or
nine shootings is highly unusual," said Oren Root,
deputy director of the nonprofit Police Assessment
Resource Center, a police monitoring and research
group.

Nationwide, many departments have set up so-called
early-warning systems to track multiple shootings and
other signs of potential problems, he said.

Houston has a program called "personnel concerns" that
tracks, among other things, officers with five or more
internal affairs or administrative allegations in the
past 12 months. But the program, as described in
departmental policy, seems directed only at
straightening out individual officers, not at
identifying problems in policy itself or at prevention
strategies.

Officers can be placed into a program of up to 250
days designed to "address the officer's problem,"
which can include firearms training. It could not be
determined whether Prendergast has ever been in such a
program because his entire disciplinary record is not
public.

Also not public are the internal investigation reports
on incidents involving use of force. Even the policy
on use of force released to the Chronicle was heavily
redacted, and the entire section on the use of
less-lethal weapons was blacked out.

Only if an officer is indicted are the investigation
reports made public -- and no police officer has been
indicted in any shooting in Harris County since 1999,
according to district attorney's office records.

After every police shooting, investigations are
conducted by HPD internal affairs and homicide
detectives. The district attorney's office has only
one investigator to check out each of the 100-plus
annual complaints of excessive force, in-custody death
and police shootings, though it has requested funding
for additional help.

Police experts interviewed by the Chronicle say that
such reviews too often focus narrowly on the question
of whether an officer has violated a law or policy.

Instead, they suggest, the department should be taking
a hard look at all shootings, especially multiple
shootings by the same officer that could indicate a
failure of training, supervision, policies or
procedures that could be endangering officers and the
public alike.

The veil is lifted only slightly when an officer is
sued, as was the case with Prendergast.

In the last 20 years, only two other HPD officers have
shot or injured more civilians than Prendergast and,
like him, both worked in the narcotics division in the
late 1980s. All three were involved in dangerous
"buy-bust" narcotics arrests and in serving search
warrants on alleged drug dealers. (The other two have
since left the department for federal jobs.)

The shootings in the late 1980s -- of both narcotics
officers and suspects -- prompted the department to
provide more training for narcotics officers,
according to officers who worked in the division back
then. For example, narcotics officers are now required
to drill at the firing range four times a year instead
of just once, like other officers.

But there's no special retraining requirement for an
officer involved in shootings, though those in car
accidents must take defensive driving classes.

None of his shootings is mentioned in Prendergast's
overwhelmingly positive performance evaluations, which
were obtained by the Chronicle. An HPD evaluation
written not long after the Robinson shooting said
Prendergast demonstrates "flawless judgment when
dealing with safety matters."

A police-procedure consultant who reviewed
Prendergast's internal affairs files for the civil
rights lawsuit argues that investigators never asked
the most important question: Why did one officer feel
forced to shoot civilians so many different times?

"Bad luck doesn't follow one particular officer over
another, so we have a trend," said Roger Clark, a
retired Los Angeles County sheriff's office
supervisor, who has been hired as an expert by the
lawyer for Robinson's mother. "Even if he found
himself in a circumstance where shooting was founded,
let's look at how he got himself into that mess and
why he had to shoot his way out of it."

During the last five years of his career, Clark
oversaw an elite major crimes division for the Los
Angeles County Sheriff's Department. During his
tenure, he said, officers made more than 2,000 arrests
without a shot being fired either by suspects or
officers.

"Most of my cases were murders, homicides,
kidnappings, crimes in progress," he said. "To me,
based on my experience, the argument that when you're
trying to arrest desperados you're going to kill a
certain percentage, that's specious. Cops know better.


"When a person dies at the hands of the police, it
should be given a serious look, with the question:
`Can we do it better?' That was never done," he said.

Clark argues that HPD's "buy-bust" practices, at least
as executed by Prendergast, put officers and suspects
in danger for stakes as low as a $20 street drug buy.

In the lawsuit brought against the city, lawyers argue
that the man who was shot, Lanny Robinson, was an
unstable drug user dying of AIDS, and should never
have been picked up by Prendergast and his partner in
the first place.

In his deposition, Prendergast said the impromptu
recruiting of a street person is a common and
necessary practice among narcotics officers.

"The job we work is dangerous," he said.

In January 2001, Police Chief C.O. Bradford gave
Prendergast a Meritorious Service Award in recognition
of outstanding performance of duty in the shooting of
Robinson. The citation says that his "decisive
handling of a difficult and deadly situation resulted
in saving the life of his partner."

Frank Miller, a retired narcotics division officer who
handled tactical training, said officers such as
Prendergast are successful because they take risks.
Miller said he "hates buy-busts," but they are a
valuable -- though dangerous -- law enforcement tool.

"It's not unusual for guys like that to have been
involved in shootings," Miller said. "He works
undercover -- and he loves it."

But Clark, the plaintiff's expert, said the shooting
should have been viewed in context, along with all the
other incidents in which Prendergast fired his weapon.
Clark said that many of the dangerous situations
Prendergast faced were partly the result of actions by
the officer himself and partly because of flawed
departmental policies.

"If more officers follow Prendergast's reckless and
cowboy example," he said, "it's just a sure thing that
more people are going to be shot and killed if they
keep doing it this way."


Monday: Experts decry lack of officer training in use
of force.