Three winters ago, Kerry Lee Thomas was bitten by a police dog for 43 seconds while lying face down on the ground.  The events of the night of February 22, 2021, which started as a dispatch report of two men making noise outside of a home, left him injured, both physically and mentally, according to the lawsuit he filed against Harris County Constable Precinct 1 deputies. 

Once he left the hospital, where he was treated for lacerations, puncture wounds, and muscle damage, Thomas says he wanted to tell somebody. But, officially, he said his only option was to report the bite to the very department that had hurt him. 

Thomas was charged with trespassing for that night’s events, but the charges were eventually dismissed. It was not until another incarcerated person at Harris County Jail told him about Pure Justice, a Houston nonprofit organization that advocates for an end to police violence and helps run a hotline for victims of police misconduct, that he found the help he had been looking for.

The Houston Police Accountability Collaborative hotline is run through a partnership between Pure Justice and the Washington, D.C. nonprofit Civil Rights Corps. The service is meant to be a resource for residents who have experienced police officers’ abuses of power. Hotline workers can help callers in Harris County file civil lawsuits, but they can also provide guidance on reporting the incident to authorities, and connect callers to advocacy organizations or basic resources for issues like housing and food insecurity. 

“You know, going through something like that, it’ll make you feel like the world is against you, like you don’t know what’s gonna happen next,” Thomas told the Landing. “You know, would you get shot next by the police? If you can’t trust the police, who you can trust?”

A spokesperson from Harris County Constable Precinct 1 declined to comment on the lawsuit. 

Thomas said that when he finally spoke with the hotline’s intake staff and lawyers, he felt uplifted and affirmed. And, for him, it meant a lot to not be judged for things like his tattoos or long hair.

“These people, they cared…they was looking at me as a person,” he said. 

The only way to report police misconduct in Harris County through official channels is to the police departments themselves. There are over 60 police departments within the county boundaries, each with its own internal affairs department processes for handling such reports. This can be disheartening – particularly for communities that may already mistrust police or cannot afford a lawyer to examine their case.

Four years ago, in the wake of the murder of Houston native George Floyd and a national reckoning on police violence and racism, Civil Rights Corps decided to create a direct line connecting those in need with advocates and lawyers, says Brittany Francis, deputy director of litigation and leader of the organization’s Police Abuse Project.

In 2020, they founded the hotline, the only one of its kind in Harris County. Simultaneously, the Civil Rights Corps worked to build a network of local lawyers trained and willing to take more civil rights pro-bono cases along with their own. 

In the years since, the project has processed nearly 200 cases of individuals reaching out for help and resources, and helped initiate six civil suits in Harris County. 

Initially, incoming calls were slow, but in 2023, Civil Rights Corps made a concerted effort to deepen their connections with on-the-ground organizations in Houston by attending and actively participating in local advocacy meetings, sharing pamphlets about the hotline, and spreading the word to grassroot groups working with vulnerable populations, according to Francis. Then, they relaunched the hotline. Since then, 141 people have reached out to the service, according to Civil Rights Corps. 

The goals of the hotline are not just to connect people with counsel, or answer questions about their legal options, said Francis. 

“It’s also just to give them a safe place to share what happened to them without intimidation or judgment or fear of retaliation, and give them an opportunity to think about ‘what do I want to do next?,’ without any fear that they’re going to be targeted.” 

Community members can get in touch with the Houston Police Accountability Collaborative through its intake line but also by reaching out to Pure Justice’s advocates in their neighborhoods or at the Harris County Jail.

Once someone reaches out, an intake worker will contact them within two days, said Alfredo Dominguez, a Pasadena native and the Houston Policing Project manager at Civil Rights Corps. He told the Landing that the hotline’s resources are particularly important in a place like Houston – where he wished such support would have been available to those he grew up with who were arrested in his own neighborhood. 

“If it can be done in Houston, we can help anyone, because Houston has some of the most complex policing apparatuses in the country,” said Dominguez, referring to the myriad of agencies with crisscrossing territories and varying internal policies.  

Now, he’s able to offer this option to locals in English or Spanish. 

Once an intake staffer like Dominguez gets back in touch with the caller, they ask a series of questions to find out things like whether the case happened in Harris County, if the incident happened within the last two years, whether the person already has a lawyer and the details of the incident where they say they experienced the abuse. Typically, callers get a free investigation into their case.

Depending on the wishes of the caller, the organization can provide a guide to filing internal affairs complaints with the county’s dozens of police departments, and also connect callers to basic resources to deal with immediate needs like housing and food insecurity, said Francis. And if the caller is interested, staffers can help them get involved in advocacy on policing issues.

Francis said the hotline’s role is also to fill a service gap: “The stop and frisk, the false arrests,  maybe a physical altercation that doesn’t result in a long-term injury but was really traumatizing to the person involved. We want to help people in those cases and make sure that they have access to counsel,” she said. 

For Thomas, his initial letter from jail to Pure Justice turned into a long-lasting and trusting relationship with his lawyers. And into a civil rights case in Houston. 

“There’s a lot of people out here in Houston that need help, and they don’t know the resources or the places to go,” said Thomas. “Everybody should know if they ever got to go through that,  I pray to God they never have to go through it, that they should go to [the hotline].”
If you feel you have been a victim of police misconduct and wish to call the Houston PAC hotline, you can find more information here. For more information on how to report misconduct to the county’s internal affairs departments, see this Houston Landing explainer.

The post Afraid to report police misconduct to the police? There’s another option. appeared first on Houston Landing.