Doc & JD Houston's Own Dynamic Duo

By Michael Egbert

Crime in Southeast Houston was at an all-time high with the highest concentration being along a seven-mile stretch of Telephone Road. This part of Houston was notorious for prostitution, drugs, robberies, burglaries, auto thefts, assaults, murders, police-involved shoot-outs, and all-around mayhem almost on a daily basis. The citizens living in communities just a mere block or two to either side of Telephone Road along its length were living in constant fear and terror and being victimized by the criminal elements that chose to do their trade there. At the threat of forming their own vigilante groups, they demanded relief to live free of fear and being victimized daily. They were trapped, prisoners in their own homes. The Houston Police captain in charge over the police officers in Southeast Houston conferred with his lieutenants and patrol sergeants as to how to deal with this problem. It was determined that at the core of the constant crime and chaos were the prostitutes who were the magnets that drew the criminal element there. The "whore patrol" was born to deal with the hookers and the criminals clustered around them. Doc and JD were partnered and eventually became known as Houston's own "Dynamic Duo," crushing the problem with a vigor never before seen and becoming heroes to the citizens and garnering unexpected respect and admiration from the criminals themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781645844419

Book preview

cover.jpg

Doc and JD Houston's Own Dynamic Duo

Michael Egbert

Copyright © 2019 Michael Egbert

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING, INC.

New York, NY

First originally published by Page Publishing, Inc. 2019

ISBN 978-1-64584-440-2 (Paperback)

ISBN 978-1-64584-441-9 (Digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

First and foremost, I want to dedicate this book to God. Without him in my life this book and the events written about could not have been possible. Secondly, I want this dedication to cover all law enforcement officer’s past, present, and future. Men and women in this profession who have and will dedicate their lives to making a difference in this world.

Foreword

It was a dark and stormy night… That’s how stories start, right? Well, this isn’t a novel. It is about the realities of life on the streets of Houston, Texas, and more specifically, it’s the night shift in one of the most dangerous sectors of Houston during the late eighties. It’s a recollection about two Houston police officers working the night shift (10:00 p.m.–6:00 a.m.) and trying to make a difference.

Yes, it was dark and we certainly had storms, but our nights, more often than not, sounded like this:

91 D (Dan) 32—Pursuit

91 D (Dan) 32—Gunpoint

91 D (Dan) 32—Shots fired

91 D (Dan) 32—Actor on the ground

Fortunately, it always ended with the following:

91 D (Dan) 32—Subject in custody, under control

Doc and JD were Houston’s own dynamic duo. I am the JD portion of the duo, and for a very short time, we were able to have a dynamic impact on crime in our area. Let me give you a quick orientation to our area. We worked the southeast portion of Houston and mainly along Telephone Road. This area is near Hobby Airport. Telephone Road runs along the west side of the airport. To the east is Interstate Highway 45, the Gulf Freeway, which runs from Galveston to the south to Downtown Houston to the north. There is a railroad track west of Telephone Road, and this pie-shaped district was our primary area of concern—a seven-mile stretch of road that I swear sometimes I thought had more pimps, prostitutes, and drugs than anywhere else. But there were good people in this area as well, and it was because of them that we had our opportunity to make a difference. It changed not only our lives but the lives of many others as well.

During the day, I was a college student going to school on the GI Bill. At night, we became a dynamic duo. Doc and I were both military veterans. Doc had been in the Navy and attached to the Marines in combat. I had been an Army paratrooper. I think this helped establish the foundation of fortitude that allowed us to face the dangers we did and survive to talk about it later.

Our story is really nothing new. It’s a story as old as time. It’s a story of good versus evil. And let me tell you that in Houston, Texas, in the late eighties, there was a lot of evil and we were fighting the good fight. The whore patrol, as it became known, was an idea from command to focus on the prostitution problem and all the other problems associated with that trade.

At first, we thought it was a s—it detail. Doc and I had never been partners before. I usually rode by myself, and Doc had a different partner. The only good news was that we did not have to run routine patrol calls. There were a lot of them. The way it worked, generally, was at the beginning of the shift, dispatch would broadcast all the holding calls. This could go on for one to five minutes. Then the units jumped in and started with the priority calls and worked their way down. All the while, other calls are being added, and at about 5:00 a.m., you got a break. This went on every night. Generally, you ran your arse off and never saw any progress.

However, after the first night of whore patrolling, we asked the sergeant to make it our permanent unit. No one else wanted the detail, and we worked well together. We later picked up our own special identifier [91 D (Dan) 32] and made numerous contacts. Quickly, we discovered that we had to come up with a way to remember and catalog all the people we were encountering and our street bible was born.

It was exciting and our reason for being in police work. It may sound corny in today’s context, but we were helping people, making it safe, and putting bad guys in jail. In just over three months, Doc and I had made 1,485 arrests. The arrests we made were not just petty misdemeanors and included a number of high court misdemeanors as well as felonies. We were instrumental in closing two drug/whorehouse motels and freed up other patrol units so they could address other problems.

It’s Houston, Texas, at the change of the decade. It’s dark, it’s dangerous, and it’s the height of the ward wars. And we made a difference.

Chapter 1

I was a Houston police officer assigned to Southeast Patrol since 1981. At that time, Southeast Houston was considered a dangerous part of Houston to work in as a police officer. That part of the city was heavily populated by Hispanics in and around the Ship Channel area to the north and east of our assigned patrol area while, to the west and south of our patrol area, the population was extensively African-American. Both communities were plagued with crime and violence. Burglary, robbery, assaults, family violence, etc. were daily occurrences in these communities. To make matters even worse, those two communities, the Hispanic and African-American, were always at odds with each other and typically did not get along well. My substation was located on Park Place Boulevard, and the officers assigned there were called the Park Place Rangers by the officers in other parts of Houston because of the almost nightly gun battles and Old West-like lawlessness in our part of the city. It was rare to not have to make an arrest at gunpoint during those days. By the time I was assigned to Southeast Patrol, the last five police officers killed in the line of duty were all working Southeast Houston. I hadn’t been at Park Place a year yet when one of my friends, a dog handler, was shot and killed during a traffic stop while patrolling the east end in the Hispanic area.

Telephone Road stretched for about seven miles north to south down the middle of the Southeast patrol area and was heavily populated by pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, sex offenders, narcotics traffickers, and icehouses (alcohol establishments); and most of it was controlled by outlaw biker gangs. One of my first calls on night shift out of the Park Place substation was to a shoot-out between narcotics officers and an outlaw biker group at a small apartment complex a block off Telephone Road. One officer had been killed, another wounded; and the suspect initiating the shoot-out had been killed too. Once the sun went down, most decent citizens living in this part of town would pretty much avoid Telephone Road and much of its surrounding area. It was easy to understand why officers in other parts of Houston would hold those of us assigned to Park Place in a sort of awe and respect.

After just a couple of years assigned to Park Place patrol, I took a temporary assignment in the Helicopter division of the Houston Police Department. It was during this time that JD was assigned to Park Place after finishing his training at the police academy. I came back to Park Place after seven months in Helicopter Patrol and met JD for the first time. JD was an experienced law enforcement officer who came to Houston after having been a border patrol officer where he’d learned to perfect his Spanish-speaking skills.

JD and I never rode together as partners but we did help each other at times when one of us needed backup or help at a crime scene. JD has the gift of gab and always seemed to be full of energy and nonstop chatter. Some of the guys likened him to the Tasmanian Devil whirlwind cartoon character. I was his exact opposite, which is probably why we worked so well together when we eventually did get paired as a unit. Park Place patrol was expanding; so the substation eventually closed down, and we moved our headquarters to another area that provided more space. It was here where JD and I were first assigned together as a patrol unit in the early part of 1989. I had just come back from a short two-week vacation, and it was my first night back at patrol. I came in and sat down in the roll-call room just as the roll-call sergeant made his entrance and went to the podium at the front of the room.

Doc.

Here.

JD.

Yo.

Whore patrol.

JD and I looked at each other as the roll-call sergeant finished calling names and making patrol assignments.

Whore patrol? What in the hell was that? we both said to each other. Almost in unison, JD and I immediately tried to get the roll-call sergeant’s attention to ask about this whore patrol assignment, and he directed us to the night-shift lieutenant.

The captain has been getting numerous complaints from citizens all up and down Telephone Road about the problem with the prostitutes and the creeps hanging around ’em, the lieutenant explained. Just go out and do what you gotta do to get this problem under control and stop the complaints from coming in. I don’t care how you do it, just do it.

But how are we supposed to be messing with the hookers while still having to answer calls at the same time? I whined.

JD was in agreement on this. Yeah, how are we supposed to clean up Telephone Road when we only get five minutes between calls to work on it?

We were both puzzled. Just how did they expect us to effectively correct a problem when we couldn’t even devote much time to it?

The lieutenant sighed and said, Arrangements have been made with dispatch to leave you guys alone. Now get out there and do what you need to do. I got work to do. JD and I left the lieutenant’s office still bewildered a bit as to what we were to do.

Whore patrol, JD mused. Who came up with this brilliant idea?

JD was on his first night back to duty after a short vacation too.

Either somebody is having a good laugh or we’re being punished for something, I commented.

We had never been partnered together before. We had no clue how well we might work together. Would we get along all right, or would we be like oil and water and just not mix together? When two officers are paired together, one will usually become the alpha male. Would we be butting heads till we got this pecking order sorted out? Did the lieutenant just give us carte blanche to handle this assignment any way we saw fit?

Our first night had a few snags because the CAD system—computer-aided dispatch—kept picking us out for calls and we had to remind the dispatcher of our status so that she could override the computer. But even with all the burps and bumps of that first night, JD and I logged over thirty arrests. We had a blast working together. I was actually having fun. I hated for the shift to end. I’d never gotten along so well with another officer as I did with JD. We were the perfect match. We had such a good time that we approached the lieutenant and asked if we could have this assignment every night.

We want to work whore patrol every night, JD said with enthusiasm. Can we do that, Lew? Doc and I had a great time and want to keep at it.

The lieutenant was surprised by this request because everyone else that had been assigned to whore patrol hated the assignment, so he readily accepted our request. That meant he didn’t have to listen to any more griping and complaining about getting stuck with Whore Patrol and notified the roll-call sergeant of that decision. Our Southeast dispatcher got her sergeant to assign us a new unit number, one that the CAD system wouldn’t recognize and try to pull us for calls. From then on, our unit number was 91D32. JD and I had our very own call sign, 91 ‘Dan’ 32. Not having to answer regular calls, working our own pace, and making our own cases was a refreshing new adventure for JD and me. We took on our new assignment and hit the road running with an enthusiasm not seen since our rookie days, and we were out to set the world on fire.

We decided we needed some kind of action plan, such as be aggressive, but at the same time, be fair; show no favoritism; approach with an attitude of zero tolerance to crime; and to not look the other way—a criminal offense, no matter how minor or major, all would be treated equally. An arrest for a minor class C offense would get the same treatment as an arrest for a class 1 felony. What was good for one would be good for all while we still remained well within the legal boundaries and were careful not to violate anyone’s rights. Nor would we come up with any bogus charges and gin anyone to keep our arrest stats up. We came at our assignment with both eyes open and saw that there were basically four hot spots on Telephone Road where the crime problem was the heaviest. These spots all bordered residential areas (usually only a block or two away on either side of Telephone Road), and it wasn’t difficult to ascertain that these residential areas were also likely where the citizen complaints all emanated from.

The hot spots we identified were the 3300 block of Telephone Road, the 4300 block of Telephone Road, the 6700 block of Telephone Road, and finally the 9700 block of Telephone Road. All these locations had fly-by-night motels that rented rooms by the hour, and hookers were always nearby. Beer joints / icehouses were everywhere and so were all-night convenience stores that attracted clientele like moths to a flame. We decided to concentrate our efforts on these locations. The 3300 block of Telephone Road also had a massage parlor that only catered to an exclusive, elite oriental businessman client base. Entry into this establishment was by invitation only and was monitored via closed-circuit cameras. The girls were moved in and out of there frequently, usually after only a week or two, to other parts of town or to cities in other parts of the country as part of a white-slavery ring that operated nationwide, which made it next to impossible for the vice division to infiltrate and put a stop to it. For the most part, the hookers had their own territories pretty much marked at these four locations and we didn’t see many new faces. On occasion, we might find one or two who would wander into another hooker’s territory, but it usually wasn’t for long.

JD and I were fortunate one night to happen upon a young woman in the 3300 block of Telephone Road who admitted to us it was her first attempt at being a hooker, and we caught her before she had any first clients. She explained she was desperate for money and didn’t know what else she could do to take care of her kids. She had no skills to speak of, and her husband had abandoned her and the family just days before. We noticed first off that she was a pretty woman and didn’t have the telltale signs of a drug addict: the needle tracks, the runny nose, the blood shot eyes, poor hygiene, the nonchalant and carefree way of talking like a sailor and acting streetwise and tough—none of the above. She didn’t have the usual vocabulary meant to shock you or give the impression she didn’t give a rat’s ass about anything like the experienced hookers we were accustomed to dealing with had. It was obvious to us that she was too clean and inexperienced at the vocation she’d chosen to enter into out of desperation nor did she comprehend the dangers she’d be facing because she wasn’t being driven by any drug addiction. It was common for hookers to endure physical assaults from johns and, at times, even be murdered. JD immediately launched into one of his relentless, severe lectures, circling and scolding this woman. And by the time he was finished, she tearfully changed her mind and wanted to go home. We never saw her again after that night. I like to think JD’s rant put the fear of God into her and she abolished the idea of selling her body.

Each time we made contact with any new to us hooker