Photo: kali9 / E+ / Getty Images
As crime continues to rise, police departments nationwide are dealing with a staffing shortage. So they are lowering their hiring standards. It's not a question of it it will happen in Houston. It already has.
"Before, you couldn't have visible tattoos, and you could not have used marijuana over the last ten years," said Doug Griffith of the Houston Police Officers Union. "The marijuana use policy has been shortened, and you can now come on to the department without an education as long as you have three years of full time work experience."
And he warns that standards could be cut even further.
"A misdemeanor charge when you were younger could be waived after a certain amount of time," he explained, adding that a shortage of officers is driving all of this.
"We have less officers than we did in 1998. We are in dire straits when it comes to the number of officers we have on the streets of Houston."
And all of this comes as the investigation continues into 264,000 criminal cases that were suspended since 2016 because of a lack of staffing.