Gang Unit Officers Recall Most Disturbing Gang Murder Cases

um what's one of the cases that obviously every single one of them has meaning there's a victim there's a victim's family and things like that but kind of one of the ones that just i don't know if i used a word that hits home more or uh you know you had you had you know you and your partners had more drive on it was more of the community was a part of it you know something like that that just really stuck out to you even looking back now well sean that's a great question and i would answer it this way again well and i don't want to catch again i don't want to diminish any of them every single one of them so you'll i think you'll you'll understand my answer then with what you just said what i realized in that 23 years of working homicides it didn't make any difference if you're a crack whore in the ditch or if you're a socialite living in river oaks which is the exclusive section of of houston that person was someone to somebody they mattered so the drive to close those cases find the right person who's done the wrong thing and bring a better measure of justice and hopefully some peace for the families of the victims was the drive so i i there are certain cases that stuck to me of course only because of the nature of the case itself but in terms of a drive to so i hit every case determined that i was going to close it every one of them i don't care i don't care who it was well and i'm glad you said that because it's uh obviously there's you know whether it be in the media or the social media and obviously policing such a huge topic and i've tried to explain that to people i'm like we in the gang unit that i was in you know you and i don't know each other today's our first day meeting each other i was in the game for 14 years in tulsa as a supervisor for that unit obviously we worked all the gang-related shootings we worked hand-in-hand with our homicide unit on gang-related murders and things like that and i try to explain to people it's like listen we don't care that that call comes in and we get up at two o'clock in the morning to go out there and work we work that thing just as hard if it's a shooting we work at just as hard for someone in this community as we do when someone in the other side of the city it's the same thing obviously if it comes to closure or arrests are made or in convictions part of it's part of the court system the other parts is how cooperative are are our victims or our witnesses that that's the deciding factor it's not going to be you or me that's ah man i don't care about this case i'm not working it any more difficult but during the career during my career um there was one deal it was on a sunday morning um this is still when the bubble caprices were around you know and those are uh oh yeah those were a great bad guy we called them shamu sham it was the same thing when i came on you know everybody i mean i started in obviously later in my career than you but i came on a 97 and you know you had guys still driving the old you know early 80 cutlasses and the box caprices right all that fun stuff but um there had been a shooting the night before that we had gotten called out about uh some gangsters shot another rival gangs guy got shot nobody's cooperative uh fast forward to the next morning and one of these the the suspects from the shooting the night before rival gang were in a baby blue bubble caprice you know a shamu type caprice well these gang members that were neighborhood crips see who they think's a hoover crip and it turns out to be four kids that are actually coming from church and they're just driving a baby blue caprice that matched the description of the night before so they see these kids up at a convenience store close to one of these neighborhood crips homeboys houses and they run over there and get a chopper they get they grab a rifle and then pull up next to it and the guy leans out the window just starts unloading and one guy loses an eye another guy's paralyzed one guy's killed um another guy's shot through the lungs and one guy somehow makes himself tiny and gets down between the seat and underneath you know the floorboard and somehow doesn't catch around and it was just a horrific case we get called in at like 10 o'clock in the morning on a sunday and we've worked every single case the same and still did up until i retired but these were kids that were coming home from church right you know they had they were just mistaken for rival gang members and we ended up getting everybody that day we recovered the rifle we end up getting you know catching a guy up short and uh it took a short time later you know within the week or two or something like that us and the fugitive warrant squad we tracked down the actual trigger man that was involved in that what was in the age of the shooters uh he i remember his name was uh vincent ajk or i'm sorry not vincent aj's name was his street name was venom was this kid's name um he was 18 maybe so he's right in the same age same age group they're all the same age group yeah you know he was convicted and he's in prison for the rest of his life but it's one of those it was early on in my time in the gang unit and when i retired last year it's still one of those cases that just always stuck out i can remember probably almost every single right shooting murder case that we went out on but those are the ones that just when you look back on a career and you go man i'm glad that the guys that i worked around with chased you know these guys responsible for that well the work in those those gang those gang cases are are always a challenge only because of the culture right within the gangs it's you know you don't talk to the police all that stuff a lot of them they do but you know but what i've what i have found is you treat everybody with dignity and respect and there's three things we all have in common that allows at least in my career and this is what i teach allows us to do that and it crosses all boundaries of race creed color religion culture it doesn't it doesn't make any difference what flavor you are if we remember that we three things we all have in common even guys from arkansas jesus uh we got uh we all want to be loved we all want to be respected and we all want to take care of those who love and respect us we just make different choices about how we accomplish those three things yeah spot on and that gives you the ability to anybody that will apply that gives you the ability to to speak to in our context in that interview room with somebody that you have absolutely zero in common with and um i know some of the gang guys we had a guy named d lok you know they've always got the street vernacular right be stupid right exactly they're stupid i mean he was a houston turd you know he was uh he was a he was a uh he was an og uh the yog young original gangster for the five new silver crips and they've been involved in a deal where they're going to do a punishment thing on one of their guys and blah blah blah and they they ended up uh um killing some people but anyway uh long story short i had him up in the interview room and treating him with the dignity and respect and so forth and so on and and i asked him names are important so i asked him what do you want me to call you and he said d-look was fine that was fine and uh i said well i appreciate that and i said i'll be right back and i'm gonna i'm gonna come in here and talk to you for a little bit and he said to me uh he said well mr waters he said i know i i know you were going to come in and and talk to me and i know i was going to have to come down here and talk to you because because because you're you're homicide you're like above hpd yep and i said like look at that man i said true that yep then i walked out and i came back in we had a real nice conversation so again you treat picnic you know people with dignity and respect and you'd be amazed at uh at the communication and relationship you can have with them i was actually just here at crimecon somebody asked that question i've been asked before like you know ending up in doing some of this media stuff like weren't you ever worried about when you were sat on the streets dealing with people and i said man listen if you're a cop you know there's this mute this weird i guess mutual respect probably a lot of people don't understand between police and gangsters you know there really is and it's like man if you're not if you're not beating guys up if you're not stealing dope or money from them if you're not planting dope on them they it's the you know it's the game they understand hey they're bad guys they know we're doing our job they're doing their thing it's the cat and mouse game and it's like long as you don't you don't belittle them when you talk to them you don't talk about their dead homeboys you know in that way when you have to sit down in a uh you know an interrogation room or you catch them up short even something as simple as you stop them on a car stop and it's an x-con you catch with a gun you know and he's like you know what i've already been to prison i don't want to do this shit again and you know as long as all because you do you interact with a lot of the same guys your witness to one murder is going to be a suspect in another or a victim in another so you get to know a lot of these type of people but just as you're talking about as long as you treat these guys well um it's it's beneficial at some point down the road more times than not it is absolutely absolutely is yeah and listen i also want to say i know i said the the the murder suspect his name was venom i'm blank on his real name that's his street name i mentioned i mentioned a vincent aj he was actually the victim of a homicide a gang-related deal so i just don't want to make sure there's any confusion there yeah what's interesting to me about all this is the integrity that you guys are showing i think the public needs to understand that as a police officer there's a there's a level of integrity you have to have and that integrity kind of i guess the best way to define integrity is what you do when nobody's looking right like you go into an interview room nobody's in there there may be a camera on or something but you go in there with that respect you go in there and you you treat your suspect with the integrity that you have and expect them to return that to you usually you get pretty good results obviously yours is just 96 percent i mean you could have done a little bit better but yeah that's kind of we tried we tried and i think the public misses that i think they missed that in order to wear a badge you have to have a level of integrity well you know the the the cops are held a higher standard as they should be hell yeah absolutely no no no as a nurse hell yeah no qualms about that and i can tell you that the average citizen comes in contact with a police officer with law enforcement in some capacity like two and a half times in their lifetime i don't know where that half comes from that's a short police officer i'm not sure what that's all about but about two two and a half times in their lifetime and their feelings or understandings or opinions about law enforcement are going to be based off of that primarily on that but then the rest of that influence is going to come from where what they see on television and that's going to come from television shows from media whatever that is going to be and we all know especially in today's world uh the the skewed uh view of police officers that is based on a false narrative is is really really upsetting and these guys and gals that are coming into law enforcement now god bless them if this had been the the state of affairs when i was a cop started being a cop 35 38 36 years ago i wouldn't have joined up for that kind of stuff yeah you know it's it's a uh they're being called and they're coming forward and they're doing although the the recruiting efforts around the country are so they suck i mean it's just terrible and then you get the guys that just come in and want to do it and want a paycheck and those are the guys you know those are the paper cops that they don't have any passion about this i thought yeah i mean listen there's a uh there's some social media accounts out there that you know that i follow um police related post a lot of good stuff they'll find a body cam you know a dash cam video an incident that's happened and they kind of break it down looking at the tactics that were used and the safety and stuff like that but um you know there's another one that's out there right now it's called survive policing and i don't know who's running it but this guy was clearly a cop in a decent agency he knew the job you know the the right way and he kind of calls out these these cops that are on here doing fucking tick tock videos you know while they're at work and that's yeah that's what i'm saying it's like they're just all about they want to be social media influencers as police and it's like it is and thank you that's exactly it he calls them out on it and you know and it's it's you know and i know they talk about interacting with the public it's like man that that's not what being a cop is is being on social media posting pictures of yourself all the time doing that stuff self-promotion no that's exactly what it's idiotic it is and it's you know and then diminishes the professionalism of the bible i've looked at some of the people that are doing this and you know you can see their patching and you'll find out what agency they're working for and it's some rinky-dink agency that has no crime and it's like come on man [Music]

Channel: Law&Crime Network

Views: 46,831

Keywords: law and crime, law and crime network

Id: CeeXBR2o2Lw

Length: 13min 47sec (827 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022