The two narcotics officers at the center of the deadly drug raid on Harding Street in January spent years making scores of low-level drug busts punctuated by months with no arrests or seizures at all, according to a Houston Chronicle review of police and court records spanning two decades.

Sometimes Gerald Goines and former partner Steven Bryant bought grams of cocaine from strangers on the street or single hits of crack from suspected drug dens in Greater Third Ward.

But in the five years leading up to the bust that left a south Houston couple dead, Goines seized heroin — the drug he and his narcotics squad were supposedly looking for — on only one previous occasion, according to police productivity reports. Over that same period, Bryant never seized any, records show.

Most of their seizures instead netted less powerful substances such as codeine or marijuana, and an analysis of district clerk records showed that a third of the drug charges Goines filed in that time frame were for less than a gram of narcotics. Over that same period, he had 28 months where he did not make a single arrest.

Experts said this pattern of focusing on small quantities of drugs and low-level cases raises questions about policing priorities and supervision in a squad that’s come under withering scrutiny over the past year.

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“It’s like a bad joke,” said Sam Walker, an expert on police procedure at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. “What do they do?”

Police Chief Art Acevedo cautioned against drawing conclusions about the officers’ productivity without knowing more about their specific assignment within the squad and defended the squad’s focus on small-time busts.

“Street-level narcotics is for just that — street-level dealers,” he said. “It’s not for your distribution networks.”

The records do not indicate work Goines and Bryant may have performed on cases led by other squad members or assignments outside their unit. It doesn’t tally other police work they may have engaged in, such as responding to natural disasters or other issues not directly related to their narcotics assignment.

But outside experts said the records point to broader questions about the division’s overall mission and the purpose of using policing resources to focus on arresting small-time drug users largely from communities of color.

“These tactics are just not netting the types of impact that we would want to see,” said Jacinta Gau, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Central Florida. “I would argue that it is time for an overhaul, and it is time to rethink policing strategy.”

‘An arrest a day’

When Goines and his squad crashed through the door of 7815 Harding on Jan. 28, the chaos that followed made national news. Two homeowners — Rhogena Nicholas and Dennis Tuttle — ended up dead in a police shootout, and their attorneys later questioned whether they’d ever fired at the incoming cops.

The officers of the Houston Police Department’s Squad 15 didn’t find any of the heroin they’d come for and instead walked away with only small amounts of cocaine and marijuana. Afterward, authorities said Goines fabricated an informant and made up a heroin buy at the home — and then relied on those alleged lies when convincing a judge to allow the no-knock raid.

Both officers retired under investigation earlier this year, and in August local prosecutors charged Goines with two counts of felony murder and Bryant with one count of tampering with a government record. Last week, the FBI arrested both men as part of a nine-count federal indictment that also named the 911 caller whose bad tip drew police attention to the home in the first place.

The shooting and events leading up to it have since sparked concerns — even from former longtime narcotics officers — about the supervision Goines and his squad received.

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“If these two guys were supervised more closely, this never would have happened,” said John Pohlman, an HPD sergeant who spent 42 years in the division before his retirement in 2017. “But at the end of the day, supervisors — of any kind — cannot be with their officers every day all day.”

For Goines, the raid and criminal charges marked an ignominious end to a long career in public service. But despite his distinguished years on the force, the department’s monthly productivity reports show sparse activity in recent years.

Goines’ attorney, Nicole DeBorde, said that because her client acted more in a supervisory capacity, the lower statistics weren’t troubling.

“In a supervisory role, he wouldn’t necessarily be taking credit for arrests that he is involved in because the person he’s supervising would,” she said. “That’s why I don’t think those numbers are surprising.”

Over the five years leading up to the Pecan Park raid, Goines made an average of 1.5 arrests a month. His ex-partner Bryant came in around 2.5 arrests a month, including a 13-month stretch when he did not tally any arrests. His attorney, Anthony Drumheller, attributed that statistic to an 11-month period during which Bryant worked in the division’s money laundering initiative.

“The multi-agency team was led by other case agents during his time there who would have been credited with any arrests or seizures made by the task force,” Drumheller said in a written statement.

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Records show Goines’ arrest figures among the lowest of the street-level narcotics officers the Chronicle identified as having participated in the raid on 7815 Harding. Bryant’s arrest figures were closer in line with several other officers — whose arrest figures ranged from about 2.25 arrests per month to about 4.25 arrests per month, according to police productivity reports.

The Chronicle obtained five years of those reports, which tally officers’ work over the previous month, including the number of undercover buys, the amount of drugs seized and the number of arrests each officer made.

Police and union officials argued that figures could be skewed by the neighborhoods where officers worked, the habits of users within different areas and the officers’ specific role within the squad.

“I don’t think you can draw conclusions without looking deeper into what were they doing and what was their role,” Acevedo said. “When you work in narcotics or organized crime, there will be times when a guy is working primarily on surveillance — that in and of itself might not be unusual.”

But Goines’ last employee evaluation before the Harding Street raid shows his supervisors dinged him for underperforming, according to a copy obtained by the Chronicle through a public records request.

RELATED: Court documents reveal origins of botched narcotics raid on Harding Street

“Officer Goines needs to refocus,” Sgt. Clemente Reyna wrote in August 2018, urging him to increase his productivity.

Over Goines’ career, supervisors rarely had other criticisms, besides chiding him for taking too long to turn in paperwork.

The records show that in the 13 months before the botched raid, Squad 15 made 251 arrests — leading to 276 charges — and seized firearms and illicit substances, including marijuana, cocaine, codeine and methamphetamines.

“You’re talking about, you know, basically an arrest a day,” said Corky Schalchlin, executive director of the Texas Narcotic Officers Association. “You’d hope they’d be out there doing at least that.”

Small seizures, minor arrests

Long before Goines and Bryant gained notoriety from the botched bust, they gathered department commendations and glowing employee reviews from years spent on the narcotics squads tasked with responding to run-of-the-mill neighborhood drug complaints.

In 2001, for example, a grateful former police officer sent a letter to police thanking then-Chief Clarence “C.O.” Bradford after Goines and other officers cleared out a Third Ward drug house.

“It’s time to commend the narcotics officers for a job well done,” he wrote in a letter to the chief in May 2001. “Their performance was professional, courteous and effective. Even more so when they found out I was a retiree. … I am bursting with pride and I wish to thank all of them.”

The narcotics division is one of HPD’s major undercover units and has shrunk in recent years, mirroring reductions throughout the police department. It now fields about 180 officers — costing approximately $13 million in salaries — across about 20 squads, which range from street-level enforcement to units that handle money laundering and major drug cartels.

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But Goines and Bryant were never tasked with those bigger busts; instead, when they made arrests, the charges were usually misdemeanors or the lowest-level felonies, according to a Chronicle review of court records detailing more than 1,000 criminal cases generated from Goines’ work over the past two decades and roughly 650 from Bryant’s work over the same period.

Nearly 60 percent of the charges in which Goines was the primary officer were for possessing or selling less than a gram of drugs. More than 70 percent were misdemeanors or state jail felonies, the lowest-level felony in the Texas criminal code, which typically involves well under $100 worth of drugs.

But more recently, prosecutors have shifted away from criminally charging marijuana misdemeanors and the smallest “trace” drug cases. Still, during Goines’ last five years at HPD, more than half of his arrests were for state jail felonies or lesser charges.

A review of Bryant’s cases yielded less dramatic results. While 24 percent of the charges listing the 23-year veteran as the primary officer were for less than a gram of drugs, 62 percent netted state jail felonies or misdemeanors.

A more limited look at 2,400 cases from six other current and former members of Squad 15 showed a similar pattern, with state jail felony and misdemeanor charges making up 70 to 80 percent of the cases.

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Experts and narcotics veterans from other law enforcement agencies viewed the focus on low-level drug arrests as a poor use of resources and others framing it as a regressive drug war policing strategy.

“What is the role of drug law enforcement in a community?” said Patrick O’Burke, a former deputy commander at the Texas Department of Public Safety who oversaw drug law enforcement. “If it’s simply to arrest drug law violators, then that’s misguided or myopic.”

Silvestre Tanenbaum, a former Dallas-area police officer who now advocates for drug policy reform through the Law Enforcement Action Partnership, questioned the value of relying heavily on low-level narcotics arrests as a policing tactic.

“Generally, the goal is to arrest the low-level guys and use the threat of a higher charge to get them to turn over information on who’s their dealer, who’s their supplier so they can work their way up the chain,” he said. “If they’re just focusing on low-level arrests, then they’re a pretty useless narcotics team.”

Acevedo said street-level narcotics teams aren’t tasked with going after those bigger busts. Typically, he said, the “heavy hitters” in major drug trafficking organizations aren’t a visible presence on the streets in local communities — so when police respond to citizen complaints, it’s not usually in reference to high-level suppliers.

“The majority of their cases are really driven by community complaints,” he said. “It’s probably a quality-of-life issue for neighborhoods.”

A ‘pretty bad’ situation

Internal Houston police documents cite the narcotics division’s mission as working toward “the suppression of illegal possession, manufacture and distribution of controlled substances,” including “citizen complaints regarding narcotics activities.”

In Upper Third Ward, where Goines executed dozens of search warrants over the years, community residents expressed mixed feelings about HPD’s anti-drug strategy.

Franky Stevenson, 67, lives on Nettleton Street near two houses that Goines and his team raided. On nearby Tuam, loiterers popped in and out of several decrepit houses across from a neighborhood park.

The situation was “pretty bad,” Stevenson said, adding that he appreciated HPD’s efforts in the neighborhood.

But he was also concerned by the department’s strategy of targeting low-level dealers or everyday users, he said.

“They’re wasting a lot of resources on these small-corner drug dealers,” he said, “instead of getting directly to the main source — who are providing these dealers with the products.”

Other community advocates questioned HPD’s strategy, which they said unfairly targeted residents of minority communities and which led to an anti-drug strategy penalizing people with addiction.

“They don’t look for drugs in the white neighborhoods,” said James Douglas, president of the Houston NAACP chapter. “Their argument is that’s where most of the crime is taking place. Well, no — that’s where you go looking for the crime. If you went looking in the white neighborhoods, you’d find they commit those drug-related crimes as much as they do in African American neighborhoods.”

‘Dated’ priorities

To drug policy experts and advocates, the reliance on small-time arrests and periods of apparent inactivity also highlight broader concerns about taking such a punitive approach to low-level drug possession.

“It demonstrates a very dated set of priorities,” said Scott Henson, policy director of the criminal justice reform nonprofit Just Liberty. “A 34-year undercover … with that level of training and experience, just walking up to someone on the street and asking to buy crack? That is a waste of time.”

Some, such as Third Ward community organizer Assata Richards, questioned whether heavily policing drug users and small-time dealers helps communities or whether the risks of raids and the costs of incarceration are simply no longer worth it.

“I’m not a fan of, you know, incarceration and police action around something that’s a mental illness,” Richards said. “They think if they can just stop the dealing, they’ll stop (people) from using.”

On top of that, some experts suggested that low-level busts may not even be an effective means for getting drugs off the streets.

“Is it worth it? Every community in Houston has to answer that, but at the end of the day, probably not,” O’Burke said. “If all you’re doing is arresting people for the sake of arresting people, in my opinion, you’re probably not accomplishing a lot. You’re simply replacing one drug dealer with another drug dealer.”

st.john.smith@chron.com

keri.blakinger@chron.com