challenges when it comes to the relationship between the police and the community, but the horror stories in cleveland would be the worst thing that had ever happened in any other city and there are about six or seven of them just in recent years that are as bad as anything that you hear anywhere else in country. do you have a basic understanding of what s been so wrong in cleveland? so certainly we have, as the consent decree shows, a pattern in practice of excessive use of force. certainly there s also a culture where the police department has not really been connected with the community. so we ve arrived here today with that problem. certainly hoping to move forward. it s our time to really bring about change. greater cleveland congregations, congregations like yours, churches and faith communities have made themselves very visible in terms of this
but we re used to a body of water being a figural focal point for large cities and the way they re laid out. in houston, that very, very large american city is instead crisscrossed with a series of small rivers that in houston they call bayous. and it s a reminder that even though houston is in texas, houston is about as close to new orleans as it is to dallas-ft. worth and one of the many houston nicknames is bayou city. houston was founded in the 1930s along the banks of what s called buffalo bayou. there s a whole system of interconnected bayous that run through the city. buffalo bayou, brays bayou, and sims bayou. it s important to understand that about houston in terms of understanding, you know, how houston s basic infrastructural commerce works and shipping, right, the utility of the whole incredibly important houston ship channel. understanding the bayous is important for understanding the overall layout of the city and
houston, annise parker. mayor parker, i know this is a very, very challenging time. thanks very much for being with us tonight. glad to talk to you. let me just ask you the latest on how things are in your city right now, and what your biggest concern is immediately this evening. we are very quickly returning back to normal. the as you mentioned in your intro, we are defined by ten small shallow rivers that go west to east across the city, and they were all out of their banks earlier this morning. they ve been receding fairly rapidly, and water drains out of houston quickly once it stops raining. the biggest problem now is going house by house, making sure that those that are in the floodway have been searched and that we make sure that all houstonians are accounted for. as you mentioned, we believe and that is very much a guess, but right now based on where we saw flooding from overflights, we think we have about 4,000
city. some of them, as i said, i find shocking because they identify things that it s very surprising to learn the cleveland pd was already not doing. things like training their officers in basic deescalation techniques, giving them basic mental health training, telling them not to use their guns as batons. some of that stuff is very surprising. there s also a lot of very wide-ranging recommendations in terms of community accountability and sort of re-knitting the police department into the community. that sounds like that s one of your major concerns. do you feel like the consent decree really gets at the heart of the problem? so i ve only had a chance to glance at the consent decree. there were four areas that we were particularly concerned about, so we ve advocated for bias-free policing. so if one is in cleveland, it doesn t matter what one s race
at least a dozen people are still missing in hays county, alone. up near austin, at the lake travis reservoir, that reservoir has risen 21 feet. in a county between houston and dallas, they re watching and worrying now over the possibility of major colorado river flooding. but in houston, in the nation s fourth largest city, when the bayous in houston fill up, the city of houston tends to fill up, too. that has led to these just remarkable and scary scenes of a big, modern, urban center, one of biggest urban centers in our country, fourth largest city in the nation, being up to its knees or some cases up to its neck, or some cases worse in this urban street flooding. some of the most dramatic and most dangerous scenes out of houston have actually been from the interstates. i-10 and i-45 converge in houston. and with flooding like this, instead of those interstates serving as evacuation routes and arteries for people to leave, to