The number of homicides in Houston rose nearly 25% during the first three months of 2006

Roma Khanna:

The Houston Police Department investigated 90 homicides through Friday, compared with 73 in the first quarter of 2005, police say. That puts the city on track for the deadliest year in more than a decade and would erase the last of the gains made in the 1990s, when the city's homicide tally was cut in half.

The carnage this year reflects the same trends that police publicized in 2005 after a bloody Thanksgiving weekend and a spate of homicides involving Hurricane Katrina evacuees from New Orleans. Police late in the year increased officer overtime pay to focus on the danger, primarily, in southwest Houston apartment complexes and the increased menace of gang violence.

But a Houston Chronicle analysis of 326 homicides that occurred in the city last year shows that those trends were obvious long before the first evacuee-related slaying and the year-end spike that prompted Police Chief Harold Hurtt to direct resources and public attention to these problem areas.

Hurtt last week admitted that HPD was slow to identify the patterns. But he blamed a staffing shortage that grew worse over the last year and outmoded tools for crime analysis.

"We were behind the curve as far as resources," he said. "We need to do a better job of continuously identifying and even forecasting trends. But you need (technology) and you need personnel to be able to respond."

One in three Houston homicides last year occurred in apartment complexes, the leading location for killings in each month of 2005, according to the newspaper's findings.

Specifically in southwest Houston, the Chronicle found, two police patrol districts were the most violent in the city, accounting for one in five homicides last year.

Yet those districts had the lowest police presence of any in the city, according to an internal HPD study of manpower distribution. It was not until last month that Hurtt, who has been grappling with a manpower shortage throughout the department because of a large number of retirements, added 20 officers to patrol the southwest's Fondren area.

The already high rate of homicides there grew in the final months of last year, at the same time the population in southwest Houston was swelling with Katrina evacuees. The spike in apartment crime helped double the number of homicides in December, compared with 2004. By year's end, police had investigated 336 killings, a 22 percent increase over the previous year.

Ten of those homicides occurred prior to 2005, but because they were investigated last year, 336 is the figure reported to the FBI as the city's official homicide total.

Evacuees from Hurricane Katrina, who began arriving in Houston after the Aug. 29 landfall, were the victims or suspects in 18 homicides. That was 13 percent of the slayings that occurred between September and December.

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