More than a year before a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in east Houston, Mayor John Whitmire’s administration quietly changed a decades-old policy that required Houston Police Department detectives to investigate every officer-involved shooting within city limits, regardless of which agency those officers work for.
Since at least the 1990s, HPD officers have responded to these shootings, collecting evidence at the scene and coordinating interviews of witnesses and the officers involved, according to experts and past presentations to Houston City Council. In early 2025, however, Houston Police Chief Noe Diaz changed course and started deferring to the law enforcement agency responsible for the shooting.
Instead of automatically responding, now HPD treats each shooting on a case-by-case basis, Diaz said. They opted not to respond when they were notified about Salgado’s shooting.
The change came roughly a month after President Donald Trump assumed office for a second term, promising dramatically expanded immigration enforcement. In January 2025, his administration began pulling grants from cities and law enforcement agencies it said were not ideologically aligned with its priorities.
Diaz said Trump’s administration and its positioning on grants had nothing to do with the agency’s decision.
As a result of the policy change, HPD investigators did not respond to the scene when an ICE agent shot and killed Salgado in July. Instead, representatives with the district attorney’s office were the first local investigators to the scene, a day later, losing precious hours to collect their own evidence and testimony before federal authorities consolidated control.
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In an interview, Diaz said he reversed the policy around February 2025 because past HPD investigations were often futile, with federal officials stonewalling detectives and refusing to give them access to the scene and the evidence that comes with it. As a result, he said, those local investigations merely echoed the conclusion of federal investigators.
“Most of the time, the police department was just kind of standing around and not getting the information they actually needed to investigate,” Diaz said. “I need to have access to the evidence. I need to have access to see if there’s any videos involved. And when you don’t have access to this, we’re just in a holding pattern in the hopes that later they share information with us.”
Brian Harris, a retired HPD homicide investigator who taught classes on how to respond to officer-involved shootings until 2016, said Diaz is right that federal agencies frequently made it hard for local investigators to question agents. Still, Harris said, there simply cannot be a homicide investigation if local authorities do not respond.
“Are the feds equipped to do that investigation?” Harris said. “Are they the agency regularly investigating homicides and murders? No. Even when the FBI is called in on a murder case, it’s always for some specialty purpose – their behavioral unit, or for their technology.”
Local investigators could still collect evidence, even if they were slowed from questioning witnesses, Harris said.
“Go and ask the DA or anyone else who they’d rather investigate homicides in the city of Houston – trained homicide investigators from the city or county, or a random FBI or DEA agent?” Harris said.
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In 2017, former HPD Chief Art Acevedo created a specialized unit to handle these calls, according to a presentation to city council. The team included two lieutenants, four sergeants and 16 officers tasked with investigating allegations of misconduct by HPD employees and any sworn peace officers whose offense occurred in the city of Houston.
Those officers would “automatically” respond to and investigate all shootings or uses of force within HPD’s jurisdiction, according to Harris, who said that policy was in place since at least the 1990s.
Records from the time show relatively few cases between 2017 and 2020, peaking at 11 such shootings in 2018. None of the investigations resulted in charges filed against the officer.
An earlier statement from HPD said another rationale for the change was to reduce “duplicated efforts.” Harris said those investigations have always been a tiny fraction of the homicide division’s caseload, which has only gotten smaller in recent years as homicides have declined and other responsibilities, such as investigating assaults and gang violence, have moved to other divisions.
While federal authorities frequently keep investigators from immediately speaking with agents, there is still utility to a quick response, Harris argued, because any delay means videos might get deleted, shell casings might get buried underfoot or fingerprints might be washed away in the rain.
No other agency is better equipped to handle the role of investigating the shooting than HPD, Harris said. While federal authorities might be good at filing complex warrants or tracking down international criminal organizations, they have little experience with homicides.
Still, Diaz argued there is little utility in sending officers to wait on the sidelines.
“I think I have the finest team in the state to be frank with you,” he said, “and they’re capable of doing anything here, but if our federal partners decide, ‘Hey you can’t come on the scene,’ or they don’t call us, or they call us and say, ‘We have this one, we don’t need your help,’ that’s where we’re at with these investigations.”
There’s more and it’s a gift link, so read the rest. I would have been deeply annoyed if the reason for this had been standard Trump administration bullying nonsense, but I would have at least understood the motivation. The actual motivation seems to be a desire to not waste time and resources on investigations that have universally been futile. I do get that, but the volume is small and the importance of each case is high, so it seems misguided to me. At the very least, I don’t get why HPD would be content with letting other agencies, ones they clearly see as being less able to do this job, do what they do in their place. Just for the pride of it, I don’t understand why they’d let this go. And while we may never get a resolution in this incident regardless of how it plays or might have played out, we’ll also now never know for sure what we could have discovered had this been properly investigated from the jump. That feels very wrong to me.