The Chicano Squad: Houston’s Pioneering All-Latino Homicide Detectives

Forty years ago, Houston’s Latino community was plagued by discrimination, police brutality and a growing number of unsolved murders.  In 1977, a young veteran named Jose Campos Torres was detained at a Houston-area bar after getting into an altercation. Instead of arresting him and taking him into jail, police took him to a remote parking lot and beat him, and then threw him in the swamp in an attempt to cover up their crime.

Two years after the murder, which remains one of the most infamous in-custody deaths in Texas history, the Houston Police Department recruited a handful of young Chicano officers for a bold experiment in an attempt to solve murders in the city’s fast-growing Mexican American neighborhoods and build community trust. The Chicano Squad operated from 1979 to 2010. Its story provides new perspectives on enduring issues of police violence and unsolved murders today.

Two native Texans teamed up to tell that story in a new podcast called Chicano Squad. 

Eva Ruth Moravec, an Austin-based freelance writer and the series’ producer, has spent years writing about police and collecting data on in-custody deaths for a series on police shootings of unarmed people, and is the co-founder of the nonprofit Texas Justice Institute. Cristela Alonzo, a Rio Grande Valley native, writer and actress who now lives in California, hosts the series. The first two episodes of the series, produced by Vox Media, are available via Apple Podcasts.