At issue is an internal department code that police used in 264,000 cases to suspend investigations due to a lack of personnel. The crimes included roughly 4,000 sexual assault cases.
Kinsley began his law enforcement career in 2017 as a patrol officer at the Houston Police Department.
Oh, so not like in the past 6 years as in that he had an illustrious career until recently. No, he started 6 years ago and decided to speed-run his way to “bad apple.” But wait, why wasn’t he fired or anything sooner?
He received positive performance reviews during his two-year tenure, with supervisors praising his dependability, leadership skills, and “safety mindedness,” among other qualities.
Huh, maybe his superior officers didn’t know? Or… I don’t know… Maybe the bushel is so saturated with bad apples that they’ve forgotten what good apples look like?
But Kinsley’s file also details several allegations of misconduct.
Internal affairs investigators found Kinsley “dropped his body weight” onto a suspect during an arrest in August 2018, even though the suspect was already “prone on the ground” as another officer pinned him down with a knee on his back.
No, it looks like someone knew that there were at least a couple of bad apples…
Then-police chief Art Acevedo wrote that Kinsley’s use of force “was not necessary” in the situation.
Jesus Christ! How high up do these goddamn apples go???
Kinsley elected to give up five days of paid time off instead of serving the resulting five-day suspension.
Fuck me, cops get to play on fucking easy-mode. You failed the whole test so you got your bonus points taken away?!
Then, in June 2019, Kinsley was relieved of duty pending the results of another internal investigation. Details about the alleged misconduct are not included in Kinsley’s personnel file and could not be confirmed by the Landing.
However, Kinsley resigned from the Houston Police Department in October 2019 while still under investigation. Houston police did not confirm whether the probe continued following Kinsley’s exit.
Kinsley began his next law enforcement job in December 2020 with the 50-member Dickinson Police Department.
Oh good, so they tried to sweep him under the rug and when that didn’t work, they kicked the can further down the road…
There, Kinsley once again received glowing performance evaluations, yet he continued to draw scrutiny from internal affairs.
You know, I’m starting to get suspicious of all these police departments saying “these bad apples sure do make great cops!” I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt, but they’re either doing bad math or are fucking up on purpose.
Five months after the Scurlock encounter, Kinsley came under investigation again, this time for an unauthorized car chase.
Personnel records showed Kinsley responded to a vehicle pursuit led by the Friendswood Police Department, even though Friendswood had not asked for assistance and Kinsley never notified dispatchers that he was en route. According to Dickinson’s internal investigation, Kinsley raced to the scene of the chase, accelerating to nearly 100 mph in a 40 mph zone without activating his emergency lights or siren.
When he reached the scene of the chase, Kinsley forced the suspect vehicle onto the sidewalk and drove into oncoming traffic to pursue the fleeing vehicle, nearly colliding with a Friendswood squad car. At one point, a pedestrian was forced to leap out of the way of traffic as Kinsley approached.
Kinsley abandoned the pursuit only after sustaining a flat tire as he drove over the highway median. Following the case, he did not complete an incident report as required by department policy.
Price, the Dickinson internal affairs lieutenant, initiated an internal investigation into the chase after Friendswood’s police chief complained to the department about Kinsley’s actions. A Friendswood police sergeant would later liken Kinsley to Barney Fife, the bumbling law enforcement officer from “The Andy Griffith Show,” Price wrote in his investigation notes.
Kinsley later told Price that he initiated the pursuit to “help out another officer” and decided against filing a report in anticipation of an internal affairs probe.
Dickinson officials ultimately concluded Kinsley violated numerous policies and “should have reasonably known that this pursuit was clearly a danger to the public.” However, Kinsley’s personnel file does not indicate whether he was disciplined for his actions.
I’m truly flabbergasted by this… He murders someone and then five months later tries to figure out how many other goddamn regulations and laws he can break without getting fired or something? Congratu-fucking-lations, you found out that if you and enough other colleagues shit the bed frequently enough that people will stop recognizing the pile of shit as a bed. In this idiom-turned-metaphor, the police department is the bed. The police department is a steaming pile of shit.
And now the moment we’ve all been waiting for: the event that was a catalyst for this whole article.
Body camera footage published by the Landing in October showed Kinsley throwing Scurlock to the ground, causing his body to go limp for nearly three minutes, during a minor bike crash investigation.
The video also showed Kinsley withheld key information about Scurlock’s condition from emergency medical personnel who responded to the scene, then did not get Scurlock additional medical attention as his condition deteriorated on the way to jail.
Scurlock ultimately spent two weeks in a hospital intensive care unit with a brain bleed. He then bounced between hospital and nursing homes for nine months before dying in December 2022 following a stroke.
That’s fucking awful… In regards to death, my hope is always that people get to die with dignity and peace and all of that was taken away by this monster. What a horrible piece of trash taking away oxygen from someone who at least would have the basic decency to say “hey, his head bonked the ground and he was out for a few minutes. Someone should look into that.”
Well, at least the town got a new police chief, maybe they’ll clean things up!
Dickinson Police Chief Michael Berezin, who joined the department in early 2023, has lauded Kinsley’s job performance as “spectacular” during his tenure. Kinsley, who was an officer at the time of the Scurlock encounter, was promoted to sergeant in August.
Rabbani’s legal appeal challenging his death sentence, which would ultimately prove successful, languished in the Harris County courts for decades. His defense attorneys neglected to pursue it, effectively abandoning Rabbani and leaving him unrepresented for years. Meanwhile, prosecutors remained aware of the appeal but appear to have set it aside indefinitely.
At the same time, Rabbani’s new lawyers allege he suffered medical neglect while serving the unconstitutional death sentence.
Together, these failures have left Rabbani as Wolff found him in spring 2023 – severely disabled, deeply mentally ill and unable to stand or even articulate full sentences. He has, Wolff wrote in his letter to the district court judge, “deteriorated past the point of possible recovery.”
In an email to the Houston Landing on Wednesday, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice disputed Wolff’s allegations about Rabbani’s living conditions and declined to comment on Rabbani’s care specifically.
“All inmates have access to comprehensive health care, including mental health care,” Amanda Hernandez, director of communications for TDCJ, said in an email. “Both security and nursing staff attend to inmates on a regular basis.”
Rabbani’s case is not isolated.
Texas again proving it is the shittiest place in America.
I would argue that they carried out the death sentence as Mr. Rabbani seems to need constant care now and has no hope of ever regaining even a measure of personal freedom.
An interesting article. I have some experience with colonias as there’s one near me and I have been through and near others. What’s a bit confusing to me is that this doesn’t sound like a colonia at all (although it is referred to as “formerly” a colonia, perhaps confusing me further). Colonias are typically areas with no incorporated entity at all and often on land not platted for residential development. This leads to a near complete lack of infrastructure. Without water, sewer, paved roads, or even street addressing, colonias tend to have significant safety and health problems just due to the realities of exurban population concentration without the infrastructure to support it.
That’s not the case here, though—the area is apparently a planned residential development with an active developer and property owner’s association. To the extent there are infrastructure issues it’s probably a result of underregulation of residential development, a widespread problem in Texas that the article nods to. But that’s a whole issue aside from the “haven for illegality” accusation which feels like far more of a scare story than a reality. Still, crime in areas like this can become a significant problem… impoverished people in marginal living situations (e.g. RVs parked on rural lots) tend to be very attractive targets for theft, and that starts a feedback loop of escalating violence and worsening conditions as residents feel forced to defend their livelihood and shelter—and therefore get trigger happy with firearms and aren’t able to hold down jobs due to the time they’d be away. This has visibly played out in the San Luis Valley in Colorado, for example.
The situation here seems fairly optimistic, though, doesn’t it? The school district seems responsive, the POA is funding law enforcement. It looks like a community that’s maybe on the edge of this downwards trend starting, but that’s taking active measures to stop it. What they need from the state legislature is probably more funding and perhaps authority to incorporate, I’m not sure how that works in Texas. But that doesn’t look like what they’re going to get, because the legislature’s dominant party has decided to make it an illegal immigration story.
The detail that this is playing out in “Liberty County” is, of course, a wonderful one. It invites a comparison to libertarian/anarchist development efforts that have often failed in interesting ways, but then this doesn’t seem to be one. The leg seems invested in it not coming off that way, either.
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