[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 124 (Wednesday, September 22, 1999)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1927-E1929]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




HONORING BRUCE P. MARQUIS, HOUSTON INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT CHIEF OF 
                                 POLICE

                                 ______
                                 

                            HON. KEN BENTSEN

                                of texas

                    in the house of representatives

                     Wednesday, September 22, 1999

  Mr. BENTSEN. Mr. Speaker, I rise to honor Houston Independent School 
District ``HISD'' Police Chief Bruce P. Marquis for his outstanding 
contribution to the safety and well-being of our children attending 
HISD schools, which was recently highlighted in an article in the Wall 
Street Journal.
  Since the day he took office in 1994, Chief Marquis has embraced a 
simple, guiding principle--to foster an environment, as he puts it, 
``for teaching and learning to take place.'' His work to make our 
Houston community schools safer for students and teachers has been 
nothing less than outstanding. Not only has he made our schools safer, 
but he has made our children feel safer. Chief Marquis is a strong 
believer in the concept that our children must feel secure in order to 
learn.
  HISD officials made a forward-thinking decision 5 years ago when they 
created a new Police chief position for the schools and hired Bruce, 
who was distinguished by his extensive management experience and his 
background in law enforcement. A former agent in the FBI's Houston 
office, Bruce brought long-range vision and can-do pragmatism to the 
creation and management of HISD's police department. Only Texas and 
Florida State laws allow school districts to create their own police 
forces. Bruce has built the HISD police department from the ground up, 
expanding it into the largest in the state.
  Since Chief Marquis took over, aggravated assaults in Houston schools 
have decreased by three-quarters, and weapons' violations are down by 
two-thirds. Chief Marquis' proactive and aggressive leadership became 
evident from the beginning of his tenure when he helped persuade the 
Texas Legislature to transfer authority over school police officers 
from principals to school police chiefs. Once that was done he made 
sure that HISD officers wore uniforms and badges, and that they carried 
guns just like community peace officers. Whether it's dealing with gang 
activity, drug deals or weapons, Marquis stations his officers 
throughout our schools to proactively stop problems before they start.
  Other innovations Chief Marquis has helped institute include: HISD 
officers making arrests and keeping records, issuing citations for 
truancy and fighting, and jailing kids aged 17 and over for not paying 
fines. He went above and beyond duty when he extended his department's 
jurisdiction to include a shelter for battered women.
  Chief Marquis's law enforcement credentials run deep. In addition to 
his 10 years with Houston's FBI office, he served as a former U.S. Air 
Force officer, chief of police at the Los Angeles Air Force Station, 
and security manager for the 1984 U.S. Olympic Games. Chief Marquis has 
put his experience and professionalism to good use for Houston's 
children. I am proud that my friends and constituents Bruce and his 
wife Traci Bransford-Marquis have chosen to share their spirit of 
giving with their community, and are teaching their two children those 
same values.
  Mr. Speaker, I congratulate Chief Marquis for his contributions 
toward ensuring our children are safer. To protect our students in 
today's increasingly violent society, Chief Marquis has transformed a 
loose coalition of school security guards with essentially no law 
enforcement tools into a modern, efficient team of officers who, armed 
with a full range of police training and expertise, form a network of 
safety within our Houston school district.
  I insert in the Record at this point The Wall Street Journal article 
on Bruce Marquis which appeared September 20, 1999.

             [From the Wall Street Journal, Sept. 20, 1999]

        Reading, Writing and Miranda Rights: Cops Patrol Schools

                           (By June Kronholz)

       HOUSTON--Armed, trained in assault tactics, equipped with 
     bulletproof vests and bomb-sniffing dogs, supported by and 
     bomb-sniffing dogs, supported by 24-hour emergency 
     dispatchers. Chief Bruce P. Marquis and his 177-member police 
     department walk the country's highest-profile beat this fall.
       They patrol public schools.
       Schools are safer than they have been in years, the U.S. 
     Department of Education reports. Crimes against kids while 
     they're in school are down by 20% in three years; one-third 
     fewer children were suspended for bringing a gun to school in 
     1998 than the year before. Education Secretary Richard Riley 
     calls schools the safest place for a child to be.
       But the gun rampage in Littleton, Colo., the deadliest in a 
     three-year string of school shootings, is the flip side of 
     that good news, and has sent school districts rushing to 
     upgrade their security. Kids returned to school to find metal 
     detectors, fences, dress codes, security cameras. And, in the 
     Houston schools, one thing more: a police department.
       Forget the days when the football coach doubled as security 
     chief, checking the boys' room for idlers and cigarette 
     smoke. The Houston Independent School District Police 
     Department stations armed officers in the 58 middle schools 
     and high schools and many of the 35 magnet and other 
     alternative schools in its 312-square-mile jurisdiction. It 
     patrols school neighborhoods with bicycles and a fleet of 
     squad cars, fields gang and drug task forces and operates a 
     crime-scene communications van.
       Over and over on a recent, stifling-hot afternoon, a new 
     Special Response Team practices skulking down an alley below 
     window level, crouching behind a bullet-proof shield and 
     then, with guns drawn, rushing a stairwell to overwhelm an 
     imaginary gunman.


                            Chain of Command

       There is a horse-mounted unit for traffic control. An 
     investigations division handles crimes short of rape and 
     murder. Dispatchers fielded 14,000 calls last year. And 
     heading it all is a 47-year-old former FBI agent who holds a 
     doctorate in education, earns $84,000 a year and has shaped 
     his department down to the smallest details, including 
     designing the uniforms and the department flag himself. Chief 
     Marquis--so mindful of chain-of-command protocol that he and 
     his longtime deputy address each other by their titles--
     offers this description of his job: ``We exist for teaching 
     and learning to take place.''
       Education is a local function in the U.S., so districts 
     handle security in lots of different ways, and no one 
     collects nation-wide information. Most districts, if they use 
     any security at all, use armed local police, reasoning that 
     because schools are part of the

[[Page E1928]]

     community, they should be protected by community police. But 
     some districts use police just to patrol the halls, while 
     others ask them to run safety and counseling programs as 
     well. Some pay local police with school funds; others depend 
     on the police force to pay the costs and handle the 
     administration.
       In Texas and Florida, state laws allow school districts to 
     create their own police forces, and 82 of the 1,042 school 
     districts in Texas have done just that. With a budget of 
     about $12 million, the HISD police department is the largest 
     in the State. But beyond that, Houston shows how the job of 
     protecting school kids has expanded and become 
     professionalized since the days when coaches patrolled the 
     halls.
       The starting salary for an HISD police officer is $28,000, 
     only about $1,000 less than for Houston Police Department 
     rookies. New hires must be graduates of a police-academy 
     program, hold a police license and have 60 hours toward a 
     college degree. By state law, officers receive at least 20 
     hours of training a year. Bike patrols and drug and gang 
     specialists receive training beyond that. And the Special 
     Response Team practices hostage rescues and school 
     evacuations two days a month, including training with the 
     Federal Bureau of Investigation.


                               Shaping Up

       That's a far cry from the department that Chief Marquis 
     inherited in 1994--a ``ragtag bunch'' in mismatched uniforms, 
     he says, who applied the decals to their squad cars 
     themselves. Because Houston's schools use site-based 
     management, giving principals control over some of the day-
     to-day details of running their schools, HISD policemen 
     carried guns and wore uniforms in schools where principals 
     favored them but didn't elsewhere.
       Houston's superintendent, Rod Paige, says the school board 
     decided to upgrade its policing when focus groups told it 
     that middle-class parents, and particularly whites, were 
     leaving the district because they viewed the schools as 
     unsafe. Of Houston's 211,000 students, more than half are 
     Hispanic, a third are African-American and three-quarters are 
     poor. Big-city superintendents worry, says Dr. Paige, ``that 
     school districts so at odds demographically with the rest of 
     the community'' risk losing community support, especially 
     financial support. And operating unsafe schools is one 
     certain step on that path.
       In the 1993-94 school year, HISD police reported 89 
     aggravated assaults, two murders, seven rapes and 244 cases 
     of children carrying weapons to school. Hired mid-year, Chief 
     Marquis already had been a U.S. Air Force officer, chief of 
     police at the Los Angeles Air Force Station, security manager 
     for the 1984 Olympic Games and a 10-year member of the FBI. 
     The son of a San Francisco bus driver, he graduated from the 
     University of Portland, earned a business degree from 
     Pepperdine University in Los Angeles and got his doctorate 
     from Texas Southern University in Houston. He expects to earn 
     a second master's degree, in criminal-justice management, 
     this spring, and after that is eyeing a program at Harvard.
       Two years into his HISD job, Chief Marquis, a Democrat, ran 
     for sheriff of heavily Republican Harris County and took a 
     drubbing. But he moves easily in Houston's civic circles, 
     from the YMCA to the rodeo, and entertains a steady stream of 
     TV reporters who ask about the schools.
       A typical Marquis day begins at 4 a.m. with a workout and 
     allows for one cup of coffee, weekdays only. He does the 
     cooking for his wife, a former Justice Department lawyer, and 
     two small children, and sews a missing button on his 
     daughter's dress before she leaves for preschool.
       Still, the screen saver on his office computer declares 
     ``Always Forward.'' Vince Lombardi quotations hang framed on 
     the wall (``What It Takes to Be No. 1''). And Chief 
     Marquis delights in pushing the boundaries of his job 
     description: He recently extended his department's 
     jurisdiction to include a shelter for battered women, on 
     whose board he sits, by reasoning that the children of the 
     abused mothers probably attend Houston schools. ``I'm not 
     a status-quo kind of guy,'' he says.


                              Bearing Arms

       Indeed. Among his first changes, Chief Marquis helped 
     persuade the Texas Legislature to put school police officers 
     under the direction of school-police chiefs, taking them out 
     of the orbit of principals. With that, HISD officers began 
     wearing uniforms and badges--and carrying guns. Without guns, 
     ``they're not police officers,'' the chief says.
       Where HISD police formerly backed up Houston police on 
     calls in schools, now it's the other way around, with school 
     police making the arrests and keeping the records, (although 
     still using Houston police substations for bookings). 
     Emergency dispatchers, who once routed 911 calls through the 
     Houston police, now relay them directly to HISD. And four 
     years ago, HISD police received the authority to issue 
     citations: Disrupting school can bring a Class C citation 
     that carriers a $400 municipal-court fine. Violating a 9:30 
     a.m. to 2:30 p.m. curfew--imposed by the city to keep kids 
     off the street when they should be in school--can bring a 
     $250 fine. And citations for fighting can start at $250 and 
     soar to $1,300.
       At age 17, moreover, a youngster can be sent to jail for 
     not paying his fines. ``That gets their attention,'' says 
     HISD Capt. Al Barnes. More important, he adds, it helps keep 
     fights off the school grounds and out of the classrooms.
       With site-based management, Houston's schools can decide to 
     use their detectors and security cameras, and they can opt 
     for school uniforms and bans on trench coats. Milby High 
     School is banning denim this year, and because of thefts and 
     fires in the lockers, Austin High has bolted them shut, which 
     means students all carry around their days' books and 
     supplies.


                            Random Searches

       But to add to the schools' precautions, Chief Marquis also 
     issues hand-held metal detectors to his officers and next 
     year, will add computers to link them with headquarters--a 
     converted telephone-company building--and into the records 
     bureau. Prompted by the Littleton shootings, HISD will begin 
     twice-monthly drug and weapons searches this year, randomly 
     picking out a school and then two classes in that school for 
     searchers. More typically, though, his officers linger at 
     front doors as school begins each morning, picking up on 
     tensions or bad moods. They wander hallways, shooing 
     stragglers into class. They direct traffic at dismissal, 
     breaking up knots of loiterers who might, out of idleness, 
     start trouble. And they listen for word of gang fights, drug 
     deals and weapons.
       That word usually gets out, Officer Marvin Lee says with 
     reassuring certainty, because ``the good kids outweigh the 
     bad kids.'' Officer Lee has patrolled Lamar High, a middle-
     class school with 3,000 students, for 15 years, and he has a 
     clear sense of his job: ``It's stepping out little fires 
     before they become big fires.''
       Across town, a little fire appears to be smoldering at 
     Yates High as a skinny sophomore is brought into the tiny 
     police office, accused of kicking an assistant principal who 
     has reprimanded him for not wearing the regulation khaki 
     pants. The parents have been called, and the teenager, 
     clearly fearful of his stepfather, sits worried and resentful 
     as Officer Ernest Lang outlines his strategy.
       Officer Lang, who scored 33 touchdowns in his senior year 
     at Yates in 1951 and is still known in Central Houston as 
     ``The Legend,'' plans to get the boy into the school ROTC 
     program, and assigns a sleepy-looking senior nicknamed Wolf 
     to serve as his mentor. An officer who knows the stepfather 
     will look in at home from time to time, and a Baptist 
     preacher who was tossed out of Yates 20 years ago but has 
     returned as a counselor will work on the youngster's 
     attitude. ``We can reach him if we take the time.'' Officer 
     Lang says easily. Then, as the parents arrive for a 
     conference, he leans toward the youngster and warns: ``Don't 
     you act ugly now.''
       Juvenile crime has fallen nationwide in the past five 
     years: In Houston's schools, aggravated assaults are down by 
     three-quarters, and weapons' violations are down by two-
     thirds since Chief Marquis took his job. Dewey Cornell, a 
     psychologist who studies youth violence at the University of 
     Virginia in Charlottesville, credits better policing for part 
     of the decline. But he also credits a strong economy, the 
     calming of the cocaine wars, success in arresting gang 
     leaders, a federal law that mandates expulsion for bringing 
     guns to school, and the spread of character-education and 
     conflict-mediation programs.


                          Character Education

       Ten years ago, worried about what they saw as declining 
     social and moral values, local business leaders raised $2 
     million to fund one of the country's early character-
     education programs in Houston's schools. The idea is to teach 
     values such as honesty and self-discipline as part of every 
     class, says Dot Woodson, who was a University of Houston 
     basketball coach before coming to HISD to head the program. 
     So, in a class on the Boston Tea Party, she tells teachers to 
     ask kids, ``What would make you so angry that you would want 
     to rebel, and what are the appropriate ways to rebel?''
       In a decade, Houston has trained 16,000 of its teachers in 
     character education and bought or written character-education 
     curricula for all its schools. Ten state legislatures 
     (although not Texas's) now mandate that schools teach 
     character education, and six others encourage it. ``This is 
     the place to spend money,'' Virginia's Dr. Cornell insists.
       Certainly, compared with hiring policemen, character 
     education is cheap. Security is barely a blip on the $1.2 
     billion budget of the Houston schools, but even so, the 
     district sets aside $9 million. Chief Marquis says his 
     spending, which comes from several budget pots, actually is 
     at least a third more, and even that doesn't include what the 
     schools individually spend on security hardware. Meanwhile, 
     Houston's character-education program is still operating, in 
     part, off its original $2 million grant.
       With schools under huge pressure to raise standards and 
     test scores, special-response teams and communications vans 
     can seem like an extravagance--until they're needed, of 
     course. Herbert Karpicke, principal of the 700-student High 
     School for the Performing and Visual Arts, offers a tour 
     while Chief Marquis is giving an interview in the school's 
     video lab. Doors open onto a choir practice, a jazz band, a 
     corps of ballerinas, dramatic soliloquies. Dr. Karpicke has 
     persuaded the district to contribute $15 million toward a 
     new, larger school, but he has to raise the other $15 million 
     himself in the next five years, and he is wondering how.
       Even this school--its hallways lined with cellos, its 
     students hand-picked--has an

[[Page E1929]]

     armed HISD police officer at the front door, though. Chief 
     Marquis concedes the benefits of violence-prevention 
     programs: They're ``a spoke in the wheel,'' he says. ``But as 
     long as problems from the community come onto the campuses, 
     the police are necessary,'' he says, and that means armed, 
     trained and equipped officers. He is lobbying to hire 40 
     more.

     

                          ____________________