Mayor (name not specified) and Harris County District Attorney Sean Teer announced a joint effort on evidence-handling reforms on behalf of the city of Houston and Harris County, saying the collaboration will clear decades of stored property and return officers assigned to evidence custody back to patrol duties. "But today, we're going another step forward in improving criminal justice in Houston and across Harris County," the mayor said, adding that the initiative represents "a new day of properly handling evidence."

The initiative centers on identifying and destroying narcotics and other items that officials say no longer bear value to prosecutions. District Attorney Sean Teer said his office will change how it handles narcotics evidence and is taking immediate steps to address the volume of stored property. "As of right now, we are starting to move that up, and we will be destroying any narcotics evidence that has been obtained prior to 2015," Teer said. He also said the office will not permit police departments to destroy narcotics evidence that has been in police possession since 2005 without coordination with the DA's office.

Teer outlined several operational steps his office has taken or will take: creating a senior attorney position to liaise with the Houston Police Department, the sheriff's office and other agencies to facilitate property destruction; preparing property-destruction orders for cases where the disposition is known; and using funds controlled by the DA's office to cover the high cost of destroying illicit narcotics. "By noon today, we will have a list, chief, for every single one of those cases, and we will have property destruction orders ready to go on those," Teer said. He also said his office will pursue judicial and defense sign-off on property-destruction forms at the time of plea bargains where appropriate.

Chief Diaz of the Houston Police Department described the scale of the storage problem and the operational impact of maintaining evidence for decades. "We have over 1,200,000 pieces of evidence here at the Houston Police Department," he said, and described examples including narcotics and other items from the 1980s and 1990s that remain in storage. Chief Diaz said the department has taken steps to address storage conditions, including extermination and updated tracking systems, but that space and cost pressures remain. "It is a huge cost, a huge process," he said.

Peter Stout, president and CEO of the Houston Forensic Science Center (HFSC), described technical and safety issues involved in storing large quantities of drugs and said HFSC will take over the property operation currently housed at HPD as part of a transition. Stout noted that drugs can attract pests and present chemical, flammability and contamination risks. He said HFSC has applied standards and holds an accreditation for property operations (AR 3181) that will be overlaid on the transitioning operation. "Rodents, bugs, and fungus, all kinds of things love drugs," Stout said. "It is a challenge storing large quantities of drugs."

Officials said destroying large amounts of narcotics is costly and subject to environmental rules. Chief Diaz and Teer both said the state police have assisted with burning marijuana at no cost in some cases, but noted that EPA and other regulations constrain disposal options. "We can't just go set it out and burn it. There's EPA rules," Diaz said. Teer said the DA's office will allocate money to cover destruction costs and that the work will require coordination across agencies, the judiciary and contractors that can dispose of hazardous evidence.

Officials emphasized this as a multi-agency, process-driven fix rather than a single-action cleanup. Actions described include compiling case lists with disposition information, issuing property-destruction orders, establishing a dedicated senior attorney position for property destruction, seeking judicial and defense signatures on destruction forms at plea, and transitioning property custody to HFSC with accreditation-based oversight. Speakers repeatedly framed the changes as addressing a decades-old, systemic problem so evidence rooms can be reduced in size and officers returned to street duties.

Next steps officials described include finalizing lists of cases and destruction orders, further coordination with judges and defense counsel to secure required signatures, funding and contracting for safe disposal under environmental rules, and continuing the transition of property operations to HFSC. Officials did not provide a specific timetable for completion of bulk destruction beyond the immediate steps described, and several details — including the total weight or precise number of pounds of narcotics to be destroyed and the full budgeted cost of disposal — were not specified in the briefing.