Retired police officer, an advocate for his profession,dies at 85
By S.K. BARDWELL
Staff
Retired Houston homicide Lt. Breckenridge Porter , described by several co-workers as a department legend, died Saturday at the age of 85.
"What a great guy," said Houston Police Department homicide Sgt. Jim Binford, who worked with Porter . "He was a manager, a father-confessor . . . as a baby detective coming into homicide, you wanted to do good, if for no other reason, to have him approve of your work."
Porter , who joined HPD in 1941 and retired in 1975, was a co-founder of the Houston Police Officers Association.
"Those who worked with him and those who knew him, loved and respected him and sought out his advice, long after he had retired," Binford said. "He was a living legend."
Born in Houston in 1914, he graduated from Reagan High School and joined the Border Patrol at the age of 17. For two years he patrolled 100 miles of Texas border in a Model A Ford, until his superiors learned his age and fired him for being too young.
Porter returned to Houston and was put on the police force by then Mayor Oscar Holcombe, only to be fired seven months later when a new administration took over.
After a brief stint at the newly formed River Oaks Police Department, Porter returned to HPD in 1941. In 1943 he moved into the homicide division, where he stayed until retiring in 1975.
HPD Capt. Bobby Adams said he learned a lot from Porter , who was the homicide division's day-shift lieutenant when Adams became a homicide investigator in 1962.
Adams, who spent 21 years in the homicide division, 12 of them as its captain, said of Porter , "What he said, you did, not just because you liked and respected him, but because he knew what he was talking about."
It wasn't only his investigative work that made Porter a legend: In 1945, he and a few colleagues founded the Houston Police Officers Association. It was the first success in years of sporadic attempts to form a police union.
"Keep in mind," Adams pointed out, "you could get fired back then." The state's police officers had no civil-service law at the time.
That was Porter 's next goal: He went to Austin in 1947, and helped forge a coalition with the state's firefighters, who had been struggling unsuccessfully since 1941 to get a civil-service law through the Legislature.
With the extra force of the state's police officers on its side, the coalition won passage of the state's first civil-service law, said Mark Clark, governmental relations director for what is now the Houston Police Officers Union.
Clark said Porter also was instrumental in the development and passage of law that gave police officers in Texas pensions for the first time.
"We're standing on his shoulders," Clark said of Porter . "I'd like the younger officers to know what he did for them, even though they never knew him."
