Houston voters will decide on two significant law enforcement policy changes on the November 3 ballot after the Houston City Council voted Wednesday to place a charter amendment before residents.
If approved, the measure would make low-level marijuana possession the lowest enforcement priority for the Houston Police Department and would prohibit the use of no-knock warrants inside the city.
The petition drive behind the measure, known as the Houston Freedom Act, was organized by Ground Game Texas, a statewide organization that says it works on social justice issues in Texas cities including Houston and Brownsville.
The group submitted roughly 40,000 signatures to the city, well above the 20,000 valid signatures required under the Texas Local Government Code to force a charter amendment election. The city secretary’s office reviewed a sample of 22,178 signatures and confirmed enough were valid to meet the threshold, with a reported validity rate of above half of those checked.
Under the proposed language, HPD would be directed to treat misdemeanor marijuana possession as its lowest possible enforcement priority and would be barred from using marijuana odor alone as probable cause for a search. Texas law currently classifies possession of up to four ounces of marijuana as a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail and thousands of dollars in fines.
The petition also calls for officers executing search warrants citywide to knock, announce themselves, and wait at least 15 seconds before entering, a provision aimed at ending no-knock raids altogether.
Mayor John Whitmire told local media the changes reflect current HPD practice, saying, “It is not an issue in the city of Houston.” He added that no-knock warrants have not been served during his administration or under his predecessor, Sylvester Turner.
At-Large Councilmember Sallie Alcorn said the ballot measure would formally lock the city’s current enforcement posture into the charter, preventing future changes by a mayor or police chief.
Not everyone agrees the measure is necessary. Houston Police Officers Union President Douglas Griffith argued the proposals target a practice HPD has already abandoned, saying, “Since Harding Street, we pretty much did away with no-knock warrants.”
Houston’s vote follows a pattern Ground Game Texas has repeated across Texas since 2022, when the group first placed decriminalization measures on ballots in Austin, San Marcos, Killeen, Elgin, and Denton. Voters approved most of those measures by wide margins, and the organization later expanded the campaign to Dallas, Bastrop, Lockhart, and Harker Heights.
Attorney General Ken Paxton has sued several of those cities, arguing their ordinances violate state law requiring municipalities to fully enforce drug statutes.
In the lawsuit against Dallas, Paxton said, “Cities cannot pick and choose which state laws they follow.” Earlier this year, the 15th Court of Appeals, whose three justices were appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, ruled in the state’s favor and found decriminalization ordinances in Austin and San Marcos conflict with state law and cannot be enforced.
The no-knock provision traces directly back to Houston’s 2019 Harding Street raid, in which HPD narcotics officer Gerald Goines used fabricated information to obtain a no-knock warrant for a home in the city’s East End. The resulting raid killed homeowners Dennis Tuttle and Rhogena Nicholas and wounded several officers; no drugs were found inside. Goines was convicted in 2024 on two counts of felony murder and was later sentenced to 60 years in prison, with parole eligibility after 30.
The city has spent nearly $3 million defending itself and former officials in litigation tied to the raid, and reforms enacted afterward now require the police chief to personally approve any no-knock warrant request.
The measure arrives about two weeks after a new state ban on several forms of consumable THC took effect, a policy already drawing attention in the U.S. Senate race between Paxton and Democrat nominee James Talarico.
Houston’s charter amendment vote will appear on the November 3 ballot alongside other federal, state, county, and city races.
