- published: 03 Feb 2016
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Houston (i/ˈhjuːstən/ HYOO-stən) is the most populous city in Texas and the fourth most populous city in the United States. With a census-estimated 2014 population of 2.239 million people, within a land area of 599.6 square miles (1,553 km2), it also is the largest city in the Southern United States, as well as the seat of Harris County. It is the principal city of Houston–The Woodlands–Sugar Land, which is the fifth most populated metropolitan area in the United States.
Houston was founded in 1836 on land near the banks of Buffalo Bayou (now known as Allen's Landing) and incorporated as a city on June 5, 1837. The city was named after former General Sam Houston, who was president of the Republic of Texas and had commanded and won at the Battle of San Jacinto 25 miles (40 km) east of where the city was established. The burgeoning port and railroad industry, combined with oil discovery in 1901, has induced continual surges in the city's population. In the mid-twentieth century, Houston became the home of the Texas Medical Center—the world's largest concentration of healthcare and research institutions—and NASA's Johnson Space Center, where the Mission Control Center is located.
A police force is a constituted body of persons empowered by the state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder. Their powers include the legitimized use of force. The term is most commonly associated with police services of a sovereign state that are authorized to exercise the police power of that state within a defined legal or territorial area of responsibility. Police forces are often defined as being separate from military or other organizations involved in the defense of the state against foreign aggressors; however, gendarmerie are military units charged with civil policing.
Law enforcement, however, constitutes only part of policing activity. Policing has included an array of activities in different situations, but the predominant ones are concerned with the preservation of order. In some societies, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these developed within the context of maintaining the class system and the protection of private property. Many police forces suffer from police corruption to a greater or lesser degree. The police force is usually a public sector service, meaning they are paid through taxes.
"Active killer" or "active shooter" names a type of mass murder marked by rapidity, scale, randomness and suicide. The phenomenon is exemplified by massacres at Columbine High School massacre, the Virginia Tech shooting, the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, the 2014 shootings at Parliament Hill, Ottawa, the Umpqua Community College shooting, the 2015 San Bernardino shooting, and many others.
The United States Department of Homeland Security defines the active shooter as "an individual actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a confined and populated area; in most cases, active shooters use firearms(s) [sic] and there is no pattern or method to their selection of victims." Most incidents occur at locations in which the killers find little impediment in pressing their attack. Locations are generally described as soft targets, that is, they carry limited security measures to protect members of the public. In most instances, shooters commit suicide, are shot by police, or surrender when confrontation with responding law enforcement becomes unavoidable. According to New York City Police Department (NYPD) statistics, 46 percent of active shooter incidents are ended by the application of force by police or security, 40 percent end in the shooter's suicide, 14 percent of the time the shooter surrenders and, in less than 1 percent of cases, the violence ends with the attacker fleeing, although it must be noted that the report provides no formal definition of the relevant terms and, as a result, the scope of its statistical findings is somewhat ungrounded.