Ashley Gonzalez was fired from the Houston Police Department in April. According to the Houston Police Officers Union, she’s now appealing.
HOUSTON — Former HPD officer Ashley Gonzalez was fired last month after video apparently showed her going on a racist rant and making racial slurs. Now, we’ve learned she’s appealing her termination.
Houston Police Officers Union President Doug Griffith confirmed to KHOU 11 that she’s appealing the firing.
Gonzalez was fired on April 23.
Editor’s note: Video above is from after when Ashley Gonzalez fired.
“The behavior exhibited by Ashley Gonzalez was abhorrent, disgusting, and entirely unacceptable,” Police Chief J. Noe Diaz, Jr. said at the time of the firing. “It is deeply disturbing and has no place in law enforcement or in our community.”
In the video, Gonzalez appears to refer to an incident that occurred while she was off duty. The person identified as Gonzalez in the video said she “hated Black people” and if she were to respond to a 911 call and a Black person was at the scene, she would take them to jail. She used the N-word several times and referenced slavery.
In the video, the person HPD identified as Gonzalez said she felt good about calling a Black person the N-word to their face.
Before she was fired, Gonzalez was relieved of duty, meaning she was technically still an employee.
In the days following the surfacing of the video, calls grew for HPD to look into Gonzalez’s arrest history. Houston City Council Member Alejandra Salinas posted a statement to social media saying she wanted HPD to “closely review any prior arrests, reports, and testimony tied to this officer to determine whether a pattern of racial bias impacted past cases and whether any Houstonians’ rights were violated.”
According to military officials, Gonzalez served in the Marines from March 2019 through March 2023 and reached the rank of Corporal, E4.
Retired HPD Captain Dr. Greg Fremin has more than 30 years of service with HPD and, at one point, worked in the internal affairs department. added that despite her firing, Gonzalez does still have a Texas peace officer certification because it is up to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement to revoke it.
“Without a criminal conviction or something of that type of nature, she’ll still have a state certification,” Fremin said. “But I suspect that there will be a huge outcry to certain political entities within Austin to look at this very closely, because, is there a possibility she can be hired by another agency? Absolutely. There could be. What agency would do that? I don’t know.”
The Harris County District Attorney’s Office has started going through cases involving Gonzalez.
KHOU 11 legal analyst Carmen Roe said Gonzalez’s overall credibility is now in question when it comes to current and past cases, adding that she will not be able to testify in court.
“These cases that we are reviewing have more to do than just race; they have to do with the credibility of this officer to be a truthteller, to come to court and to be relied on in her statements regarding her decisions, discretionary decisions to arrest individuals and tell us as a community the truth about what she deserved,” Roe said shortly after Gonzalez was fired.
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