Last February, it was revealed that the Houston Police Department failed to investigate more than 264,000 incident reports since 2016. The cases were assigned an internal code that indicated that there was a lack of available investigating personnel.
The dropped cases included more than 4,000 sexual assault crimes.
Police Chief Troy Finner swears he knew nothing about the problem until 2021 when he found out about the dropped cases. He immediately ordered his command staff to stop using the internal code.
Then in February of this year, it was revealed that the code was still being used to dismiss some sexual assault cases as well as other criminal acts.
Mayor John Whitmire took office in January and expressed confidence in Finner, despite the scandal. But this past week, an email surfaced revealing that Finner had been aware of the use of the internal code since 2018.
Whitmire said that Finner "retired" this week. He said that the continuing investigation and questions about what Finner knew and when he knew it would have an impact “on the morale in the department, the focus of the officers, and the confidence that Houstonians need to have in their police department.”
Whitmire called the email revelation, "the last straw."
“The bottom line is the department is being distracted due to issues with the investigation ... from its primary mission of fighting crime,” Whitmire told city council members. The mayor appointed Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite as acting chief.
During a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Satterwhite was asked by reporters about when he first learned that cases were being dismissed because of a lack of personnel.
Satterwhite, who has been with the police department for 34 years, said he briefly attended the November 2021 meeting where Finner told his command staff to stop using the code but left as he was focused on other duties. Satterwhite said that sometime in late 2023 or earlier this year, he might have heard something about the code related to a specific case but it wasn’t until later that he learned of the magnitude of the problem.
“We as an agency … on this one failed,” Satterwhite said.
As far as the 2018 email where Finner acknowledged the use of the internal code, the former chief said he didn't think it was used for that purpose.
“Even though the phrase ‘suspended lack of personnel’ was included in the 2018 email, there was nothing that alerted me to its existence as a code or how it was applied within the department,” Finner wrote.
Police departments around the country are facing an urgent staffing crisis as many younger officers resign and older officers retire, according to an August report by the Police Executive Research Forum. Applications to fill vacancies plummeted amid a national reckoning over how police respond to minorities.
An April 27 report by the same Washington-based think tank found more encouraging numbers.
“Small and medium agencies now have more sworn officers than they had in January 2020,” according to the forum’s report. “In large agencies, sworn staffing slightly increased during 2023, but it is still more than 5% below where it was in January 2020.”
That so many cases were simply dropped is incomprehensible. That no one thought to make the connection between the number of crimes and the number of cases being investigated is beyond belief.
The report by the committee looking into all this should be very interesting.
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