From Houston Public Media:
Three months after the Houston Police Department finished its investigation into the suspension of more than 260,000 cases in the span of eight years, HPD Acting Chief Larry Satterwhite presented its findings to Houston City Council on Wednesday.
The scandal rocked the police department in February when former HPD Chief Troy Finner revealed more than a quarter million cases were suspended with a “lack of personnel” code used improperly and too often by police officers.
“Our first major failure was that there were no parameters or guidelines established when the code was established,” Satterwhite said, later adding “This could have been fixed many years ago and it’s unfortunate that it did not until now.”
Of the more than 260,000 suspended cases, 67% have been reviewed, and 31% have been re-closed.
Among the cases HPD let get cold are 9,000 special victims cases, including more than 4,000 sexual assaults. The department has since reviewed 7,000 of the special victims cases and re-closed more than 5,000, including all sexual assault cases. Those victims have been connected to counseling services.
Mayor John Whitmire called the situation “one of the most shocking things” he’s seen during his time in public service.
“These are not car break-ins or property crimes,” Whitmire said. “These are some of the worst-of-the-worst cases.”
City Council Member Martha Castex-Tatum clarified that the code should not have been used for any sexual assault cases in the first place.
She said one of the dismissed sexual assault cases included “a name, a description of vehicle and a (rape) kit, and that’s totally different from there’s a bicycle in my garage and I don’t know who stole it.”
HPD’s Major Assaults & Family Violence Division also suspended more than 109,000 cases. The department has reviewed 61,000 of those cases and re-closed 19,614.
More than 90,000 property and financial crimes and more than 38,000 vehicular crimes were suspended.
Finner abruptly resigned in May, then told the Houston Chronicle that the department and city were trying to bury the scandal.
Satterwhite, who immediately replaced Finner, described the dropped cases as a “failure of leadership.”
“There are real victims in the public who were affected by this,” he said.
The “lack of personnel” code was created in 2016 to quantify how many cases were suspended due to a lack of staffing, but Satterwhite said officers didn’t receive sufficient training over the years on how to properly use the code.
On Wednesday, Satterwhite said the department is still “severely understaffed” adding that after protests across the country after George Floyd was killed under Minneapolis police custody, “law enforcement officers were retiring in droves.”
He also said the department’s records management system is antiquated. Frequent transfers and waves of retirement led to a lack of knowledge about how to use the system.
Finner did not respond to Houston Public Media’s request for comment. He told the Houston Chronicle that he was forced out in an effort to bury details of the scandal and said he wanted the city to “tell the whole story.”
Douglas Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers’ Union, turned the accusation back on Finner.
“He’s the one that was doing all the scapegoating and hiding of facts,” Griffith said, pointing to evidence that Finner was made aware of the code being used inappropriately before 2024.
Griffith said the department needs to hire more officers.
“We need to move forward, dispose of all the cases that we can, and only those that were sexual assault or major assault should we even be looking at at this point,” he said. “There’s cases that we’re not going to be able to investigate, period, until we can hire 1,500 to 2,000 police officers. That’s going to take years to be able to do that.”
City Council Member Edward Pollard called for investing resources to address the root causes of crime.
“We’re not going to police our way out of every single issue,” he said. “You all cannot do everything, all the time. We also have to look at jobs and education, vocational training, housing, mental health. How can we reduce the amount of crime?”
Pollard recognized that the amount of dismissed cases was “a systematic failure in many ways.” But he said staffing shortages “can never be an issue in my opinion, when it comes to any of our responsibilities,” since many other city departments are also short-staffed.
In 1998, there were 5,470 officers and 1,901 civilian staffers in the department. Now, there are 5,211 officers and 880 civilian employees.
“We are severely understaffed,” Satterwhite said, adding that some cases will still need to be suspended due to the lack of personnel.
“We will have cases of property crime that sit longer because we have to focus on violent crime,” he said.
At-Large City Council Member Sallie Alcorn said to solve the department’s clear understaffing, Houstonians would have to accept a higher tax rate.
“We cannot have it both ways,” Alcorn, who chairs the Budget and Fiscal Affairs Committee. “We cannot have super low taxes, where we’re decreasing our tax rate every year, and demand that we do a much better job at policing.”
Whitmire reiterated that public safety is his priority as mayor.
“If we don’t fix public safety, nothing else matters,” he said.
