Houston’s interim police chief said Wednesday that inadequate communication among department leaders is to blame for the continuation of a “bad” policy that allowed officers to drop more than 264,000 investigations, including more than 4,000 sexual assault charges and at least two homicides.
Interim Chief Larry Satterwhite told the Houston City Council that the code, which was established in 2016, was intended to specify why each investigation was dropped, such as an arrest, no leads, or a shortage of manpower. Instead, officers working without guidance from above used the code SL for “Suspended-Lack of Personnel” to justify decisions to halt investigating a wide range of offenses, including some involving violence.
The scope of the problem was not revealed until investigators investigating a robbery and sexual assault in September 2023 discovered that crime scene DNA linked their suspect to a sexual assault the previous year, a case that had been dismissed, Satterwhite stated.
That prompted an investigation, which discovered that 264,371 cases had been dismissed between 2016 and February 2024, when Finner issued what Satterwhite described as the first department-wide directive to discontinue using the code. There were 4,017 sexual assault cases shelved, as well as two homicides — a person purposely driven over by a vehicle and a passenger died when a motorist crashed while evading police, according to Satterwhite.
According to a department report released on Wednesday, 79% of the more than 9,000 special victims cases shelved, including sexual assault allegations, have been evaluated, resulting in 20 arrests and charges. According to Satterwhite, police are still attempting to contact each victim in the dropped cases.
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Former Chief Troy Finner, who was forced out by Mayor John Whitmire in March and replaced by Satterwhite, has stated that in November 2021, he directed his command staff to stop utilizing the code. However, Satterwhite stated that “no one was ever told below that executive staff meeting,” which he deemed “a failure in our department.”
“There was no follow-up, no checking in, no looking back to see what action is going on” that may have revealed the scope of the problem sooner, Satterwhite said.
Finner did not immediately respond to phone calls to the number posted for him, but he previously told the Houston Chronicle that he regretted not understanding the scope of the dropped cases sooner. He claimed that the department and its officials, including himself, were so busy and the use of the code was so common that the gravity of the situation went unnoticed by anybody in leadership.
Satterwhite stated that the police employed “triage” to analyze cases, prioritizing those deemed most “solvable.” New regulations now compel higher-ranking officers to assess violent offenses before dismissing them, and sexual assault cases must be reviewed three times by the chain of command, he added.
Satterwhite stated that all divisions were trained to utilize the code when it was introduced, but no standard operating procedure was produced.
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“There were no guardrails or boundaries. I believe there was an expectation that you would never use it in certain situations, but because it was not in policy, it ended up being utilized in situations where it should never have been used,” Satterwhite explained.
The mayor, who led a crucial state Senate committee during those years, expressed surprise at the figures.
“It is shocking to me as someone who was chairman of criminal justice that no one brought it to me,” Whitmire told the crowd. “No one ever imagined the number of cases.”
Satterwhite stated that no disciplinary action had been taken against any department employees. “I’m not ready to say anybody nefariously did anything.”