Houston’s mayor says the police chief is out of commission as he investigates thousands of dismissed cases

HOUSTON (AP) — Houston’s mayor has accepted the resignation of the city’s police chief while the department investigates why thousands of cases, including felony sexual assault cases, were dropped, a city spokesman said Wednesday.

mayor John Whitmire accepted the resignation of Police Chief Troy Finner, who is stepping down after it was reported Tuesday that he had knowledge of a code used to close the cases years before he acknowledged their existence.

According to spokeswoman Mary Benton, Whitmire appointed Deputy Chief Larry Satterwhite as acting chief and will discuss the chief’s resignation during a city council meeting Wednesday.

Finner’s resignation comes as police investigate the dismissal of more than 4,000 sexual assault cases, which were among more than 264,000 incident reports that were never submitted for investigation over the past eight years because of staffing problems.

Finner, who joined the Houston Police Department in 1990 and became chief in 2021, announced the investigation in March after revealing that officers assigned an internal code to the unfiled cases citing a lack of available personnel.

Finner apologized at this point and said he ordered the officers to stop in November 2021 after he first discovered that the officers had used the code to justify dropping cases. Still, he said, he learned on Feb. 7 of this year that it was still being used to dismiss a significant number of adult sexual assault cases.

On Tuesday, several Houston television stations reported that Finner had been included, responding to a 2018 email about the suspended cases.

Finner released a statement on X saying he didn’t remember that email until he was shown a copy of it on Tuesday. “I have always been honest and have never tried to mislead anyone about anything,” Finner wrote.

“Although the 2018 email included the phrase ‘persistent staffing shortage,’ there was nothing that alerted me to the code or how it was applied within the department,” Finner wrote.