After Houston Police Chief Retires Amid Dropped Cases Scandal

For months, a Houston police accountability group has demanded that Police Chief Troy Finner resign after it revealed that thousands of cases, including those involving serious offenses like sexual assault, have been abandoned over the years due to a lack of staff.

On Wednesday, Mayor John Whitmire announced that Finner was retiring effective immediately – a decision that stunned even his fiercest critics.

“I was relieved. The buck stops with him,” said Hai Bui, founder of the activist group We the People Organize. “We are very happy that the leader did the right thing.”

But community activists say Finner’s sudden departure, which ends a three-year tenure as police chief in the nation’s fourth-largest city, does not allay concerns about the cold cases. Today, groups are calling for continued accountability.

“Now more than ever, we need to make sure we stand up for survivors and make sure this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” said Sonia Corrales, deputy executive director of the Houston Area Women’s Center, which provides emergency assistance . a shelter, helpline and programs for those involved in sexual assault and domestic violence.

Whitmire, who took office this year, said the scandal that engulfed the department had become “such a distraction” that he accepted Finner’s decision to retire after a 34-year career. Two deputy chiefs were demoted and a third resigned amid an internal investigation, Finner said in April.

“Chief Finner was spending so much time dealing with the press, the department,” Whitmire told reporters in announcing his retirement, “it was affecting HPD operations. That’s the bottom line.

The “straw that broke the camel’s back”

While Finner was promoted to police chief in April 2021, the cases in question date back to 2016, when a code – “suspended: understaffed” or “SL” – was used to dismiss incident reports.

Finner revealed in February that he learned about the SL code in November 2021 and then asked officers to stop using it. He said he discovered in February that the measure was still being applied to sexual assault cases.

The code had continued to appear in approved police policies as recently as December 2023, the Houston Chronicle reported in February.

Finner launched an internal review that found about 264,000 incident reports have been suspended since 2016 due to staffing issues, representing about 10% of all incident reports over the past eight years. While about half of these suspended incident reports were related to property and financial crimes, the remainder included allegations of crimes against people. Finner had said about 4,000 of them were reports related to adult sex crimes. He warned that some of these incidents were duplicates or were mislabeled.

Last month, Finner said the department was still reviewing reports filed under code “SL” to determine if they were properly investigated. Generally, he said, more than a third of the reports were investigated and charges were filed against 27 suspects, primarily for misdemeanors but also for violent crimes. In sexual assault cases, officers attempted to contact everyone who had filed a report and expected approximately 400 follow-up interviews.

On Tuesday, Finner came under renewed scrutiny when local media reported that he was informed of the use of the code “SL” on a 2018 email chain, contradicting his February statement that he had learned about it in 2021. Finner, then executive deputy chief, was informed of ‘a case of road rage using this code. code, and he responded in an email to a police commander that “this is unacceptable, look into it and follow up with me.”

The existence of the earlier email casts doubt on Finner’s timeline. He could not immediately be reached for comment Friday.

Finisher posted on before retiring, he “never sought to mislead anyone”, but the email did not stand out to him at the time because he was unaware of how the expression was used in internal.

Still, Whitmire told reporters Wednesday that the email was the “straw that broke the camel’s back.”

“Press the reset button”

Finner’s departure is just the beginning of efforts to address the Houston Police Department’s lingering problems, observers say.

A major problem remains recruiting staff for a police force that has seen a decline in officer numbers over the years, even the city’s population having grown to more than 2.3 million inhabitants. Last November, the department said it had about 5,165 officers, 81 fewer than in 2016, Houston Landing reported.

Finner said in March that the city still had fewer than 5,200 officers and told reporters he wanted “an additional 2,000 officers to properly patrol our streets and conduct investigations in this city.”

But Ray Hunt, executive director of the Houston police officers union, said Houston is not alone in struggling to retain and hire people in an increasingly scrutinized profession.

“You’re one phone call away from being shot,” Hunt said, “and everything you do and say is caught on body camera.”

But that doesn’t mean the Houston Police Department shouldn’t do its job to fully investigate cases, he said, especially those involving violent crimes and threats to public safety.

“Whoever our new leader is, they will have to explain that we will never be able to investigate every call,” Hunt said, “but we will have to respond to every crime against a person – every sexual assault, homicide and theft must to be determined. be.”

As the department’s morale suffers from the latest events, he added, “I hope we can hit the reset button.”

But Bui said community activists like him want to see more transparency from the police department as it seeks to rebuild public trust, including how federal grants awarded to the city for hiring additional agents were spent.

A Houston Police Department spokesperson said Friday that a grant of more than $6 million received last November from the Department of Justice would be used to fund classes in September and November, with each class consisting of 25 recruits.

But Bui questions whether these grants can be properly tracked and managed.

“The community deserves to know clearly how every dollar was spent and how many officers were hired, especially in areas critical to public safety,” he said.

Ultimately, the fallout from the controversy underscores the responsibility to ensure justice is served for victims and survivors of crimes, and inaction by no agency stands in the way of that, said Corrales, of the Houston Area Women’s Center.

She said there are cases of sexual assault survivors, including those whose incidents were dropped due to lack of staff, who are now linked to her organization, and that advocates are involved in the process as part of a “multidisciplinary effort” so that no one asks questions. what happened in their case.

“We have made significant improvements and we clearly need to continue working on them,” Corrales said, “but these entities cannot do it alone.”