System failure fueled dropped cases
HPD long tried to address problems that led to scandal; several factors derailed progress
Since Houston Police Chief Troy Finner revealed in February that officers improperly dropped massive numbers of criminal investigations by labeling them “Suspended — Lack of Personnel,” the fallout has claimed four top Houston Police Department executives: Two assistant chiefs have been demoted, one executive has resigned — and Tuesday night, Finner quit, too.
And the results of an internal investigation into the matter — which is virtually certain to implicate more people — haven’t even been released yet. Mayor John Whitmire has said the “dumb person that came up with that code” is no longer at HPD.
But the scandal engulfing the department today is not about the failings of one person or a select few. It’s about a total system failure, according to a Houston Chronicle review of hundreds of pages of documents and more than a dozen interviews.
What began as a plan to keep better data in an apparent attempt to justify hiring more officers became a dumping ground for tens of thousands of reports of serious crimes that contained solid clues but never got any follow-up in America’s fourthlargest city.
“When you get into a large bureaucratic institution, the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing just because they are so disconnected,” said Diana Poor, who served as
HPD’s planning director from 2017 to 2021. “Without clear guidance and data structures and guidelines, you will have things like this happen.”
The Chronicle found that Houston police have shelved investigations into minor crimes due to lack of staffing for decades. For burglary and theft investigators, the very definition of a “suspended” case was one that had workable leads but no detectives free to run them down.
But in 2014, with the department’s investigative struggles under fire and the chief pleading for more resources, HPD’s planning office openly discussed creating a “Suspended — Lack of Personnel” code for violent crimes, too.
The chief at that time said he wasn’t looped in on discussions about this “SL” code, and he said he would not have approved it, stressing that every serious crime should be assigned to a detective for at least some follow-up.
Yet HPD brass were not required to sign off when the code was added to the department’s computer system in 2016, nor was anyone charged with ensuring investigators used the code consistently. Many seasoned leaders who could have overseen its implementation also left HPD that year, as a push for pension reform created an exodus of command staff.
In its review of the 260,000 incident reports found to have been coded “SL,” HPD has found that a large chunk were mislabeled. But tens of thousands of investigations were indeed improperly dropped, including cases involving “egregious” crimes, Finner has said.
In dozens of cases, forensic testing shows that suspects who were allowed to walk free may have later struck again. For instance, police suspended an investigation in 2022 after a woman reported that an acquaintance sexually assaulted her while she slept, even though she named the perpetrator and submitted a rape kit at a nearby hospital.
“It almost sounds like the code itself established a foothold and became a crutch for people to use.”
Dwayne Ready, a retired HPD commander who led the department’s Homicide and Major Offenders Divisions
A year later, the DNA evidence collected matched with a suspect who allegedly raped another woman at gunpoint.
“It almost sounds like the code itself established a foothold and became a crutch for people to use,” said Dwayne Ready, a retired HPD commander who led the department’s Homicide and Major Offenders divisions.
Ready said he never allowed his officers to suspend investigations before assigning them to a detective because “it’s easy to just suspend something and then you can turn a blind eye to it.”
“You don’t suspend and close things just for lack of manpower,” he said. “You prioritize things, but you keep them open.”
For years, HPD leaders tried to address the systemic problems that led to such a breakdown. They upgraded computer systems, pleaded for more resources and revamped data collection practices. Much of their progress was derailed by constant turnover and attrition, along with a series of crises — from Hurricane Harvey to the discovery of egregious conduct in HPD’s narcotics unit to the coronavirus pandemic.
By November 2021, when Finner said he ordered his command staff to put a stop to the use of the “SL” code, the system allowing it to flourish was entrenched. The day after Finner’s order, another crisis hit the department: the Astroworld tragedy. Despite Finner’s verbal directive, data shows that investigators started applying the code even more frequently.
Today, the department says the code is no longer in use. But in a statement to the Chronicle last week, HPD spokesman Kese Smith acknowledged that there is more work to be done.
“Chief Finner has said there will be drastic changes to the culture and operations of the department to move past this and stands by his commitment to investigate every violent crime,” Smith said.
A few hours later, Finner resigned.
‘We never get caught up’
The Chronicle spoke to multiple former HPD staffers, from chiefs to commanders to patrol
officers, who had no memory of the “SL” code or even the concept of “suspending” an investigation.
But for some investigators, it was a daily routine.
Richard Rekieta, a longtime lieutenant in the Burglary and Theft Division, said he and his colleagues “inactivated” most nonviolent property crimes cases immediately due to lack of leads. But numerous cases with workable leads were also “suspended” due to lack of manpower every day since the 1980s.
“We never, ever, ever could assign all the cases that had clues,” said Rekieta, who retired in 2017. “If a complainant called — we called them squeaky wheels — the complainant says, ‘Hey, nobody’s working my case,’ I’d pull that case out of suspension. But that’d be in lieu of another case the next day that wouldn’t get worked.”
Rekieta said his division re
ported those numbers to HPD brass every month. Once, in the 1990s, he brought a stack of property crime files with him to a meeting with an assistant chief. All had been shelved due to lack of investigators.
The chief was disturbed, Rekieta recalled. “Well yeah, you suspend them, but when you get caught up, then you assign them out, right?” the chief asked.
“No, never. We never get caught up,” Rekieta remembers answering. He threw the papers into the trash can at the conference table.
“I tried to make it as graphic as possible,” he said. “We’re short of people. If you want it worked, we need people. If you don’t want it worked, so be it.”
In 2014, a third-party audit revealed the scale of what Rekieta was talking about: Nearly 15,000 burglaries and thefts, researchers found, never got any followup even though they had workable leads.
On the heels of the audit, the police chief at the time, Charles McClelland, put together a proposal to expand the department by 1,200 people. But he never got the political support he needed to carry it out. HPD has fewer officers today than it did then.
McClelland said he wasn’t surprised that tens of thousands of cases still go unworked by HPD investigators each year. All big departments, he said, prioritize violent crime investigations and leave many property crimes, even those with leads, unworked.
“The big difference in this current situation involves violent crimes. That’s the big difference,” McClelland said. “All violent crimes should be reviewed by some detective. Now, review could mean, ‘I read it and there’s nothing I can do,’ or, ‘I need to make a phone call.’ But it should be reviewed.”
Yet a decade ago, employees in HPD’s planning office began discussing a plan to allow for the opposite. In documents produced in 2015, they wrote that a major goal of the department was to measure the number of cases “suspended” due to lack of personnel not just for nonviolent
property crimes, but for all types of crimes.
McClelland said he did not recall any discussion of tracking “suspended” cases and likely would not have been looped in anyway. He retired in early 2016, the year that documents show the code was added to HPD’s computer system.
“No police chief in the Houston Police Department can delve down that low into the bowels of the ship,” he said. “You’re looking at a 40,000-foot view. What’s our overall clearance rate, did crime go up or down.”
Poor said that by the time she became HPD planning director in late 2017, no one was talking about the code and many senior commanders had left. She eventually changed the process for adding new codes to the system to ensure they got sign-off from HPD leaders.
But it would be years before the department applied any scrutiny to how the “SL” code was used.
‘This is unacceptable’
At least some HPD leaders became aware of the issue in 2018, documents shows. A shortage of staff in the Special Victims Division meant that hundreds of child abuse investigations had been suspended.
That same year, a staffer wrote to executives about a hitand-run case that was suspended even though a witness had provided a license plate number and said they could identify the perpetrator. HPD’s chief at the time, Art Acevedo, and Finner, then an executive assistant chief, were both copied on the email.
Each problem was dealt with quietly. The Special Victims Division got 17 more investigators, which helped detectives start looking into the shelved cases. And Finner told the department’s Vehicular Crimes Division to investigate the hit-andrun case immediately.
“This is unacceptable,” Finner wrote. “Look into it and follow up with me.”
But there was no larger review. The Special Victims Division stopped suspending child abuse cases but continued using the “SL” code for dozens of other cases a month, including sexual assaults involving adult victims.
The Vehicular Crimes Division, which investigates hit-and-runs, also used the code liberally. More than 10,000 hitand-run cases have been suspended for lack of personnel in the last six years, data shows, even though police indicated they had the perpetrator’s license plate number.
Since the emails about the hit-and-run surfaced last week, Finner has said he has no recollection of the exchange. He also pointed out that even though the email includes the phrase, “suspended — lack of personnel,” “there is nothing that alerted me to its existence as a code or how it was applied within the department.”
Still, many divisions used the
code routinely — even automatically. HPD’s Major Assaults & Family Violence Division suspended more than 100,000 investigations due to lack of personnel from 2018 to 2024, 10% of them within a day or two of the crime being reported.
The division’s internal manual instructed sergeants to suspend investigations into most misdemeanors unless the victim called to complain. Even felony investigations could be suspended due to lack of manpower as long as sergeants “periodically review (ed)” them “to determine when they may be assigned.” But data shows that thousands of felonies were dropped within a day of being reported and never assigned.
Other divisions, including robbery and gangs, never used the code. Some others used it sparingly, then suddenly suspended hundreds of cases a month — even in a single day.
The Chronicle reached out to dozens of people for this story, including many current and former HPD executives, planning staff, commanders of investigative divisions that used the code, and the chiefs who were demoted or resigned in the wake of the scandal this year. Most declined to comment or did not respond.
Heather Morris, the Robbery Division’s captain from 2016 to 2017, declined to discuss the code in detail but said she never approved of the practice.
“The expectation was that for violent crimes, if they had a workable lead, they were assigned,” Morris said. “And, if they didn’t, then someone needed to call the complainant.”
Morris later became assistant chief over several investigation divisions, including the Major Assaults & Family Violence Division. She said she had continued to set the same expectation and was disappointed to learn that her directives were apparently ignored.
“There was no excuse for not investigating serious crimes,” said Morris, who left HPD in 2021 and is now the police chief in Aurora, Colo.
An unheeded order
In 2021, HPD’s planning office began reviewing codes such as “Suspended — Lack of Personnel.” In fits and starts that year, documents show, department leaders began raising concerns.
The code could give the public the wrong impression, one sergeant wrote in an internal memo, but it could also be a useful tool to justify the need for more officers.
Poor, the planning director, said executives told her to start the process of changing the code’s description in the department’s records system. But that would take time. “When you’ve got that large of a department, it’s a slow-moving ship,” she said.
The discussions were ongoing through November 2021, when the Special Victims Division mentioned the code during a routine meeting.
That’s when Finner says he ordered that the department stop using it.
Poor, for her part, says she had sent a letter to his office about the same issue by then but he never received it.
The month after Finner’s directive, however, the department suspended 4,814 investigations due to lack of personnel, almost 800 more than the previous month.
Every division that had used the code in the past kept right on doing so — including the Special Victims Division.
In September 2022, documents show, a woman called police to report that she had been raped by an acquaintance while sleeping in her apartment. She gave patrol officers detailed information about the attacker and submitted DNA evidence at a nearby hospital.
A patrol sergeant submitted the evidence for forensic testing, records show. But after that, the Special Victims Division suspended the case due to lack of personnel. It was only a year later that a detective followed up — after the DNA was found to match with a more recent rape that had occurred in a woman’s home, at gunpoint, while her husband was tied up in the next room.
There may be other such examples. The city’s forensic lab says it tested evidence in nearly 3,000 sexual assault cases shelved by “SL” and found matches for dozens of known offenders.
HPD has not offered any more details.