Cases put on hold trouble experts
4,000 involving alleged sex assaults suspended since ’16
Houston-area victim advocates, law enforcement veterans and experts are flummoxed after it was announced that at least 4,000 sexual assault cases were suspended by police since 2016, citing a lack of personnel.
“I am not sure how HPD is going to gain the trust back of victims,” said Jessika Gaehring, whose fiancé was killed in 2019 and who has become an advocate for families of crime victims. “Sexual assault is a very traumatic experience overall, even if your case wasn’t one suspended. Are future victims going to trust them enough to report?”
Police Chief Troy Finner said at a Thursday news conference that he learned on Feb. 7 that, despite ordering employees to stop using the code citing lack of personnel in 2021, some inside the police department had continued doing so for the next three years. He declined to say exactly how many cases in other divisions were being reviewed but said the 4,017 cases came up during a search for cases closed because of that code in the special victims unit.
The code was first instituted in 2016, Finner said.
The code gave cases a suspended designation, which didn’t close them and left open the possibility they could be reopened with new evidence, Finner said. But the chief cautioned that the results of the investigation could change the department’s clearance rate.
An initial review of 700 reports labeled with the forbidden code found that not every one was a separate case, Finner said. Some were duplicates of other cases.
Finner said around 32 additional investigators were being transferred to the department’s special investigations unit to review cases and potentially contact victims whose cases were suspended using the code.
Art Acevedo, who took over as
chief in Houston in November 2016, declined to speak about the investigation. Former Chief Charles McClelland, who retired in February 2016, said he didn’t know about the code and never authorized its creation or know it had ever been used.
McClelland said he supported Finner’s call for transparency and said the job of chief in Houston is a complex one, in no small part because of the department’s size and scope.
“When something like this happens, there’s blood in the water,” he said. “People want someone to be held accountable, and that’s not unfair. But let’s wait for all the facts.”
‘Alarming’
Charles Blain, president of the Urban Reform Institute, a right-of-center organization dedicated to creating free market solutions for urban issues, called the specifics of Thursday’s news conference “alarming” and said a massive breakdown must have happened.
“It also makes me wonder, if this was happening with something as important as sexual assault cases, where else could something have happened that we haven’t noticed?” he said. “That gives me concern, too.”
Blain said he wished Finner had provided more details about what happened after he directed employees to stop using the code in 2016, as well as offered more specifics about how many more cases might be caught up in the review.
Doug Griffith, president of the Houston Police Officers Association, had similar concerns after the news conference.
“If we knew about this in 2021, why was a team not put together then to investigate these old cases?” he asked. “And how was there not some sort of follow-up to make sure we weren’t still using the code?”
Kevin Lawrence, executive director of the Texas Municipal Police Association, said the use of the lack of personnel code to shelve thousands of sexual assault cases sounded like a badly written policy or a bad directive. He added that, if this was done to improve department statistics, it wouldn’t be totally unprecedented.