After months of reviewing 264,000 HPD cases that were suspended due to lack of personnel, over 175 felony charges have been filed. There has been progress, but don't expect to see charges brought in every single case.
Doug Griffith, President of the Houston Police Officers Union, told KTRH, "There's simply no way to file charges in every case." He said, "You have to understand, a lot of the cases that were out there were cases that were never going to be able to be worked anyway. There were no viable leads."
Thankfully, Griffith says steps have been taken to ensure that we are never faced with another backlog of hundreds of thousands of cases, leading to a massive scandal like the one we saw earlier this year. He said, "Our department has changed the way in which they triage cases. Workable leads we're going to put to the front. Get those charged, and out of the way, and then the others will follow."
Here's the bad news: the root cause of this problem, which is HPD's lack of manpower, has yet to really be solved. Griffith pointed out that Houston has a much smaller police department than other cities of comparable size, which is an issue that will take years to solve.
Griffith said, "What we're hoping to do, is get 100 more officers a year, over the next five years. That will help, but it still will not cure the issue. We need probably 2,500 officers." He says things like officer retirement, as well as officers moving to work at higher-paying agencies in the surrounding areas, are making it even harder to keep up with recruitment.