Photo: City of Houston
Interim HPD Chief Larry Satterwhite presented City Council with the findings of the department's probe into the code that led to the suspension of more than a quarter-million incident reports. The scandal led to the 'retirement' of Chief Troy Finner, who now says he was forced out in an attempt to cover up the scandal.
Mayor John Whitmire has denied that. More than 260,000 cases were suspended for a lack of staffing code that goes back to 2014.
Finner had claimed he only knew about it as of 2021, but emails showed he knew years earlier than that. Finner's full-time replacement has yet to be named, but reports say Katy Police Chief Noe Diaz could be the city's new top cop soon. Satterwhite called the scandal "a failure to recognize what was going on, and a failure to truly try and correct it." He says from sergeants all the way to the executive level, HPD needs to own the "systematic failure of our department."
Satterwhite also confirmed that on top of the number of sexual assault cases that were suspended, two murder cases were also suspended under the code.
Satterwhite says the base cause of the lack of personnel code being used and abused was due to the ongoing shortage of officers at HPD. He said, "We simply weren't able to keep up. There's a lot of reasons for that."
Satterwhite says that now 67% of all the cases have been reviewed, and the department has reached a final disposition in 34% of them.