Houston, You Have a Problem

The saying goes something like this. Everything’s bigger in Texas. What the Houston Police Department is facing right now is as big as Texas itself. It has been revealed that the Houston PD through its standard operating procedure has a written policy in place to “suspend” investigating as many as 264,000 criminal cases including sexual assault and other felony and misdemeanor cases since 2016. That figure represents about 10% of the 2,800,000 cases filed over the last 8 years. An elaborate coding system was put in place that a case could be marked as “SL” which means “Suspended Lack of Personnel.” Let’s drill down into this. I have always said that when in my opinion the police act properly and responsibly, I will go to the wall defending them and when in my opinion police conduct is questionable, I will say that as well. My credibility with the public is important to me. I won’t jump to a conclusion just yet, but this doesn’t pass the eye test upon initial review.

 As usual in this kind of disclosure, people who could face political fallout immediately begin to engage in CYA--short for cover your a$$.  The mayor says he had no idea of this practice. Plausible deniability can be given to him … for now. The chief of police, Troy Finner, repeatedly denied ever signing off on this policy and said that he ordered employees to stop using these codes years ago, but since the start of this practice it has been renewed into policy as recently as December 2023. This is going to cause a lot of finger-pointing internally as people in these situations scatter like roaches when the light is turned on. Survival is the first law of nature. Nobody wants their fingerprints on this.

 The problem for Chief Finner is that in his position, he is responsible for what goes on in his agency. The buck stops with him. Within any large city department, it is impossible for the agency head to know exactly what is going on every minute of every day. He has highly paid supervisory staff whose job is to keep their finger on the pulse of what goes on and keep the Chief briefed on the big stuff. I held that position as elected sheriff of Milwaukee County, an agency with 1,100 employees with divisions spread out all over the county. I know how difficult this can be.  I appointed all the higher-ranking officers in my agency and made it clear that they were to know what was going on in their divisions and to keep me informed and if they did not, they would be held accountable.  That, however, is why Finner is given a supervisory staff, to watch the day-to-day operations. If in this case they let him down by defying his order to cease and desist sweeping cases under the rug, then heads should roll. If all the higher-ups dump this on some front-line people to save themselves, shame on them. That isn’t leadership. If Finner determines that changes have been made to keep this from happening again or that miscommunication is to blame and that’s it? That isn’t accountability.

 The chief of police is one of the most high-profile positions in city government. A mayor’s administration could fall from a scandal emanating from within the police department. Whitmire will not hesitate to throw his police chief overboard to save himself. Fair or not, that is the way this works politically and when you take the position of chief of police, you know this going in. At worst, Finner has to be willing to fall on the sword, accept full responsibility and offer to resign.  The mayor is now calling for an outside independent investigation. He said, “I trust and believe that Chief Troy Finner is doing the best he can to manage the internal investigation, get to the bottom of it and hold people accountable. The independent panel will be people I also trust to review and validate the outcome and help bring closure to the victims.”

 It is my position that the mayor cannot allow the people who created this problem to investigate it. There must be an outside review.

 Drilling down even further, there is the issue of not investigating reported criminal cases. Everybody understands that police staffing shortages all across the country are having a profound effect on an agency’s ability to keep up with caseloads. The Houston Police Department currently has about 300 officer vacancies. Follow-up investigations will naturally lag. You can’t simply write them off as “suspended” especially felony cases including sexual assaults. That is intolerable. A better way is to sort them out by determining which cases have a higher solvability factor and giving those priority. You don’t write the rest off, but you get to those when time and staffing allow. Some misdemeanor property crime cases are a low priority. Many have no solvability favors and are only being reported by people because to make an insurance claim most insurers require that a police report be filed. It is acceptable to list those as suspended due to lack of personnel.

 After sorting these out, it is imperative for the chief to inform the city council and the public through the media of what he is doing due to lack of staffing. Most of the public will understand this. Simply wiping these off the board in the fashion they were is inexcusable. Mayors and city councils do not like surprises that they find out about through an explosive media investigation. The headlines in the Houston Chronicle newspaper about this were ugly. This revelation couldn’t be very comforting to the residents of the city of Houston. They have to feel victimized, first by the criminals and then again by the HPD after finding out that criminals are going unpunished. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott chimed in, calling for the state to impose consequences for what he labels as “neglect” by the HPD.

 There is a feeding frenzy going on right now in Houston, Texas. Chief Finner should be aware that sharks and piranha are circling in the water, and they smell blood.

Sheriff David A. Clarke Jr. is former Sheriff of Milwaukee Co, Wisconsin, President of America’s Sheriff LLC, President of Rise Up Wisconsin INC, Board member of the Crime Research Center, author of the book Cop Under Fire: Beyond Hashtags of Race Crime and Politics for a Better America. To learn more visit www.americassheriff.com