A flawed policy for coding dropped cases resulted in the dismissal of over 264,000 cases, the interim Houston police chief said on Wednesday. This included more than 4,000 sexual assault cases and at least two homicide cases, The Associated Press reports. Interim Chief Larry Satterwhite told the Houston City Council that a code implemented in 2016 was meant to identify why each case was dropped — for example, because an arrest had been made, there were no leads or a lack of personnel. Instead, officers acting without guidance from above used the code SL for “Suspended-Lack of Personnel” to justify decisions to stop investigating all manner of crimes, even when violence was involved. The extent of the problem wasn’t discovered until after officers investigating a robbery and sexual assault in September 2023 learned that crime scene DNA linked their suspect to a sexual assault the previous year, a case that had been dropped, Satterwhite said.
That led to an investigation, which revealed that 264,371 cases had been dropped from 2016 until February 2024, when Former Chief Troy Finner issued what Satterwhite said was the first department-wide order to stop using the code. Among them, 4,017 sexual assault cases were shelved, and two homicides — a person intentionally run over by a vehicle and a passenger who was killed when a driver crashed while fleeing police, Satterwhite said. A department report released Wednesday said that 79% of the more than 9,000 special victims cases shelved, which include the sexual assault cases, have now been reviewed, leading to arrests and charges against 20 people. Police are still trying to contact every single victim in the dropped cases, Satterwhite said. Finner, who was forced out by Mayor John Whitmire in March and replaced by Satterwhite, has said he ordered his command staff in November 2021 to stop using the code. But Satterwhite said “no one was ever told below that executive staff meeting,” which he said was “a failure in our department.”
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