HOUSTON — The long-awaited final report on the controversial ‘suspended – lack of personnel’ code used by the Houston Police Department came out on Wednesday.
Acting Houston Police Department Chief Larry Satterwhite presented the report to the city council. The results of internal affairs investigations were not released, but Satterwhite said no one has been disciplined for the 260,000 suspended cases. He did however, shed light on what triggered the internal investigation into the code.
It started with a robbery-turned-sexual assault in 2023.
A man robbed a Fiesta Mart in late 2023, fled, tied up a husband and sexually assaulted the wife.
“Everybody was appalled, and we wanted this individual off the street before he could hurt somebody else,” Satterwhite told city council today.
When Houston Police ran the DNA, they got a hit – to another sexual assault case in 2022 that was suspended for lack of personnel. A report was taken but it was never assigned to an officer for investigation.
“She felt like she had been sexually assaulted after staying with a friend,” Satterwhite said of the 2022 victim. “She didn't have a ton of information to offer. But she did have a name, a description and a vehicle.”
A report was taken and referred to the Special Victims Division but it was suspended lack of personnel. And never investigated until the subsequent sexual assault in 2023.
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That prompted an investigation into the “suspended – lack of personnel” code began, according a report into suspended HPD cases released today.
That initial probe found 4,017 sexual assaults were suspended under this code. But months later there has been no disciplinary action taken for the use of the code.
At the time, it was not against policy to use the code, Satterwhite said. The code was originally created to demonstrate the need for increased staffing, which is still true today.
“HPD remains understaffed,” the report reads. “While the public generally recognizes this in terms of visibility and response times, the Department’s investigative divisions also remain understaffed The Department simply cannot investigate all crimes.”
But there were no guidelines for the code, which led to it becoming widespread after 2018, according to the report. By 2021, a sergeant wrote a “blue note” asking that the title of the code be changed.
“I mentioned the optics of how the use of this code may give the public the wrong impression as to how a variety of cases are handled,” the sergeant wrote.
An email chain and memo continued the conversation, but none of the correspondence, “indicated any discussion occurred regarding the practice of suspending incident reports with workable leads.”
So cases continued to be suspended until this year. Satterwhite admitted HPD missed opportunities to investigate this code seven times over the past eight years.
“We should have asked more questions where we should have done more, and I'm talking about chiefs enough that we could have done more and should have done more throughout this 8-year period,” Satterwhite said.
HPD officials pledged to investigate all sexual assaults during council today and some details about the reopened suspended cases.
Officers have now reviewed 79% of the cases in the special victims division, including 20 arrests; 56% of cases in the major assaults and family violence division, including 251 arrests; and all of the cases in the homicide division, including 25 arrests.
Full final report on suspended cases for lack of personnel code
Here is the full report released on Wednesday morning from HPD.
Code History
It all started in 2014 when the city funded a study to look at staffing for the Houston Police Department. From that study, then-Chief Charles McClelland went before Houston City Council to plead for more staffing. It’s something that the report that was released on Wednesday said was “desperately needed.”
At the time of the report, HPD had 6,576 employees -- 5,301 classified personnel and 1,275 civilian. As of June of 2024, the department had 6,091 employees, which was 485 fewer than when McClelland went before City Council in 2014. They increased over the decade in classified personnel by 302, but the civilian number dropped in that time from 1,272 to 939.
McClelland told council that HPD wasn’t able to do follow-up investigations for every criminal case in part, due to a lack of staffing. When McClelland made his presentation, there was a single code – suspended – that covered all cases that either didn’t have a workable lead or because of inadequate staffing.
In 2015, a project was created to standardize language for cases. From that, suspended cases were divided by new codes – ‘suspended – lack of personnel,’ ‘suspended – patrol arrest’ and ‘suspended – no leads.’
The ‘suspended – lack of personnel’ code was sent out to the different divisions of the Houston Police Department, but according to the report, no written instructions or guidelines were given. The report says the Special Victims Division (SVD) and Major Assaults & Family Violence (MAFV) Divisions added the ‘suspended – lack of personnel’ code into their standard operating procedures, which led to the code being used in violent crimes, including sexual assault and physical assault cases.
The big turn came in 2023 when investigators with the HPD robbery division found that a sexual assault incident from 2022 that was linked by DNA to a 2023 robbery case had been suspended using the ‘suspended – lack of personnel’ code. That led to the department looking into the code as it relates to violent crimes.
In Feb. 2024, the department found the code was widespread.
- May 7: KHOU 11 Investigates: Email shows former HPD Chief Troy Finner knew about suspended cases code earlier than he claimed
- April 30: 45 suspects charged in HPD's review of suspended incident reports due to 'lack of personnel' code, Finner says
- April 18: ‘We remain laser-focused’ | HPD says all 4,000+ suspended adult sex crime reports have been reviewed
- April 11: KHOU 11 Investigates: 30 charges filed in HPD suspended cases
- April 8: HPD had named suspects in dozens of sex crime cases that were shelved
- April 2: Some charges filed as HPD continues to review cases suspended under department's 'lack of personnel' code, Finner says
- March 20: Independent review committee begins reviewing HPD's handling of suspended cases
- March 19: Police union calls for Houston Police Chief Troy Finner’s recusal in suspended case probe
- March 8: How does the statute of limitations impact HPD's suspended cases due to 'lack of personnel' code?
- March 7: Assaults top list of HPD cases suspended for lack of personnel
- March 7: Houston mayor calls for outside review into HPD after thousands of cases were suspended
- March 1: 2 HPD assistant chiefs demoted after hundreds of thousands of reported crimes were suspended, police officers' union says
- February 28: 'Things need to change' | Sexual assault survivors want voices to be heard
- February 28: 'I don't want to leave any victim behind' | HPD chief vows to clean up system that allowed 264,000 reported crimes to be suspended
- February 22: 'We owe them an apology' | HPD to thoroughly investigate 'suspended' sexual assault cases
- February 19: Mayor Whitmire weighs in on sexual assault cases that were suspended by Houston Police Department
- February 16: 'Should have never happened' | Houston police to review sexual assault cases that had been suspended