HOUSTON — The Houston Police Department’s controversial “suspended – lack of personnel” code was a failure of leadership, HPD Acting Chief Larry Satterwhite said.
He called the scandal “a failure to recognize what was going on, and a failure to go in and truly try to correct it” for years.
Satterwhite was speaking to Houston City Council as he presented a report on the use of the code that was originally created in 2016 to highlight the need for more staffing.
But without guardrails or guidelines for when not to use the code, red flags were ignored and it spun out of control.
“Between 2016 and 2024, there were at least seven opportunities when the magnitude of the issue could have been identified,” the 43-page report read.
Those include a 2017 policy not to use the code for child sex assault cases.
“Unfortunately, it was still active in the adult sex crimes section and was not corrected,” Satterwhite said.
A year after the 2017 policy, a memo about a shelved hit-and-run accident went nowhere.
“Nothing else was done and the code was allowed to continue to be used,” Satterwhite said.
In 2020, there was a state audit of sexual assault investigations. HPD examined its sexual assault investigations from 2014 to 2018 and mostly focused its report on collecting evidence and relationships with victims. The suspended lack of personnel code was never mentioned.
“It was another opportunity to see what was going on, to look deeper, but we never did,” Satterwhite said.
In 2021, an HPD sergeant sounded the alarm on the controversial code, providing hard numbers by division of incidents suspended for lack of personnel.
“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 in a “blue note” memo.
At the time there were 22,000 suspended cases listed as suspended cases and over 1,000 were adult sex crimes, according to his note.
An email chain and internal memo about the issue followed but it never made its way to the chief and none of the correspondence, “indicated any discussion occurred regarding the practice of suspending incident reports with workable leads,” according to the report.
“The biggest fail again was there was no follow-up,” Satterwhite said Wednesday.
Repeated lack of follow-up ultimately meant more than 260,000 shelved.
As for anyone getting disciplined in the scandal, Satterwhite said, “Where it is appropriate, discipline cites will be issued.”
But Satterwhite cautioned that he doesn’t expect many people to get disciplined. He said this wasn’t a one-person or two-person failure, it was a department, systemic failure.
“That's a failure of leadership. And it's a systematic failure in our department,” Satterwhite said. “And I think we all have to own it, from supervisors at the sergeant level all the way to the chief level.”
The full list of missed opportunities, as noted in the report are:
- The 2016 audit of the Special Victims Division case management process
- Periodic leadership transitions
- Creation of the Major Assaults & Family Violence Division
- The 2018 FSGI incident
- The 2020 House Bill 1 audit
- The 2021 blue note and proposed circular
- The 2021 Special Victims Division presentation to Executive Staff
Full final report from HPD on suspended cases for lack of personnel
Here is the full report released on Wednesday morning from HPD.