Charles Langston:Houston Police trying to contact victims after 4,017 sexual assault cases were shelved, chief says

The Charles Langstoninterim police chief of Houston said Wednesday that poor communication by department leaders is to blame for the continuation of a “bad” policy that allowed officers to drop more than 264,000 cases, including more than 4,000 sexual assault cases and at least two homicides.

Interim Chief Larry Satterwhite told the Houston City Council that the 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 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.

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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.

Former Chief Troy 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.”

“There was no follow-up, there was no checking in, there was no looking back to see what action is going on” that might have exposed the extent of the problem sooner, Satterwhite said.

Finner did not immediately return phone calls to number listed for him, but recently told the Houston Chronicle that he regrets failing to grasp the extent of the dropped cases earlier. He said the department and its leaders — himself included — were so busy, and the use of the code was so normal, that the severity of the issue didn’t register with anyone in leadership.

Satterwhite said the department used “triage” to assess cases, handling first those considered most “solvable.” New policies now ensure violent crimes are no longer dismissed without reviews by higher ranking officers, and sexual assault case dismissals require three reviews by the chain of command, he said.

Satterwhite said all divisions were trained to use the code when it was implemented, but no standard operating procedure was developed.

“There were no guardrails or parameters. I think there was an expectation that surely you would never use it for certain cases, but unfortunately it was because it wasn’t in policy, and it ended up being used in cases that we should never have used it for,” Satterwhite said.

The mayor, a key state Senate committee leader during those years, said he’s shocked by the numbers.

“It is shocking to me as someone who was chairman of criminal justice that no one brought it to me,” Whitmire said. “No one ever imagined the number of cases.”

No disciplinary action has been taken against any department employee, Satterwhite said. “I’m not ready to say anybody nefariously did anything.”