HOUSTON — Houston Police Chief Troy Finner held a roundtable discussion for nearly two hours with the media and community members Tuesday to discuss the progress of incident reports reviewed amid the department’s investigation into its “lack of personnel” code.
Finner said he wanted to host the roundtable discussion instead of a public press conference because he wanted to have a conversation that wasn't on a time constraint. He said the next public news conference about this investigation should happen "really soon."
In February, the chief revealed since 2016, 264,000 incident reports have been suspended due to the “lack of personnel” code being used -- a code Finner said he verbally told his staff to stop using back in November 2021.
Finner claims he wasn’t aware that his order was not followed until years later, and when he “found out the magnitude” of the issue, he went to the mayor and then made the public aware.
Breaking down the numbers
(Numbers provided by Chief Finner on Tuesday, April 2)
- Among those 264,000 incident reports, 67,533 have been reviewed, Finner said. That’s a little more than a quarter of the cases. It’s important to know that “reviewed” means the cases were thoroughly read. After the cases are reviewed, an officer attempts to make contact with the person who reported it by phone, text or email. If any one of those forms of communication is unsuccessful, an officer will go to the person's last known address.
- 4,017 of those 264,000 reports were sexual assault incidents. Finner said 3,833 of those 4,017 have been reviewed. The 184 other cases are still being looked at, Finner said.
- Officers have made 1,182 residence checks to the last known address of people who made a report.
- Investigators have scheduled more than 256 follow-up interviews with people who made a report.
In a statement posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, Finner said at the initial review, these were incident reports, but not all were criminal cases or offenses.
"Incident reports are created for a variety of reasons," Finner said. "Some will be civil matters, some for insurance claims, suspicious circumstances, and others for the sole purpose of documenting an incident."
Finner revealed that some charges have been filed as a result of the reviews but when asked Tuesday on the exact number of how many people were charged and what crime those charges fell under, Finner could not answer. He said he hoped to provide those details in the coming days.
During the roundtable Tuesday, Finner also revealed that Chief Policy Advisor Jim Jones resigned. Finner did not give specifics into why but said Jones was a witness/target in the internal affairs investigation.
Finner is still not saying who created the code. He said that information will likely be revealed once the internal affairs investigation is completed, but he said, for now, his ultimate goal is fixing and getting out of the hole the department put itself in.
"I didn’t start it, but I damn sure going to end it and I mean that. That’s a promise," Finner said. "I owe it to the city, I owe it to the department. We owe that to the community."