The Defender recently reported that crime statistics and the general public’s perception of crime levels didn’t match. In a word, the general public (in Houston and across the country) believes there is way more crime than the national, state and local numbers report.
But the reporting of those numbers, at least on the local level, is coming into question, amid the revelation that 264,000 Houston Police Department (HPD) cases were coded as suspended.
The issue
The question being asked: With more than 264,000 HPD incident reports over the past eight years shelved under the code of “Suspended—lack of personnel,” and now being retroactively investigated, did the omission of roughly 33,000 cases a year on average skew the crime rate counts?
When Houston Mayor John Whitmire’s Independent Review Panel gets underway sometime next week, it is charged with finding that answer regarding if crime rate numbers, shown to be improving over the years, were affected by the lack of personnel code.
The 264,000 cases include more than 4,000 adult sex crime reports, 109,000 major assault cases and 6,500 homicide cases. Each was suspended under the same “lack of personnel,” according to Houston Police Chief Troy Finner.
More specifically, suspended cases included sexual assault cases and family violence cases.
Whitmire calls out previous administration
“I believe it has manipulated our crime rate,” said Whitmire regarding the suspended cases. “I believe the credibility of the City of Houston about crime was going in the right direction… it’s been revealed that was a spin. Because the credibility of the data collected by HPD and released to the public, for at least the last eight years, is flawed and been misrepresented of the true facts.”
Without naming names, Whitmire accused his predecessor, Sylvester Turner, of deceiving Houstonians, saying that the City “knew we had a criminal justice, crime problem in the City of Houston.”
Whitmire campaigned for his current seat with crime as his number one issue.
“I ran on that. We had no idea how bad it was in terms of data collection and suspension of incidents,” he added.
Still, several social scientists, including Sam Houston State University Criminal Justice Professor, Dr. Jay Coons, believe it’s too early to start affixing blame.
“Anything’s possible at this stage because we’ve got some very, very general findings, we don’t have any specifics,” Coons said. “We haven’t broken these quarter million cases down into specific offenses.”
Local example of national problem
To Coons’ point, police departments nationally have endured more than their share of controversies regarding the handling of cases and evidence, especially regarding Black defendants. Yvonne “Missy” Woods, a former DNA scientist with the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI), was found to have manipulated data and withheld testing results, according to a current criminal investigation.
She worked with the CBI crime lab for 29 years before being placed on administrative leave last October and retiring a month later.
And as of January 2024, the U.S. still has 90,000 rape kits yet to be tested.
The city of Chicago is dealing with a very similar reality – cases being cleared simply by the way police code them. In Chicago, however, there have been an epidemic of cases where police purposely told family members one thing, when another was actually the case – i.e. they lied.
The police misconduct in the Windy City has prompted Chicago Missing Persons, a four-part series of articles into a two-year investigation by City Bureau and Invisible Institute, two Chicago-based nonprofit journalism organizations, into how Chicago police handle missing person cases reveals the disproportionate impact on Black women and girls, how police have mistreated family members or delayed cases, and how poor police data is making the problem harder to solve.
“There are things that are certain and simply unacceptable to the public, as we’re finding out,” Coons said. “Clearing the case because we don’t have enough cops is just not something that is publicly unacceptable.”
For now, elected officials, HPD and the general public await the findings of Whitmire’s Independent Review Committee.
