Houston’s mayor says the city’s chief of police retired amid an internal affairs probe into why hundreds of thousands of cases were never investigated, including more than 4,000 sexual assault cases.
Mayor John Whitmire said on Wednesday that he accepted Chief Troy Finner’s retirement as the police department needed to move forward under new leadership during the ongoing probe.
During a news conference, the mayor told reporters that the investigation and questions about what the former police chief knew and when he knew it were cumulatively impacting “morale in the department, the focus of the officers, and the confidence that Houstonians need to have in their police department.”
Mr. Whitmire, who took office in January, had expressed confidence in Mr. Finner after he revealed in February that more than 264,000 incident reports in the past eight years were never submitted for investigation as officers assigned an internal code to the cases that cited a lack of available personnel.
Mr. Finner said that in November 2021, he had ordered his command staff to stop using the code after learning of its existence. Despite his orders, he said, he learned on Feb. 7 of this year that the code was still being used to dismiss a significant number of adult sexual assault cases.
Mr. Whitmire’s confidence in Mr. Finner appears to have quickly ended as local news stations reported that the now-former chief had been informed of the dismissed incident reports in an email in 2018.
The mayor said that finding was the “final straw.”
“The bottom line is the department is being distracted due to issues with the investigation ... from its primary mission of fighting crime,” Mr. Whitmire told city council members. The mayor appointed Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite as acting chief.
On Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Finner wrote a lengthy post on social media saying that the last few months of his career had been the “most challenging” and “painful.”
Mr. Finner did not address his sudden retirement in his comments.
During Wednesday’s news conference, reporters asked Mr. Satterwhite, who has been with the department for 34 years, when he had first learned that cases were being dismissed because of a lack of personnel. He said he had briefly attended the November 2021 meeting where Mr. Finner told his command staff to stop using the code but left the meeting to focus on other duties.
In late 2023 or earlier this year, Mr. Satterwhite said he might have heard something about the code related to a specific case but was unaware of the magnitude of the problem until later.
“We as an agency ... on this one failed,” Mr. Satterwhite said.
“Even though the phrase suspended lack of personnel was included in this 2018 email, there is nothing that alerted me to its existence as a code or how it was applied within the department.”
