Houston’s police chief apologized to victims and their families Thursday after an internal review revealed that about 264,000 criminal incident reports were suspended in the past eight years due to a lack of personnel.
In February, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner announced that hundreds of thousands of incident reports were dropped because a "lack of personnel" code was assigned to them. The number of reports — which included violent crimes, sexual assault, and property crimes — represents about 10% of the 2.8 million incident reports filed in the past eight years.
"I apologize to victims, their families, our citizens, for the use of the code for sexual assault incidents and other violent crimes against persons," Finner said at a Thursday news conference. "This is not the trauma-informed, victim-centric services they deserve. Again, this code should have never been used and never will be used again."
