Two Houston assistant police chiefs were demoted over their role in the more than 264,000 incidents suspended using an internal code citing lack of personnel, a spokesman for the Houston Police Department said Monday.
Victor Senties, a spokesman for the department, confirmed that Ernest Garcia and Kevin Deese had been demoted. Senties said Chief Troy Finner would release additional information about the investigation later, the Houston Chronicle reports.
It's unclear what role Deese and Garcia played in the suspension of the cases and it's also unknown what their new titles are, KHOU reports.
Before their demotions, the HPD organizational chart showed that Deese was the head of the Criminal Investigations Command and oversaw homicide, major assaults and special victims (among others). Garcia was the head of the Organizational Development Command, overseeing employee services, recruiting and training.
What began as a review of more than 4,000 suspended sexual assault cases in the department balooned department-wide and grew to encompass more than 264,000 incidents reported to the department since 2016, Finner has said. The dropped cases make up about 10% of the department’s 2.8 million filed since 2016, Finner said. About 100,000 of those are property crimes, he wrote.
