Houston Police Suspended 260,000 Cases Due to Lack of Personnel

The Houston Police Department has suspended more than 260,000 department-wide cases since 2016 due to a lack of personnel, Police Chief Troy Finner said in a statement Monday.

Finner’s announcement comes days after he announced the department is planning to investigate more than 4,000 sexual assault cases suspended for the same reason.

He said the 264,000 suspended cases represents about 10 percent of the 2.8 million incident reports filed with the police department just in the past eight years. About 100,000 of those suspended reports are property crimes, Houston Public Media reports.

“Regardless of staffing challenges, this should have never happened and will not continue,” Finner said in a statement last week. “All victims and their families are important to me and deserve to be treated as such.”

He said the code that was used to label reports “suspended due to a lack of personnel” was developed nearly a decade ago, and should’ve never existed.