Houston mayor says police chief is out amid probe into thousands of dropped cases

HOUSTON– Houston’s mayor has accepted the retirement of the city’s police chief as the department investigates why thousands of cases, including sex crimes, have been dismissed, a city spokesman said Wednesday.

Mayor John Whitmire accepted the retirement of Police Chief Troy Finner, who is stepping down after Tuesday’s revelation that he knew of a code used to drop the cases years before acknowledging its existence.

Whitmire has appointed Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite as acting chief and will discuss the chief’s retirement at a city council meeting Wednesday, spokesperson Mary Benton said.

Finner’s retirement comes as police investigate the expungement of more than 4,000 sexual assault cases. These are among more than 264,000 incident reports that were never submitted for investigation due to staffing issues over the past eight years.

Finner, who joined the Houston Police Department in 1990 and became chief in 2021, announced the investigation in March after revealing that officers assigned an internal code to the unfiled cases involving a lack of available staff.

Finner apologized at the time and said he ordered officers to stop in November 2021 after first learning officers had used the code to justify dropping cases. Despite this, he said, on February 7 this year he learned that it was still being used to dismiss a significant number of adult sexual assault cases.

On Tuesday, several Houston TV stations reported Finner’s involvement and responded to a 2018 email referencing the suspended cases.

Finner posted a statement on X saying he didn’t remember that email until he was shown a copy of it on Tuesday. “I have always been honest and never intended to mislead anyone about anything,” Finner wrote.

“While the phrase ‘suspended staffing’ was in the 2018 email, there was nothing to alert me to its existence as a code or how it was applied within the department,” Finner wrote.