THE BUZZ!
Houston police chief apologizes for department not investigating 264K cases due to staffing issues
First up.
Police departments across the country are facing a shortage in officers. In this major U.S. city it’s caused a major problem for years.
Houston’s police chief faces a tough situation. Over 264,000 cases, including 4,000 sexual assaults, went uninvestigated in the past eight years due to staffing shortages.
Meaning that hundreds of thousands of incident reports, were never submitted for investigation. Police instead used an internal code to mark cases as “no available personnel” instead of properly investigating them.
The chief apologized for the use of code for sexual assault incidents and other violent crimes. Acknowledging not meeting the standards of victim-centric services. He emphasized that the code should never have been used and will never be used again.
The chief expressed that the department takes ownership of the unacceptable events since 2016 and committed to addressing and rectifying the situation.
That’s 33,000 cases a year for the past 8 years that nothing ever happened. I feel bad for those people.
It’s going to be a long road back to regain the people’s trust.
Source: thegrio
