Dropped-cases scandal puts city’s crime stats into question
A recent revelation that Houston police used a little-known computer code to drop investigations into thousands of alleged crimes dating back to 2016 sparked a troubling question: Does that mean Houston is more dangerous than city officials have led residents to believe?
The answer: It is impossible to be certain, but a Houston Chronicle analysis shows it is likely that the statistics from those years remain an accurate snapshot of the city’s crime rates.
The department dropped 224,000 incident reports for alleged small and major crimes dating back to 2019 due to a lack of personnel, but more than 70% of those were included in the department’s crime statistics shared with the public. The remaining 67,000 suspended reports could’ve been omitted from the city’s crime statistics for several reasons, including clerical errors or that the reports were not actual crimes.
Weeks after Chief Troy Finner’s initial announcement about the dropped cases, Mayor John Whitmire appointed an independent panel to investigate the suspended reports, describing the matter as a “terrible mistake” that “manipulated” the city’s crime statistics for years.
The Chronicle analysis doesn’t back up the mayor’s claims about manipulated data, but it does show how crime statistics are far from a perfect science. Crime statistics can be fraught with errors, differing crime classifications and persistent differences between federal and state reporting practices.
“They should rhyme even if they don’t match entirely,” said Jeff Asher, a New Orleans-based criminologist and co-founder of AH Datalytics. “Certain things will change, like if you have an incident in the system as an aggravated assault, but it doesn’t meet the FBI’s definition, just the state definition. So there’s various circumstances in which the exact numbers don’t match.”
Whitmire made crime a cen
terpiece of his successful campaign for mayor, following a tough-on-crime platform similar to one that elected leaders have ridden into office across the country, regardless of political party.
The dropped-cases scandal gave fresh fuel to something that Whitmire and others asserted throughout the campaign season. Despite widely reported declines in dangerous and violent crime, public polling showed residents remained concerned about public safety. Data also showed an uptick in some quality-of-life crimes like car break-ins.
Houston police’s crime statistics are pulled from submissions to the National Incident Based Reporting System, a record management system used by police departments nationwide. The system tracks 62 types of crimes, from minor infractions to sexual assaults and homicides.
As part of the program, the city must release logs tracking all criminal offenses in its jurisdiction, allowing city by city comparisons.
Separately, the department keeps its own internal record system, which generally turns out similar crime statistics.
Edward Claughton, founder and CEO of PRI Management Group, which advises police departments across the country on records management, said classifications can get tricky, particularly between the local and federal systems.
Most police departments divide things between current case status and final outcome — open, closed, suspended or the victim refused to cooperate, he said.
Police are only supposed to include criminal offenses in the their data fed to the nationwide system, Asher said, so using an internal record system can help them track incidents that may have yet to be proven criminal in nature.
“You’re acknowledging the things that you don’t know,” Asher said of the internal system Houston police use. “You’re still investigating, you’re serving the public. You may not have an answer. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to get an answer.”
About 39% of the suspended cases omitted from the nationwide data were for incidents being investigated, including 1,686 homicide investigations and 788 rape investigations.
Christopher Hassig, commander of the department’s homicide division, said many of the investigations in his division don’t wind up being a crime.
“We kind of become the catchall division for patrol officers,” he said. “The joke is, when in doubt, label something ‘Investigation — Homicide.’”
But once these cases are categorized as “investigations,” progress can languish, according to the Chronicle analysis.
The earliest such case came in November 2016, and hasn’t been touched since July 2018. For nearly 90% of the suspended homicide investigations, officers haven’t reported any new activity since at least 2022.
The department did not say whether it has a process for periodically reviewing its backlog of suspended incident reports to determine if they have the bandwidth to resume investigating them.
Houston police officials also said last month that some of the suspended reports were civil — not criminal — matters, like insurance claims, suspicious circumstances and other reasons.
Finner first announced the department had suspended cases in late February, launching an internal investigation into the matter that has concluded, though the results haven’t yet been made public.
He said he instructed officers to stop using the code in 2021, though data shows the number of suspended reports continued to balloon after he gave the order.
“That code was put into effect in 2016. It will not be used again in my administration,” Finner said. “It was unacceptable then. It’s unacceptable now.”