Houston Police chief resigns, mayor 'shocked' by latest investigation’s revelation

Just the News ^ | 5/13/24 | By Bethany Blankley

[CFW]

Houston’s police chief has resigned after emails obtained by a local news outlet appear to show that he knew about massive failures in the department well before he said he did. Within hours of issuing a statement about the findings, he resigned.

In February, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner first announced that the Houston Police Department dropped 264,000 crime reports, including violent crimes and sexual assaults, which weren’t investigated because a “lack of personnel” code was assigned to them, The Center Square reported.

In March, new Houston Mayor John Whitmire appointed an independent panel to review an internal HPD investigation into how the hundreds of thousands of criminal incident reports fell through the cracks. When Finner apologized at a news conference for the code being used, he said he first learned of its use in November 2021. He also said he told his senior leadership team to make sure it was no longer used.

Hours later, he submitted his resignation to Mayor John Whitmire, who accepted it. Whitmire sent a notification to HPD that he had accepted Finner’s immediate resignation and had appointed Larry Satterwhite as Acting Chief of Police on May 8.

[CFW]

The media that informs you that crime is down is lying and they know it. Police agencies just aren't investigating crimes or not reporting them to the FBI. Crime is up nationwide.

[Jonty30]

I think he’s the guy that told the antipolice crowd to sign up and they could show him a better way to enforce the law.

I don’t think he should have resigned, but he was in a no-win position. They city council cuts back on your funding, so you can only investigate half the calls but the mayor demands your reason why you can’t investigate all the calls.

[pepsionice]

Maybe if you live in a town of 3,000 with a chief and five policemen...what ‘numbers’/statistics they talk about....probably are true. In all of the top 100 metro-cities in the US, if you dug into it....none of their statistics are reliable.

But it’s not just them...you need to talk about prosecutors/DA’s, and their statistics as well.

[Fai Mao]

Yeah, he also publicly invited any dissatisfied officers from other liberal cities to apply in Houston.

[Political Junkie Too]

I think much of this goes back to the day when liberal DA Kim Ogg took over from Republican Devon Anderson in 2017.

Late in the 2016 campaign, it was discovered that the Houston police department destroyed thousands of pieces of evidence that was held in the property room. Besides running on a soft-on-crime platform with most of the liberal Democrat DA's, Ogg added the property room evidence scandal to the campaign to oust Anderson.

Ogg won the election 54.2% to 45.8% for Anderson.

Now Ogg has her own problems, including a very public fight with Harris County Judge (aka County Commissioner) Lina Hidalgo.

And the Houston PD isn't helping matters much.

-PJ

[CFW]

The media talks about crime being higher in red states. However, I suspect that is because conservative-led jurisdictions are probably more honest in their crime reporting. And of course, they fail to note that most of the crime comes from the democrat-controlled large cities in those states. Alabama has Birmingham, Georgia has Atlanta, Louisiana has New Orleans. Those cities’ crime numbers skew the data in red states.

As I said, many Democrat-led states and cities do not correctly report their crime.

Note: I just realized I failed to indicate where I “snipped” the article above showing where I left out paragraphs.

[TStro]

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked!

[Liz]

Mayor Whitmire beat Yale grad, onetime (gag) Cong Sheila Jackson Lee.

[Liz]

Police chief Troy Finner has resigned after emails obtained by a local news outlet appear to show that he knew about massive failures in the police department well before he said he did. Within hours of issuing a statement about the findings, he resigned.

In February, Finner first announced that the Houston Police Department dropped 264,000 crime reports, including violent crimes and sexual assaults, which weren’t investigated because a “lack of personnel” code was assigned to them,

[texanyankee]

Systemic.

[tje]

I live in Harris County (and worked for the sheriff’s office for a bit). You don’t want to live in within the HPD jurisdiction. - Inside the beltway for the most part

[ansel12]

He won’t be following the trajectory of the incompetent Lee Brown who kept getting bumped up from office to office or the buffoon Willie L. Williams who replaced Daryl Gates.

[sit-rep]

ya know it may all, across the board, be as simple as they/we dont have the facilities to lock up “THAT” amount of people in any givin area...

[Palio di Siena]

Houston - too close to New Orleans.
20 years (almost) ago Houston got thousands of displaced democrats from
New Orleans after the Katrina debacle.
Add to that the cultural enrichment they’ve gotten from uncontrolled illegal
immigrants.
Houston - we have a problem.

[Carl Vehse]

Houston - D.I.E.

[rlmorel]

Regarding crime statistics, I have heard localities all across the US have stopped sending data to the FBI Crime Database where it was aggregated, and citizens had access to it.

It was voluntary, but most localities did it for a variety of reasons.

I used to frequent that website LINK: The Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program

It was famously used by Heather MacDonald of the Wall Street Journal to provide hard statistics that the BLM narrative that black men were being hunted down and shot or persecuted by police for no reason at all was absolute horse crap.

She wrote a book about this, not only wrote a book about this and survived at the WSJ to leave on her own terms, even though the hue and cry to fire her had been long and loud, but...they gave up trying to fire her because she had command of the facts.

I will link to a short 7 minute video by Bill Whittle which really explains a lot (and gets all of its data from the link to Heather MacDonald at the Wall Street Journal, who did the number crunching on the federally supplied numbers to reach her conclusions):

Any time the narrative comes up where it is asserted that there exists an epidemic of black men being shot by police officers, here is the statistic that should lead off the ensuing conversation:

---

In 2015, according to federal crime statistics, a police officer of ANY race is 18 times more likely to die at the hands of a black man, than a black man is to die at the hands of a police officer.

"The Myths of Black Lives Matter" by Heather MacDonald) (Note: This is behind a paywall, but this link takes you to where the article is, in case you need to verify its validity.)

---

Here is an excellent video from Bill Whittle that not only is NOT behind a paywall, and it COMPLETELY puts things in the proper perspective:

"Black Lives Matter Kills People" by Bill Whittle
It is a 7 minute video which puts it in context, and explains much.

Here are some relevant screen captures from that EXCELLENT video:

(If you are not familiar with Bill Whittle, visit his site at billwhittle.com...I believe he is one of the foremost purveyors of conservative thought today. I am a paying member there, and cannot recommend it highly enough. He has new content nearly every day that is incisive, relevant, and even entertaining.)

[MayflowerMadam]

Whittle is SO GOOD! I can’t understand why he isn’t more “out there” in the media than he is.

[bray]

Too easy for a cop to lose his career over a fake incident.

[bert]

The Chief fell on his sword

One can only wonder if he had gathered an adequate surplus for retirement

[rlmorel]

Absolutely...I admire him.