Of the suspended sex crime incident reports submitted by the Houston Police Department to the Houston Forensic Science Center, nearly 100 came back with links to other cases, Chief Troy Finner said Monday evening.
[…]
In HPD’s initial review, 4,017 of those suspended incident reports had been identified as adult sex crimes, Finner wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Finner wrote that the department had met with the forensic science center and the Harris County District Attorney’s Office to get a second level of review and address the way the agencies communicated regarding DNA related to both sex crime cases and other offenses.
A list of adult sex crime incident reports was provided by HPD to the forensic science center following a March 27 meeting, and of the 4,017 incident reports, 1,147 had sexual assault kits tested for DNA. Of that number, 76 of those matched with perpetrators in other offenses. Finner directed all cases regardless of offense title be sent to the forensic science center, and that resulted in another 20 matches to other cases, he wrote.
Finner said that investigators are reviewing those incident reports to follow up on investigations.
See here and here for some background. The review of the dropped cases is ongoing, so that number is likely to go up. This is hardly a surprise, any large number of randomly selected cases would include some number that are connected. In theory, these shouldn’t be “random” cases but ones that were deemed low probability to be solved and thus not worth the HPD resources needed to investigate them. If nothing else, this casts the decision to discard them like this in a more harsh light. We’ll see what that committee that the Mayor put together comes up with.