The independent panel reviewing the ongoing Houston Police Department scandal over suspended cases identified an interim police chief as the one who ordered the creation of the “SL” lack of personnel code and made a wide range of recommendations to avoid similar systemwide failures in the future. 

The preliminary report, shared with City Council on Wednesday morning, said that Martha Montalvo, who served as the department’s acting chief for a few months in 2016, approved the implementation of the code throughout the department and added that the special victims division began using it immediately. In the first six months of 2016, the report says, the division suspended 550 cases involving sex offenses due to lack of personnel.

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The report, ordered by Mayor John Whitmire, recommended the Houston Police Department should standardize reporting procedures and put departmentwide directives in writing to prevent another scandal from happening in the future.

It also provided revised numbers on how many total incident reports were suspended using the internal code — going from 264,000 to 268,920 — with around 9,167 from the special victims division, or sexual assault incident reports. 

“I still find it so mind-boggling and unacceptable that for 10 years, no stakeholder, no active officers, no employees, no administration, no one brought this to our attention,” Whitmire said.

The report, which focused on the incident reports suspended in the special victims division, confirmed many of the Chronicle’s recent findings — the code was borne out of discussions that started in 2014 about cases that were not being investigated because of a lack of personnel and proliferated in use in the years since because of inconsistent division policy, bad data reporting and no oversight from above on what was happening on a divisional level.

“We learned early on, due to lapses in technology, the divisions could become inundated and lead to the problems we see today,” said Christina Nowak, a committee member and the deputy inspector general of the Office of Policing Reform and Accountability for the City of Houston.

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The committee recommended the special victims division partner with the Houston Area Women’s Center and victims services to conduct better outreach in sexual assault cases. It also recommended, with the implementation of a new records management system in 2025, the department standardize the options employees have on recording results.

Council Member Tiffany Thomas said that former Police Chief Troy Finner would have been a leader in implementing the report’s recommendations.

“I can’t help to imagine that if Finner was still our chief that all of these recommendations would have been adopted,” Thomas said.