Originally published in the Houston Chronicle.

By Matt deGrood.

A new Texas bill aims to make it easier for police departments statewide to solve crime by providing money for retaining officers, additional forensics testing and better data gathering.

The only problem? The Legislature neglected to provide any funding for the new grant program.

“We will continue to work for grant money to be included in the next budget session,” said Nikki Pressley, Texas director and chief of staff for the organization Right On Crime.

The right-leaning nonprofit organization backed the bill in this year’s legislative session, arguing something must be done to bolster sagging clearance rates from public safety agencies.

Only 53% of Texas homicides were solved in 2023, according to a study from the organization. Researchers attributed the decline in clearance rates to staffing issues, problems with technology, funding problems and a lack of case prioritization.

Not all investigation divisions at major agencies have uniformly struggled with their clearance rates. Houston’s homicide division, for instance, cleared almost 90% of its cases in 2024 after solving less than half just a few years prior.

Not every department publicly discloses clearance rates, which are calculated based on the number of homicides in proportion to how often a suspect for each case has been charged or identified. But among those that share data with other big-city agencies, Houston may well lead the nation with its homicide clearance rate. San Antonio Police Department, for instance, had a clearance rate in 2024 of around 25.1%, according to data from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Other divisions inside HPD, however, are solving much lower rates of crimes. The agency cleared just 9.9% of rape offenses in 2024, according to state data, compared to the Harris County Sheriff’s Office’s 12.2% and Dallas PD’s 23.9% clearance rate.

To fix the issue, police departments need more funding resources to retain staff and better train them, institute new policies to target high crime areas and better transparency, researchers argued.

Senate Bill 2177 aimed to address multiple issues identified in that study, Pressley said. It would have provided funds to hire, train and retain personnel to investigate violent and sexual offenses; collect and test forensic evidence; analyze violent and sexual offenses; acquire and upgrade technology for evidence collection and forensic testing; and upgrade records management systems for better data reporting.

The author of the bill, state Sen. Brent Hagenbunch, R-District 30, did not respond to a request for comment about the lack of funding.

Investigators and public safety researchers have both identified police department’s internal records management systems as critical to ensuring accurate data and helping detectives with the most up-to-date information on cases, with Houston’s antiquated system identified as one of the problems behind more than 264,000 cases since 2016 going uninvestigated.

Houston city leaders have said that they plan to change systems, but indefinitely shelved a new $31 million records management system, set to go online in April of this year, after deciding the police department was unprepared for the switch.

Police officials have not responded to a records request filed by the Chronicle five months ago seeking information about that delay and program.