CID were short handed and inexperienced.
https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/12/09/fort-hood-report-highlights-army-cids-failings-there-and-possibly-elsewhere/
An independent committee of five civilians found that the more than 40 Army CID agents charged with investigating felony crimes and violations of military law at Fort Hood were largely inexperienced, underresourced and understaffed.
The Fort Hood CID detachment was “basically being used as a training ground,” said Chris Swecker, a former FBI inspector who served on the committee. “They had a difficult time, and it’s not their fault.”
“That would be like staffing the New York field office of the FBI with new agents right out of Quantico,” Swecker said Wednesday at a congressional hearing. “This is one of the busiest military installations in the country, maybe around the globe, and yet there were very few experienced agents.”
Much of the report focused on the handling of sex crimes, given allegations brought forth by Guillen’s family that she experienced sexual harassment prior to her murder. But the committee found that Fort Hood CID was well short of the number of investigators necessary to handle the workload there.
The post’s CID detachment opened roughly 350 sex crime cases annually between fiscal years 2018 and 2020 and could justify an allocation of nine or 10 sexual assault investigators. Yet, the detachment only had three on staff at the time of the report.
Other issues included an incredibly high rate of drug use among Fort Hood soldiers that wasn’t properly dealt with and poor interviewing skills among agents, all of which are being looked at by the larger CID enterprise.
“We are carefully reviewing all of the information in the Report of the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee,” said Chris Grey, a spokesman for Army CID, in a statement to Army Times. “We recognize the importance of this review and are thankful for the hard work of the committee.”
