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Rep. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) – House Armed Services Subcommittee on Military Personnel ranking member – delivered the following opening statement at a subcommittee hearing on "Military Criminal Investigative Organization Reform Recommendations from the Fort Hood Independent Review Committee."

Remarks as prepared for delivery:

The Fort Hood Commission's deep dive into the Army's Criminal Investigative Division on-post highlighted very concerning issues.

Rookie agents were sent out on their own, leaders struggled to keep their heads above water, and support functions were non-existent. Just twelve of seventy-six uniformed agents at Fort Hood had more than one year of experience.

These apprentice agents should, by definition, have been mentored and supervised by experienced agents to learn the ropes and keep investigations on track. Instead, the lack of experienced agents and adequate resources resulted in long case lead times and poor investigations.

Individual missteps added up to chronically lackluster investigative work on suicides, homicides, and sex crimes on and off-post. Only one of fifty-three suicides in CID's jurisdiction received a completed postmortem behavioral assessment. Sex crime cases progressed slower than nearly all other comparable posts and undermined a soldier's belief that allegations of criminal wrong-doing would be taken seriously.

For many victims of crime at Fort Hood, justice delayed felt like justice denied.

The Fort Hood leadership also failed to use a variety of tools to connect with local law enforcement and disrupt hot-spots of known criminal activity. These tools are available to every post commander and they have been used successfully elsewhere in the past. I'm interested to know exactly why that wasn't the case at Fort Hood. This is no way to handle serious crimes.

I look forward to hearing today from the seasoned investigators on the Review Commission about their impressions of the situation at Fort Hood and what they believe could be done to produce better investigations in the future.

I'm especially interested in their findings about how the Army could better resource CID offices with admin and support personnel to keep agents in the field doing investigations rather than behind a desk.

Our second panel includes representatives from each service's criminal investigation division. Each service has a different model for tackling this problem and is designed to fit their mission and deployment needs.

Hopefully we can learn more about what builds strong military investigators and how the Army plans to move forward in improving CID.

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