IAPE Evidence Blog

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Mis­souri), FIRST EDITION
BYLINE: BY CHRISTINE BYERS cbyers@post-dispatch.com

St. Louis, MO

found items Mas­sive orga­niz­ing effort began after audits found $22,000 was stolen and $33,000 could not be located.

ST. LOUIS — A gun stolen in 1972 was recov­ered by St. Louis police in 1984. It wasn’t returned to the owner for about 25 years, until Lt. Joe Hecht took the job of straight­en­ing out the neglected evi­dence room.

The gun’s owner “couldn’t believe it” when police called, Hecht said. 

Hecht has expe­ri­enced some dis­be­lief, too, since being — using his term — “sen­tenced” to the Prop­erty Cus­tody Unit in April 2008.

Through the years, the col­lec­tion of evi­dence, and found prop­erty turned in by res­i­dents, had piled up into a dis­or­ga­nized mess — even­tu­ally eat­ing 23,000 square feet of the department’s six-story down­town headquarters.

The house­keep­ing dis­as­ter led to some of the department’s recent black eyes, includ­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion that found offi­cers had taken 2006 World Series tick­ets held for evi­dence in scalp­ing cases, used them and then put them back in the evi­dence room.

In 2007, inter­nal and state audits found that $22,000 had been stolen from evi­dence bags and $33,000 was clas­si­fied “unable to locate.”

Hecht remem­bers think­ing: “How am I going to fix this mess?”

“It was a night­mare,” Hecht recalled. “If you don’t clean your base­ment for a few years, what hap­pens? That’s what I walked into here.”

Other police depart­ments have strug­gled with man­ag­ing evi­dence and prop­erty cus­tody rooms. Lack of over­sight has cost police exec­u­tives from across the coun­try their jobs and forced them to face crim­i­nal charges when guns, drugs and money went missing.

Sloppy evidence-keeping also can open pros­e­cu­tions up for scrutiny from defense attor­neys who may ques­tion whether the qual­ity of evi­dence has been com­pro­mised in storage.

Mak­ing things worse, the need for stor­age space will grow, as DNA tech­nol­ogy advances and new laws extend the statutes of lim­i­ta­tion for sex­ual assaults, homi­cides and even burglaries.

One of the ear­li­est changes in St. Louis was shift­ing respon­si­bil­ity away from the Bureau of Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tions, so the peo­ple sub­mit­ting the evi­dence are not in charge of it, said Lt. Col. Paul Noc­chiero, who now over­sees the unit.

“It’s not crime-fighting on the streets, but it’s what got every major police depart­ment in trou­ble,” Noc­chiero said.

“Man­age­ment didn’t pay atten­tion through the years because we were crime fight­ers and under­staffed, but we got to a crit­i­cal mass, and the audit of the drug vault spurred us to take action.”

Evi­dence piles up
Keep­ing and inven­to­ry­ing evi­dence can seem like a point­less job, when only about 1 per­cent of it ever gets used in the court­room, Hecht said. 

“But when they need it, we bet­ter have it,” he said.

When he arrived, the depart­ment had already moved much of its prop­erty room to the vacant cells of the for­mer holdover. Evi­dence bags were falling out of shelves, and piled on pris­oner bunks.

About 500 aban­doned bikes lined the hall­ways. Car seats, tires, tables, golf clubs, skate­boards, piles of scrap metal, news­pa­per stands, gui­tars, an ATM machine, air con­di­tion­ers, elec­tron­ics and more were tucked into a labyrinth of rooms, mak­ing the first three floors of head­quar­ters look like a garage sale.

Tucked in with the ran­dom found prop­erty items were rape kits and evi­dence from homi­cides and other crimes — includ­ing money.

The depart­ment hired Joe Latta, of Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems Inc., in 2008 for about $26,000 to audit and rec­om­mend changes. Latta learned ware­hous­ing and inven­tory man­age­ment in the gro­cery busi­ness before becom­ing a police offi­cer on the West Coast. He retired and founded the con­sult­ing business.

Latta, who has worked with hun­dreds of depart­ments, said St. Louis’ prob­lems ranked some­where in the mid­dle: “It was just dys­func­tional,” he said.

Since then, progress has been slow but steady. Hecht said he and his team of eight com­mis­sioned offi­cers and two civil­ians still have 113,000 items to sort through. That doesn’t count 25,000 pieces of bal­lis­tic evi­dence that include the old­est items in the unit: bul­lets from 1949.

The team has so far ana­lyzed 60,000 items, orga­niz­ing them by the type of crime and date, sort­ing them into stack­able crates and fil­ing them on shelves. “What used to take hours, even days, to find now takes min­utes,” said Lt. Scott Gardner.

Thou­sands of guns once piled on top of one another are now stored in indi­vid­ual boxes with bar codes. The depart­ment has asked the cir­cuit attorney’s office for per­mis­sion to destroy hun­dreds of guns no longer needed for evidence.

“For many years, it was, ‘Hold on to every­thing, then we don’t have to worry about being asked for it,’” Gard­ner said.

Cam­eras mon­i­tor every move, and the video is audited monthly. No per­son, regard­less of rank, has all the codes to pass the lay­ers of new secu­rity in the vaults.

“In the police busi­ness, lieu­tenants don’t tell lieu­tenant colonels what to do, but Lt. Hecht told me, ‘Hey, Colonel, you can’t go any far­ther than that until you sign the book,’” Noc­chiero said.

‘A clear­ing­house’
Gard­ner said the department’s deci­sion in 2009 to refuse most found prop­erty has cut the annual load to 9,000 items from 26,000. “We were a clear­ing­house, a black hole. We would take, keep and hold every­thing. Even­tu­ally we reached a crit­i­cal mass.” Under new use of an old law, police check found prop­erty for indi­ca­tion of own­er­ship and then turn it back to the finder.

The process of emp­ty­ing the evi­dence room has led to some inter­est­ing reunions.

Last week, Sgt. Joe Lehman opened a bag labeled “Owner Unknown.” Inside, he found about $120 and the owner’s iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and the title to his jet ski. He called the man, who said he lost his wal­let at Fair St. Louis in 2004. He came to get it that day.

Since Octo­ber 2009, the prop­erty room unit has returned about $19,000 in cash to 35 peo­ple. (This is sep­a­rate from recent refunds of money from the department’s Asset Removal Unit.)

About 98 per­cent of the time, the right­ful own­ers of prop­erty can­not be found. In those cases, police peti­tion the court to dis­pose of it, or auc­tion it off online. (Claims can be made online at slmpd.org; auc­tions are at propertyroom.com.) Pre­vi­ously, there was no process in place to purge the items, Noc­chiero said.

“It prob­a­bly costs us more in time to track down the owner of the tools than the tool is worth, but we have an oblig­a­tion, we have a respon­si­bil­ity to do it,” he said. “What if they’re your tools, your lawn mower?”

LONG-TERM plan­ning

Though the progress is encour­ag­ing, Noc­chiero said he needs about $1 mil­lion to con­tinue. He would like to see the unit run entirely by civilians.

Latta said civil­ians tend to make careers of prop­erty room duties, whereas police are fre­quently rotated. And, he noted, “Cops steal more from evi­dence rooms than civil­ians, his­tor­i­cally speaking.”

He rat­tled off exam­ples from around the coun­try of police exec­u­tives brought down by evi­dence thiev­ery or mis­man­age­ment. “In some depart­ments, the prop­erty room is con­sid­ered the penalty box: If you can’t per­form in field, we’ll put you in the prop­erty room,” Latta said.

In St. Louis, that stigma didn’t seem to hold true dur­ing the last Police Board meet­ing. Hecht, Gard­ner and Noc­chiero got a resound­ing round of applause for their efforts. Noc­chiero cited a col­lab­o­ra­tion among the cir­cuit attorney’s office, infor­ma­tion tech­nol­ogy staff, legal depart­ment and Police Board.

“We’re talk­ing about 35 years of his­tory, of evi­dence,” Noc­chiero said. “We’ve made great strides in cor­rect­ing the prob­lems, but we have a cou­ple more years left.”

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
“Law Enforce­ment Serv­ing the Needs of Law Enforce­ment”
www.IAPE.org