IAPE Evidence Blog

Hat­ties­burg Amer­i­can, hattiesburgamerican.com
BYLINE: Tim Doherty, tdoherty@hattiesburgamerican.com

Lamar County, MS

Facil­ity set to open by end of year

Work con­tin­ues on the Lamar County Inmate Work Cen­ter in Purvis. The 54-bed cen­ter will house non-violent offend­ers and help relieve crowd­ing at the main jail. Pho­tos by Matt Bush | Hat­ties­burg American

PURVIS — A 54-bed work cen­ter that will house non-violent offend­ers is expected to be fin­ished by year’s end.

The Lamar County Inmate Work Cen­ter is not only expected to help relieve crowd­ing at the main jail but also take some strain off the county budget.

“By the end of the year, we hope to have it up and run­ning,” Lamar County Sher­iff Danny Rigel said.

The project began late last year, with the relo­ca­tion of the county’s family/children ser­vices depart­ment. The con­ver­sion of the facil­ity adja­cent to Mul­berry Street about 50 yards north of Lamar County Law Enforce­ment Com­plex then began

“We’ve com­pletely remod­eled it,” Rigel said. “We’re keep­ing the cost down by using county work­ers and inmate workers.”

County Admin­is­tra­tor Chuck Ben­nett said $200,000 had been set aside for the con­ver­sion in the 2010 – 11 bud­get, though a por­tion of that money will carry over into the 2012 fis­cal year that starts Oct. 1.

“This will go into the next bud­get year, but we’re doing it in-house, and we’re (pay­ing) it as we go,” Ben­nett said.

An inmate worker preps walls at the Lamar County Inmate Work Cen­ter being built in Purvis. 

Much of the inte­rior work and util­ity instal­la­tion has been com­pleted, includ­ing a search room, prop­erty room and recep­tion room. A shower/bathroom pod on the west side of the build­ing is nearly fin­ished, with county crews installing roof and ceil­ing over that area.

“We’re here every day now, so a cou­ple months, maybe three, I’m hop­ing, and we’ll be fin­ished,” said Frank Macias, build­ing and grounds direc­tor for the county. “We’ve got all the mate­r­ial, so there shouldn’t be any­thing to hold us up anymore.”

Bed­ding, fenc­ing, sur­veil­lance and alarm sys­tems will be among the final steps before inmates are moved into the building.

The exte­rior also will be land­scaped, Rigel said.

“The last thing we’re going to do is to try and make it as aes­thet­i­cally pleas­ing as pos­si­ble, so it doesn’t look like a jail from the out­side,” Rigel said. “Hope­fully, the gen­eral pub­lic is not going to know there’s any difference.”

But Rigel also stressed that the barracks-like cen­ter will be every bit as pro­tected as the jail.

“It’ll be con­nected to the jail and as secure as the jail,” Rigel said. “It’s going to be alarmed. It’s going to be wired. It’s going to be fenced.

“But we’re also going to be able to save money by being able to use the main, sup­port facil­i­ties already in the jail, like the laun­dry, the kitchen, that type stuff.”

The county’s jail, which opened seven years ago, can house 164 inmates. As Lamar County’s pop­u­la­tion grew fol­low­ing Hur­ri­cane Kat­rina, jail cells began fill­ing up as well. The jail aver­ages about 130 to 140 pris­on­ers a day, Rigel said.

“It’s going to free up a lot of bed space,” Rigel said of the cen­ter. “We’re going to be able to house about 54 inmate work­ers when it’s up and run­ning, fully up and run­ning, and that’ll allow more room in the main jail, which is where we house the vio­lent offenders.”

That will buy the county time to con­sider future inmate hous­ing solu­tions, Ben­nett said.

What the cen­ter also is expected to pro­vide is a deeper pool of work­ers that can be used by the county.

Inmates work out­side the jail on a vari­ety of details already. Two, seven-man crews pick lit­ter from county roads. Oth­ers are used for projects at county-owned build­ings and grounds. The county uses inmate labor to clean high school foot­ball sta­di­ums after games as well as help dur­ing the county’s “white goods” col­lec­tion on the weekends.

“It’s the worker you see out in the county now on trash detail, at the cour­t­house, pub­lic build­ings, for main­te­nance, jan­i­to­r­ial, san­i­ta­tion, that kind of stuff,” Rigel said.

In addi­tion to help­ing build the inmate cen­ter, inmate labor also com­ple­mented county work crews on the recent decon­struc­tion of the inte­rior of the county’s old Cir­cuit Cour­t­house. Ben­nett esti­mated that the county saved hun­dreds of thou­sands of dol­lars by using in-house and inmate labor.

Down the road, inmate labor could sup­ple­ment county work­ers in areas such as san­i­ta­tion and build­ing and grounds.

“Obvi­ously, there are costs,” Ben­nett said. “You have to feed them and house them and pro­vide them with med­ical care, but it’s not the same as pay­ing a $100 a day. It may be $20 a day.

“So, long term, it’ll help out with (county labor) costs, sea­sonal work and also take some of the (pop­u­la­tion) pres­sure off the jail a lit­tle bit.”

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

ABC15 (KNXV-TV), abc15.com
BYLINE: Corey Rangel
Link to Arti­cle
One Video
Pinal County, AZ

An inde­pen­dent audit raises some alarm­ing con­cerns within the Pinal County Sheriff’s Prop­erty and Evi­dence Unit which, accord­ing to the report, could have an impact on past, present, and future cases.

Even Sher­iff Paul Babeu admits there are some problems.

“The poten­tial lia­bil­ity here is grave. We have some seri­ous issues here and we don’t want to con­ceal it from you and we’re address­ing it in quick speed,” Babeu told ABC15.

The audit, done by California-based Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems Inc., high­lights prob­lems with the way evi­dence is or has been han­dled, processed, and stored.

The report raises sev­eral spe­cific issues regard­ing how evi­dence is mon­i­tored and tracked and states “there could be a sub­stan­tial num­ber of items miss­ing but it will never be deter­mined unless some­one is look­ing for a spe­cific item and it can­not be found.”

At the time of the audit, there were more than 200 items in the “Unable To Locate” file includ­ing guns, drugs, money, and bio­log­i­cal evi­dence. The last time the file was exam­ined by a super­vi­sor was August 2010, the report found.

ECS made the rec­om­men­da­tion that man­age­ment should review the cur­rent miss­ing items and deter­mine if any of them “should require an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, fur­ther search, or crim­i­nal investigation.”

The audit found sev­eral glar­ing prob­lems at stor­age facil­i­ties where evi­dence is being kept.

When audi­tors vis­ited a long-term stor­age facil­ity in Flo­rence that typ­i­cally holds evi­dence in older cases, the report noted, “Accord­ing to Prop­erty and Evi­dence Unit per­son­nel, the facil­ity has been bro­ken into on a num­ber of occa­sions which could jeop­ar­dize the evi­dence in court pro­ceed­ings. Sec­ondly, it is believed that there could be old homi­cide evi­dence still being stored in the building.”

While audi­tors esti­mated 90 per­cent of the items at the facil­ity could be purged, it rec­om­mended “all efforts be made to aban­don this facil­ity as quickly as pos­si­ble. In the event that there is another break-in and crit­i­cal evi­dence is stolen, the depart­ment will be cri­tiqued by the com­mu­nity and crit­i­cized by the newspaper.”

At a stor­age area in Casa Grande, ECS found other poten­tial prob­lems that could have an impact on cases not­ing: “It is a very good like­li­hood that deputies are enter­ing the room that has non-secured evi­dence that could eas­ily be removed or tam­pered with or chal­lenged in court.”

Accord­ing to the audit, the evi­dence area is in an old jail cell and “there is no record of who is enter­ing the cell to the un-secured evidence.”

The audit notes the cell vio­lates all accepted stan­dards and prac­tices and states, “It is obvi­ous the first line super­vi­sors assigned to this sta­tion are not con­cerned with evi­dence secu­rity of the chain of cus­tody. All that a defense attor­ney would have to ask is “could some­one have tam­pered with this evidence.”

“Cases could be com­pro­mised and that’s a prob­lem. We’re not in the busi­ness of being the prob­lem in a case with the evi­dence not being prop­erly han­dled, safe­guarded or processed,” said Babeu.

The 300-page report finds other poten­tial causes for con­cern regard­ing how evi­dence is doc­u­mented and tracked.

“At the present time if an inves­ti­gat­ing deputy/case offi­cer signs out evi­dence for inves­tiga­tive pur­poses he/she has no require­ment to return the evi­dence. The evi­dence can in fact stay in the pos­ses­sion of the deputy indef­i­nitely,” accord­ing to the audit.

It went on to note, “Many law enforce­ment agen­cies have had scan­dals or lost crim­i­nal cases wherein the investigators/case deputies have signed out evi­dence ‘for inves­tiga­tive pur­poses’ and the evi­dence has either never been returned or the evi­dence was sub­sti­tuted in the pack­age returned.”

Sim­i­larly, it also found, “Any time a Deputy of inves­ti­gat­ing offi­cers signs out an item of evi­dence for ‘inves­tiga­tive need,’ there is never any type of follow-up to ascer­tain the sta­tus of the evidence.

The audit rec­om­mended the sheriff’s office imple­ment a pol­icy that requires rou­tine mon­i­tor­ing of evi­dence that is removed from the Prop­erty and Evi­dence Unit includ­ing any evi­dence removed for inves­tiga­tive purposes.

The audit goes on to state, “Items not returned to the Prop­erty Room or prop­erly accounted for will even­tu­ally make head­lines or at least be respon­si­ble for los­ing a case.”

In addi­tion, ECS ques­tioned how sex­ual assault kits are stored and processed.

It found only about 5 per­cent of the sex­ual assault kits ever go to the Crime Lab and said, “It is unclear why more sex­ual assault kits and other evi­dence are not being sent to the Crime Lab for analy­sis in hopes of iden­ti­fy­ing a per­pe­tra­tor or link­age to other crimes.”

The audi­tors even sug­gested, “There is a very good like­li­hood that in a num­ber of the cases being stored in the Prop­erty Room the inves­ti­ga­tor has retired or trans­ferred to another unit and the case has been forgotten.”

“It’s pretty alarm­ing when you see that, when you see evi­dence that, for years, has not been sub­mit­ted for DNA test­ing when it comes to sex­ual assaults, when it comes to pos­si­ble homi­cide and mur­der cases,” said Babeu.

Despite the prob­lems, Babeu tells ABC15 he has met with the Pinal County Attor­ney and said they’re not aware of any cases that have been compromised.

Babeu said many of the issues are a result of mis­man­age­ment by pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tions dat­ing back 20 years and said the proof is in the stor­age rooms.

“Clearly we have a stor­age prob­lem with evi­dence,” said Babeu as he stood next to boxes piled taller than him.

Evi­dence rooms are so full, boxes are stacked to the ceil­ing with left­overs spilled out onto the floor. Some items date back to the 1970s.

At least half of it can be tossed out but the sher­iff tells ABC15 he doesn’t have the staff to do it because they’re focus­ing on prop­erly pro­cess­ing the new evi­dence com­ing in.

So many items need to be purged the audit found it would take some­one 26 years to reduce the inven­tory by half.

“This is not nor­mal. This does not meet any stan­dards. The audit even talks about this. To prop­erly cat­a­log and store all this — this is not the way you do busi­ness,” he said.

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

The Ari­zona Repub­lic, azcentral.com
BYLINE: Lind­sey Col­lom and Caitlin McGlade — The Ari­zona Republic

Pinal County, AZ

An inde­pen­dent audit of the Pinal County sheriff’s property-and-evidence unit details years of mis­man­age­ment and over­stuffed stor­age units with the poten­tial to harm prosecutions.

More than 300 pages of the report by California-based Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems Inc. high­lighted prob­lems with the way evi­dence was han­dled, detail­ing a bloated, hap­haz­ard inven­tory of items that should have been destroyed, sold or returned to right­ful owners.

Audi­tors esti­mated the inven­tory in excess of 300,000 items accu­mu­lated over more than 30 years. The report said that between 65 and 80 per­cent of the inven­tory could be discarded.

“It’s like a big junk closet,” said Elias John­son, a Sheriff’s Office spokesman. “It looks like an episode of ‘Hoarders.’ ”

Sheriff’s offi­cials say the audit high­lighted long-standing issues from pre­vi­ous admin­is­tra­tions, and they called it a “hot potato” left in the hands of Sher­iff Paul Babeu. Tim Gaffney, the sheriff’s com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor, said Babeu became aware of prob­lems in Jan­u­ary 2009 when a precinct sergeant was accused of not log­ging seized prop­erty into the unit.

“We didn’t real­ize how severe the issue was,” Gaffney said. “We didn’t know three days into office whether this was an iso­lated inci­dent or whether this was much larger.”

Fol­low­ing three inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tions — one by the Sheriff’s Office and two by out­side con­trac­tors — Babeu requested an inde­pen­dent audit in July 2010 to “iden­tify all of the issues need­ing cor­rec­tion in our prop­erty and evi­dence section.”

What Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems found dur­ing an inspec­tion Dec. 6 – 10 was an under­staffed unit respon­si­ble for a main ware­house that was stocked beyond capac­ity, and sev­eral ancil­lary stor­age areas and sub­sta­tion evidence-collection sites with inad­e­quate security.

Audi­tors found urine sam­ples — some saved long past the cor­re­spond­ing cases’ adju­di­ca­tion — stocked in 60 spots with­out any des­ig­nated shelf or bin in the refrig­er­a­tor where they sat. Per­sonal belong­ings, held for safe­keep­ing after the orig­i­nal own­ers were arrested, sat col­lect­ing dust in the stor­age rooms. Audi­tors found metham­phet­a­mines last reviewed in Octo­ber 2008 that had yet to be destroyed.

More than 25 per­cent of the inven­tory had not been logged elec­tron­i­cally, and the unit was three months behind in doc­u­ment­ing new items. Of the files that had been gen­er­ated, some didn’t match with phys­i­cal objects. Guns marked as destroyed were actu­ally still at the armory. There was no record-keeping of money stored in the unit.

Improp­erly track­ing items and money is no anom­aly for evidence-storage rooms among law-enforcement agen­cies, said Joe Latta, direc­tor of the audit­ing com­pany. Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems has audited 65 agen­cies in Canada and the U.S. and offers sug­ges­tions to clean up the mishaps and main­tain order based on stan­dards of the Com­mis­sion on Accred­i­ta­tion for Law Enforce­ment Agen­cies, the Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion of Chiefs of Police, and the Inter­na­tional Prop­erty and Evi­dence Asso­ci­a­tion.

Latta said many of the prob­lems come down to staffing and the size of the bud­get for agen­cies everywhere.

The Pinal County Sheriff’s Office is “try­ing their hard­est with the lim­ited resources they have, and almost every depart­ment across the coun­try has the same prob­lems,” Latta said.

Stock­pil­ing old, use­less evi­dence slows down the effi­ciency of agen­cies and makes it more dif­fi­cult to locate mate­ri­als for exist­ing cases, he said.

In a ran­dom search, audi­tors selected a firearm logged in a com­puter and hunted for it in stor­age. They had to sort through 300 boxes before they found it. Audi­tors took ran­dom sam­plings of 20 pack­ages at one stor­age loca­tion and found that 75 per­cent of the mate­ri­als were eli­gi­ble for review, mean­ing the statute of lim­i­ta­tions on the cases had expired or the cases had likely been closed. Audi­tors con­cluded that the source of this prob­lem often started with the offi­cer in charge of the case.

Ide­ally, offi­cers would give the own­ers of prop­erty that was being held a receipt and tell them they had a cer­tain num­ber of days to claim their belong­ings or they would be dis­posed of. But audi­tors learned that many of these receipts were not issued. Audi­tors also learned that deputies often would not respond to requests from evi­dence tech­ni­cians to review objects for poten­tial dis­posal. The report cited one exam­ple in which an evi­dence tech­ni­cian tried to reach one deputy via e-mail twice over the course of about a month and got no response.

Sheriff’s offi­cials are review­ing the audit and for­mu­lat­ing an action plan to rec­tify issues, Gaffney said. The hir­ing of three new evidence-unit tech­ni­cians is already in the works, he said, and the depart­ment plans to sub­mit a fund­ing pro­posal to county super­vi­sors to hire four more techs and pur­chase unspec­i­fied equip­ment to com­ply with audit recommendations.

Mean­while, the depart­ment has installed more secure lock­ers for evi­dence stor­age at its sub­sta­tions, and employ­ees on light duty have been help­ing unit staff review inven­tory and dis­pose of items.

Both Babeu and County Attor­ney Jim Walsh say they are not aware of any issues raised in the audit that have affected any past or cur­rent cases. But the pos­si­bil­ity “is real, and this is why we are try­ing to address it now so no vic­tims will ever be denied jus­tice,” Babeu said.

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