IAPE Evidence Blog

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”
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