IAPE Evidence Blog

The Daily Breeze, dailybreeze.com
BYLINE: C.J. Lin, Staff Writer, cj.lin@dailynews.com
Link to Article

Los Ange­les, CA

AUDIT: Report months ago found errors, but replac­ing old tracker will take time.

Six months after an audit exposed prob­lems with the Los Ange­les Police Department’s evi­dence rooms, con­cern remains that the department’s out­dated track­ing sys­tem could lose evi­dence cru­cial to crim­i­nal cases.

The June audit looked at the evidence-tracking sys­tem, installed 20 years ago, and found errors in 6 per­cent of the pieces stud­ied. The audit said evi­dence was not described accu­rately, items weren’t stored where they were sup­posed to be, and the poten­tial for the pro­gram to mal­func­tion was “eminent.”

“It’s cer­tainly a risk,” said Richard Drooyan, pres­i­dent of the Los Ange­les police com­mis­sion, the civil­ian over­sight board of the LAPD.

“Say there was a piece of phys­i­cal evi­dence, a shirt that matched a shirt being worn by a bank rob­ber in a bank rob­bery,” Drooyan said. “You want to be able to have the detec­tive say, ‘This is the shirt I found when I searched the suspect’s house.’ If that shirt is miss­ing, you can’t tie it to the bank rob­bery because you don’t have it anymore.”

The prob­lem is com­pounded by near-capacity prop­erty rooms and a lack of elec­tronic mon­i­tor­ing of who accesses the rooms, accord­ing to the audit.

The elec­tronic secu­rity sys­tem that con­trols access to prop­erty rooms is not work­ing in sev­eral divi­sions, and there are no auto­matic logs of those enter­ing or leav­ing the rooms, accord­ing to the audit. The audit also found that sur­veil­lance cam­eras mon­i­tor­ing the rooms were not reg­u­larly mon­i­tored or reviewed.

Since the audit, depart­ment offi­cials said they have begun rou­tine inspec­tions of the secu­rity sys­tems and sur­veil­lance tapes.

The depart­ment is draft­ing a request for pro­pos­als for a new evidence-tracking sys­tem. It could take at least six months to select a ven­dor, accord­ing to officials.

“I’m sat­is­fied that they know it’s a pri­or­ity and that they’re going to move to get this thing out,” Drooyan said. “But I’m not sat­is­fied with the sys­tem that we have in place.”

Drooyan said he was not aware of any instances where evi­dence was lost, or of any crim­i­nal cases being affected by the anti­quated system.

“This is a prob­lem that is known to the entire city and the depart­ment,” said Cmdr. Scott Kroe­ber of LAPD’s Office of Spe­cial Oper­a­tions. “The sys­tems in place are such that I believe they are suf­fi­cient for what can and should be done until we bring it online.”

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Inter­na­tional Asso­ci­a­tion for Prop­erty and Evi­dence
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