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South­bridge, MA

Some items in over­flow­ing evi­dence rooms go back as far as 15 years

SOUTHBRIDGE, Mass. — A small hot tub and a set of brass knuckle with three knives stick­ing out of it are among unusual items that have accu­mu­lated in the South­bridge Police Department.

They are exam­ples of a com­mon house­keep­ing issue for police depart­ments — the need for more room for evi­dence and recov­ered items.

Author­i­ties in West­boro are going through inven­tory, police Lt. Robert T. Fryer said. They have guns and old tele­vi­sions, com­put­ers and dif­fer­ent things that are of no par­tic­u­lar inter­est, he said.

“We’re going through our old cases — things that are 10, 12, 15 years old — and mak­ing sure that the cases are not active and dis­pos­ing of what we can to make more room,” Lt. Fryer said.

West­boro has a small room for valu­ables such as guns and drugs. Other items are kept in cold stor­age in a 12– by 25-foot space off the garage.

Bicy­cles and other items are in yet another area — a stor­age con­tainer at the West­boro Depart­ment of Pub­lic Works. Many bikes were auc­tioned, the lieu­tenant said.

Sut­ton Police Chief Den­nis J. Towle said his staff met last week about the same problem.

Chief Towle said his pre­de­ces­sor years ago bought a stor­age con­tainer for items. That’s now full.

Sut­ton police have also par­ti­tioned part of their garage for evidence.

“We have an exten­sive amount of jew­elry from a spe­cific case that we’re wait­ing to get a dis­po­si­tion on,” Chief Towle said. “At that point we’ll try to find who the own­ers are. It’s unlikely we ever will find them.”

The chief clas­si­fied some of the jew­elry as “real, real unique stuff.” A pocket watch has an esti­mated value of $3,000 to $5,000.

“Some­body has to be miss­ing it, whether or not (the owner is) still with us,” Chief Towle said.

The Auburn Police Department’s 30-square-foot evi­dence room prob­a­bly has about 500 items and is nearly out of space, Chief Andrew J. Sluckis said. The items are “run of the mill” guns and drug evi­dence, such as things used to cul­ti­vate marijuana.

“A lot of it has to do with either open cases that we’re wait­ing to come up for trial, or cases where we have to hold on to the evi­dence because the per­son is in default and has never appeared in court,” he said.

In South­bridge, uniden­ti­fi­able head­stones are among other unusual items, Chief Daniel R. Charette said.

South­bridge police have a plas­tic tub con­tain­ing about 30 or 40 swords. “We must have 300 or 400 firearms,” he said.

The depart­ment has checked with the town’s lawyer to see what it can do with this prop­erty, the chief said.

“It would seem pretty sim­ple on the sur­face,” Chief Charette said. “You have the recov­ered prop­erty from a break­ing and enter­ing. You know whose it is, you give it back to them.”

But the prob­lem is that some­times the court case has been dis­posed of and the insur­ance com­pany has paid for the loss. The insurer usu­ally doesn’t want the item back so it sits with police, Chief Charette said.

An auc­tion is a pos­si­bil­ity, but when items are declared sur­plus the town gets to keep the por­tion of money from the auction.

“My hope with that is the money stays within the police depart­ment,” he said with a laugh.

South­bridge police Sgt. Jose A. Din­gui recently met with Northboro-based Vil­lage Vault, a firearms stor­age facil­ity that in some cases will give the police 60 per­cent of the pro­ceeds from a gun sale.

For the most part Vil­lage Vault stores guns that were taken by police in restraining-orders cases, license revo­ca­tions or were aban­doned or donated in instances when a gun-owner died and the fam­ily didn’t want the weapon.

About five years ago, an Inter­net com­pany called propertyroom.com emerged, and it has been help­ful for depart­ments, said retired Shrews­bury Police Chief A. Wayne Samp­son, who is the exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Mass­a­chu­setts Chiefs of Police Association.

The com­pany logs the items, takes pic­tures and posts them on the Internet.

Chief Samp­son said this is a bet­ter pro­gram because the items are on the Inter­net per­ma­nently, and as mate­ri­als are sold the com­pany sends a check to a community.

State law allows “prop­erty which has been stolen, lost, aban­doned or taken from a per­son under arrest” to be dis­posed of.

Just to be thor­ough, the chief’s asso­ci­a­tion filed leg­is­la­tion to allow auc­tion­ing prop­erty on the Inter­net, Chief Samp­son said. The bill passed in April.

In the old days, an offi­cer would spend weeks or months going through prop­erty, try­ing to track down own­ers through let­ters, Chief Samp­son said.

The offi­cer would have to make sure the case was cleared before the depart­ment hired an auc­tion­eer, which requires a news­pa­per advertisement.

“We would have to bring in extra help on the day of the auc­tion to be there and process it,” Chief Samp­son said.

In most cases, after pay­ing for the pub­lic auc­tion, the depart­ment prob­a­bly would lose money to get rid of the prop­erty, he said.

How­ever, some items still find their way home the old-fashioned way.

Seven days ago in West Brook­field, a West Spring­field woman lost a dia­mond ring. She told a reporter it was a fam­ily heir­loom that fell out of her purse as she got out of her car for a Valentine’s Day din­ner with her hus­band at Salem Cross Inn.

Jean Smith of Wilbra­ham found it and turned it over to staff at the inn, who in turn gave the ring to police.

By Wednes­day it was in the right­ful owner’s hands.

Sgt. Charles H. Laperle, who han­dled the case, said the owner was lucky to have hon­est peo­ple turn in the ring.

West Brook­field police cer­tainly don’t need any more unclaimed items, which are kept in var­i­ous loca­tions in the department.

The ring’s owner did not want her name men­tioned, but she said she was “thrilled and relieved” and “for­ever grate­ful” to Ms. Smith.

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

The Los Ange­les Times www.latimes.com
By Nicholas Riccardi — nicholas.riccardi@latimes.com

Col­orado Springs, CO

The City Coun­cil is con­sid­er­ing a pro­gram to let the Police Depart­ment sell con­fis­cated guns to licensed deal­ers. Sales could net $10,000 a year.

This con­ser­v­a­tive city is tak­ing an unusual, some might say extreme, step to try to stem its fis­cal woes: It’s enter­ing the gun business.

The Col­orado Springs City Coun­cil is expected in com­ing weeks to approve the final details of a pro­gram that would allow the Police Depart­ment to sell con­fis­cated firearms to fed­er­ally licensed gun deal­ers. Police have already stopped melt­ing down the hun­dreds of guns they col­lect from crime scenes, drug houses or civil­ians who don’t need them anymore.

The sales are pro­jected to bring in about $10,000 a year, only a slight dent for a city that faced a deficit of one-quarter its $200-million annual bud­get this year. But it still helps, said Vice Mayor Larry Small, who pro­posed the gun sales.

“Every penny counts,” Small said.

Col­orado Springs is home to the Army’s Ft. Car­son, the Air Force Acad­emy and NORAD. Men and women in uni­form min­gle eas­ily with civil­ians in the shop­ping cen­ters and strol­lable down­town that sits in the shadow of 14,000-foot Pikes Peak. Peo­ple here are com­fort­able around firearms.

But even in Col­orado Springs, the idea of law enforce­ment as gun sell­ers has raised some eyebrows.

The Police Depart­ment objected, only to be over­ruled by the coun­cil, which in Feb­ru­ary voted 8 to 1 to direct the depart­ment to draw up the pro­gram it will con­sider this month. Lt. David Whit­lock said the Police Depart­ment has been mov­ing cau­tiously to address the many con­cerns the sales raise.

“There’s all kinds of ancil­lary issues, one of which is the pol­i­tics of being in the gun-selling busi­ness,” Whit­lock said. “The other is not intro­duc­ing another weapon into the community.”

Jan Mar­tin, the lone coun­cil mem­ber who voted against the sales, said the small amount of money they could bring in is out­weighed by the risk that a gun sold by the city could one day be used for a crime.

“I remem­ber what some of those weapons were used for,” Mar­tin said. “Just the idea of putting those weapons back on the street is unconscionable.”

The Inter­na­tional Assn. of Chiefs of Police cau­tions against law enforce­ment agen­cies sell­ing weapons they have seized. Destroy­ing the firearms, it says, is a bet­ter pol­icy. No one tracks the num­ber of agen­cies that make sales, but offi­cials believe it to be very small.

Nonethe­less, Scott Knight, who helped for­mu­late the association’s pol­icy on gun sales, said, “We under­stand, par­tic­u­larly in this econ­omy, that some depart­ments need to recoup bud­get losses.”

Knight’s police depart­ment, in Chaska, Minn., about 20 miles south­west of Min­neapo­lis, is one such agency. The depart­ment upgraded its rifles recently and the only way to pay for the guns was to sell the old ones to licensed firearms dealers.

“I cer­tainly was not will­ing to turn those over to the pub­lic,” Knight said.

In El Paso County, which includes Col­orado Springs, Sher­iff Terry Maketa’s agency has been sell­ing con­fis­cated firearms to licensed deal­ers since 2006. Spokes­woman Lt. Lau­rie Sevine noted that most weapons used in crimes are not for sale because they are kept as evi­dence, some­times for decades.

Sevine stressed that licensed deal­ers can only sell to peo­ple who can legally own firearms. “We’re not sell­ing to any civil­ian off the streets,” she said. “We’re very cau­tious as to how we go about this.”

The sheriff’s pro­gram, which has net­ted nearly $30,000 in two auc­tions, is what inspired Small to pro­pose that Col­orado Springs police start sell­ing their seized weapons. He shrugged off com­plaints about guns pos­si­bly end­ing up on the streets, not­ing that police have long sold other assets seized from criminals.

“We auc­tion off cars. It seems to me there’s not that much dif­fer­ence between a firearm and a vehi­cle,” Small said. “We’ve got a num­ber of homes we’ve seized.… We don’t send a bull­dozer over to them.”

Small said he thinks res­i­dents are com­fort­able with the idea because he’s got­ten only a hand­ful of e-mail complaints.

Col­orado Springs, pop­u­la­tion 375,000, has always been more cos­mopoli­tan and diverse than stereo­types of the moun­tain­ous West.

Yes, the evan­gel­i­cal group Focus on the Fam­ily has a sign on the inter­state adver­tis­ing the organization’s vis­i­tors cen­ter. One of the many com­mer­cial thor­ough­fares that wind through the sub­di­vi­sions is called Cor­po­rate Drive. But the city’s core is full of vin­tage cloth­ing shops, music stores and an old-fashioned movie the­ater that last week was show­ing “Food Inc.”

Nonethe­less, sev­eral res­i­dents were rather blase about the pos­si­bil­ity of their police sell­ing guns.

“If it’s going to gen­er­ate money for the Police Depart­ment or the city, that’s a good thing,” said Joe Nason, 28, a six-year Army vet­eran tak­ing a break from work­ing on a con­struc­tion project down­town. “Peo­ple can get weapons any­way. I don’t think [the sales] would have an effect on crime or more weapons.”

Ty Lewis, 43, a floor installer reclin­ing in square-block Aca­cia Park, also had no wor­ries. “I don’t think it’s that much of a risk,” he said. “Crim­i­nals are going to get their guns illegally.”

But Susan Jones, an ele­men­tary school teacher, had other ideas. “I’m totally against it,” she said. “I don’t want to have as many guns out there as there already are.”

Her hus­band, David, also a teacher, was push­ing a pink stroller hold­ing their 11-month-old daugh­ter, Kate­lyn, while their 9-year-old son, Zach, walked along. He said he didn’t nec­es­sar­ily have a prob­lem with the idea. But then he stopped and recalled how, when school dis­tricts were in dire need of cash, they allowed in soda and candy vend­ing machines. Now the nation is in the midst of a child obe­sity epidemic.

“It’s got to be man­aged right,” he said, so the police don’t find them­selves hav­ing to con­fis­cate the guns another time.

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