IAPE Evidence Blog

The Ari­zona Repub­lic, azcentral.com
BYLINE: D.S. Wood­fill, The Ari­zona Repub­lic
Link to Article

Sur­prise, AZ

Two inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tions in the Sur­prise Police Depart­ment have gone into a sec­ond year hav­ing no clear end in sight.

One case, involv­ing for­mer Assis­tant Chief Scott Con­nelly and an uniden­ti­fied employee, started in June. Offi­cials said they hope to wrap it up by the end of the year, but it could take longer if the other employee appeals any dis­ci­pline that may be meted out.

The other case con­cerns $33,000 in drug money stolen from a depart­ment evi­dence locker in Sep­tem­ber 2010. Police had con­fis­cated the cash in two drug inves­ti­ga­tions — one in March 2008 and the other in Feb­ru­ary 2009. Police said they have been wait­ing for a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion by the Phoenix Police Depart­ment to end before begin­ning an internal-affairs inves­ti­ga­tion inter­views in earnest.

The Repub­lic has sought pub­lic records in the miss­ing money and Con­nelly cases.

MISSING DRUG MONEY

The Repub­lic learned in March that $33,000 in drug money had gone miss­ing from a police evi­dence locker six months ear­lier. The Police Depart­ment — headed at the time by interim Chief Mark Schott — didn’t pub­licly dis­close the theft, but reported it to the Phoenix Police Depart­ment, which began a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion. That inves­ti­ga­tion has is now in its sec­ond year.

Sur­prise Chief Mike Fra­zier, who took over for Schott in Feb­ru­ary, told The Repub­lic in March that the money was seized by police from sus­pected drug dealers.

The theft sparked out­rage from the new chief, who said he was “gravely con­cerned” about the miss­ing money and the fact that the depart­ment may still have a thief in its midst.

In addi­tion to the inter­nal inquiry and crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, Fra­zier ordered an over­haul of secu­rity pro­ce­dures, which were crit­i­cized by at least one employee from the evi­dence depart­ment, accord­ing to Phoenix police doc­u­ments. Frazier’s reforms included stricter lim­its on employee-access to the evi­dence room and addi­tional video cam­eras to cover blind spots.

Where the inves­ti­ga­tion stands:

Sur­prise offi­cials orig­i­nally said the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion could last sev­eral weeks to a few months. How­ever, the review has no clear end in sight.

On Tues­day, Sur­prise Police Com­man­der Terry Young said inves­ti­ga­tors still do not have any sus­pects. He said it’s pos­si­ble that the cul­prit or cul­prits are no longer employed at the department.

Young was non­com­mit­tal when asked if he is con­fi­dent inves­ti­ga­tors will dis­cover who stole the money.

“That’s cer­tainly my goal,” he said. “Obvi­ously, there’s no guarantee.”

Young said he had been wait­ing for the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion to reach a point where he could start inter­view­ing employ­ees for the inter­nal inquiry. That process has started, he said.

“As a mat­ter of pro­to­col, we let the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion unfold first,” he said. “We don’t want to inter­fere with or step on the toes of that crim­i­nal investigation.”

Young said fed­eral law also pro­tects gov­ern­ment employ­ees from being com­pelled to pro­vide poten­tially self-incriminating infor­ma­tion to employ­ers dur­ing a crim­i­nal investigation.

“For exam­ple, if I talk to an employee on an admin­is­tra­tive mat­ter, I have the right as the employer to com­pel them to answer my ques­tions,” he said. “But crim­i­nally, obvi­ously, you have the Fifth Amend­ment right to remain silent.

“So, we take a lot of pre­cau­tions to make sure that we’re not speak­ing to peo­ple who might ulti­mately be inter­viewed crim­i­nally. You can start kind of cloud­ing that line for them as to when they have to talk, when they don’t and are they pro­vid­ing infor­ma­tion that they should be pro­tected from,” he said.

Young said the depart­ment began inter­view­ing peo­ple because the crim­i­nal case is wind­ing down. Still, the inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion can­not con­clude until they have all the infor­ma­tion from the crim­i­nal investigation.

What’s Next:

Theron Quaas, the lead Phoenix detec­tive inves­ti­gat­ing the theft, didn’t respond to requests for an interview.

When asked if the crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion could take another year, Young said, “It should not take any­where close to another year.”

Young said the inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion should end within 120 days after the crim­i­nal case is closed.

What oth­ers have said:

Coun­cil­man John Williams said the coun­cil has no role track­ing the inves­ti­ga­tions of the miss­ing money or in the inquiry involv­ing Con­nelly and declined to com­ment. He said it’s not appro­pri­ate for the coun­cil to get involved in mat­ters that aren’t policy-related unless pub­lic trust is at stake.

Still, Williams said he would request an update from the city man­ager, say­ing his inter­est was piqued, but “I don’t plan on run­ning any inter­fer­ence or insert­ing myself.”

Pierce Mur­phy, a board mem­ber of the Idaho-based National Asso­ci­a­tion for Civil­ian Over­sight of Law Enforce­ment, said there’s no set time for how long an inves­ti­ga­tion should last if it’s con­nected to crim­i­nal wrong­do­ing. Such cases can be more com­plex than admin­is­tra­tive inquiries over pol­icy violations.

Mur­phy is also the Boise Police Department’s ombuds­man, in charge of inves­ti­gat­ing pub­lic com­plaints and audit­ing internal-affairs investigations.

Mur­phy, who was unfa­mil­iar with the details of the Sur­prise case, said a year could be rea­son­able for an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion that is part of a crim­i­nal case.

He said, for exam­ple, a case could be con­nected to a fed­eral inves­ti­ga­tion, drug car­tel or because police are inves­ti­gat­ing wider cor­rup­tion that was uncov­ered by the orig­i­nal crime.

SCOTT CONNELLY

Con­nelly resigned Aug. 15 after being demoted from assis­tant police chief to sergeant in Jan­u­ary. Offi­cials said the demo­tion, which took effect imme­di­ately after it was announced, was voluntary.

The Repub­lic filed two public-records requests seek­ing infor­ma­tion from Connelly’s per­son­nel file — one after his demo­tion and another shortly before his resignation.

City Attor­ney Michael Bai­ley declined both requests, stat­ing in a let­ter dated Feb. 14 that state law lim­its pub­lic access to gov­ern­ment records if the doc­u­ments are con­fi­den­tial by statute, involves pri­vacy inter­ests or when dis­clo­sure is detri­men­tal to the state.

He did not say on which of those grounds offi­cials denied the request.

In his sec­ond denial let­ter dated Aug. 9, Bai­ley said the requested infor­ma­tion was the basis of a pend­ing inves­ti­ga­tion and state statute pro­hib­ited its release.

Nei­ther depart­ment offi­cials nor Con­nelly has dis­closed the nature of the inves­ti­ga­tion.
Where the inves­ti­ga­tion stands

Com­man­der Terry Young, who over­sees the department’s Pro­fes­sional Stan­dards Unit, would not share details on the case. He said it involves another unnamed employee who is cur­rently the sub­ject of an inves­ti­ga­tion in the same mat­ter. Police have long said they don’t com­ment on inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tions and are pro­hib­ited by state law from dis­clos­ing infor­ma­tion to the pub­lic on ongo­ing inter­nal investigations.

Offi­cials have said it does not include any sus­pected crim­i­nal wrong­do­ing.
What’s next?

Young said he hopes to con­clude the inves­ti­ga­tion con­cern­ing the other employee by year’s end.

When asked why the case requires that much time, Young said that it had been stalled by an “employee issue.” Young added he hasn’t been able to con­clude the inter­view por­tion of the investigation.

“As soon as I’m able to do so, then we can put that one to bed and be done with it,” he said.

Opin­ions on case vary

Six months is too long for most non-criminal inves­ti­ga­tions, said Pierce Mur­phy, a board mem­ber and past pres­i­dent of the Idaho-based National Asso­ci­a­tion for Civil­ian Over­sight of Law Enforcement. .

Mur­phy said inves­ti­ga­tions not involv­ing crim­i­nal acts should take only 60 to 90 days.

The rea­sons are myr­iad, he said. It’s unfair to allow offi­cers with careers and rep­u­ta­tions on the line to remain in limbo, he said.

Mur­phy added that if an officer’s bad behav­ior or mis­takes aren’t rec­ti­fied quickly, man­agers lose the oppor­tu­nity to cor­rect long-term behavior.

“If you’re talk­ing 180 to 365 days or more, I’m not sure you’re accom­plish­ing that goal,” he said. “The teach­able moment’s gone.”

Lengthy inves­ti­ga­tions also send the wrong mes­sage to other offi­cers, Mur­phy said. If employ­ees know bad behav­ior won’t be cor­rected swiftly, it lessens the con­cern they will be disciplined.

Mer­rick Bobb exec­u­tive direc­tor of the Police Assess­ment Resource Cen­ter, a Los Ange­les police watch­dog orga­ni­za­tion, said six months is the max­i­mum for less com­plex cases. He cited U.S. Depart­ment of Jus­tice guidelines.

How­ever, depart­ments should strive to con­clude them as quickly as pos­si­ble, he said.

Tim Dorn, pres­i­dent of the Ari­zona Asso­ci­a­tion of Chiefs of Police, said in an e-mail that the length of time an inves­ti­ga­tion should take “is based totally on the extent and nature of the investigation.”

But Dorn said a recently enacted law requires inves­ti­ga­tions to com­pleted within 120 days, but it does not apply to inves­ti­ga­tions that were started prior to the law’s adoption.

“There are exemp­tions for inves­ti­ga­tions which also involve a crim­i­nal inves­ti­ga­tion, or where it can be clearly demon­strated that addi­tional time is nec­es­sary to com­plete the inves­ti­ga­tion,” he said.

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

Phoenix New Times, LLC., blogs.phoenixnewtimes.com
BYLINE: James King
Cat­e­gories: Bad cop. No dough­nut.
Link to Article

Tempe, AZ

A for­mer Tempe cop accused of steal­ing evi­dence from the agency’s evi­dence room — includ­ing a refrig­er­a­tor — has pleaded guilty to reduced charges.

Ini­tially, for­mer Tempe Offi­cer Elliot Camp­bell was booked on two counts of theft of a credit card, 10 counts of tam­per­ing with evi­dence, and one count each of forgery, bur­glary, and theft. He pleaded guilty this morn­ing to attempt to com­mit theft of credit card obtained by fraud­u­lent means, and tam­per­ing with phys­i­cal evidence.

Camp­bell, an 11-year vet­eran, was arrested in May after an inves­ti­ga­tion revealed he looted the department’s evi­dence room and used the items he stole — includ­ing sev­eral gift cards to var­i­ous retail stores — for a lit­tle home improvement.

The Ari­zona Reg­is­trar of Con­trac­tors Office began inves­ti­gat­ing Camp­bell in April regard­ing his per­form­ing con­tract work with­out a contractor’s license.

The inves­ti­ga­tion revealed that Camp­bell was dri­ving on a sus­pended license. He was placed on admin­is­tra­tive leave pend­ing the out­come of the inves­ti­ga­tion, which ulti­mately found he’d also been steal­ing evidence.

Dur­ing the course of their inves­ti­ga­tion, author­i­ties searched Campbell’s squad car and found envelopes checked out of the department’s evi­dence room in March 2008. Addi­tion­ally, detec­tives found that Camp­bell also had checked out a refrig­er­a­tor, a clothes washer, a watch, and some tools from the evi­dence room. He told employ­ees in the evi­dence room he was plan­ning to return the items to their own­ers, which is why he was allowed to take them.

It was later deter­mined that the gift cards Camp­bell had checked out of the evi­dence room were used at Costco and Tar­get stores near the officer’s home. A search of his house turned up the watch and the refrig­er­a­tor. The wash­ing machine, Camp­bell later told police, was given to a friend.

Bill Richard­son is a for­mer Mesa detec­tive who is often crit­i­cal of the Tempe Police Depart­ment. He says Camp­bell never should have been per­mit­ted to remove the items from the evi­dence room in the first place.

In a let­ter to Tempe offi­cials, Richard­son wrote the fol­low­ing:

In all my years of expe­ri­ence and being involved in hun­dreds and hun­dreds of felony crim­i­nal cases I have never ever taken evi­dence out of the property/evidence divi­sion and per­son­ally returned it to a vic­tim. I have never heard of such a thing. It is the duty of the property/evidence cus­to­dian to dis­pose of evi­dence and seized prop­erty not an offi­cer involved in the case.

When you dis­cover one dirty cop you have to fig­ure there are oth­ers who are exploit­ing the sys­tem.

Fol­low­ing his arrest, Camp­bell resigned from the depart­ment. His sen­tenc­ing is sched­uled for Octo­ber 21. 

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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
Link to Article

Pinal County, AZ

DNA evi­dence from more than 200 sexual-assault cases in Pinal County has been lan­guish­ing in the Sheriff’s Office prop­erty room, some for decades, a recent audit revealed.

An inde­pen­dent audi­tor found that only about 5 per­cent of sexual-assault kits, includ­ing DNA sam­ples taken dur­ing foren­sic exam­i­na­tions of the vic­tims, ever went to the state crime lab for testing.

The fail­ure to process DNA is not so impor­tant to pros­e­cut­ing the case where the sam­ples come from but has a sig­nif­i­cant impact on police agen­cies’ abil­ity to solve other sex crimes and link cases.

Sam­ples are added to state and national DNA data­bases, which makes crime solv­ing eas­ier, experts say.

California-based Evi­dence Con­trol Sys­tems Inc. cited the untested kits among the issues to be rec­ti­fied by the Pinal County sheriff’s evidence-and-property unit after decades of mismanagement.

“It’s unclear why more sexual-assault kits and evi­dence are not being sent to the crime lab for analy­sis in hopes of iden­ti­fy­ing a per­pe­tra­tor or link­age to other crimes,” the audit said. “You may have a rape/sexual assault case with a named sus­pect who may never have been arrested. Could this per­son be a ser­ial rapist? Could the DNA in that case match with oth­ers in the community?”

Sheriff’s offi­cials say 137 kits will now be sent to the Ari­zona Depart­ment of Pub­lic Safety’s foren­sic lab. The depart­ment is also for­mu­lat­ing a new pol­icy that man­dates tests of sexual-assault kits.

Untested kits are not exclu­sive to Pinal County.

An Octo­ber 2009 study of more than 2,000 law-enforcement agen­cies by the National Insti­tute of Jus­tice found that evi­dence from 14 per­cent of all unsolved homi­cides and 18 per­cent of unsolved rape cases had not been sub­mit­ted to crime labs.

“Not going for­ward with some of these (kits) if they can is a vio­la­tion of women’s rights, and everyone’s rights — the community’s, too, because that means the abuser is going to find another vic­tim,” said Heather Dumas, a legal advo­cate for Com­mu­nity Alliance Against Fam­ily Abuse in Apache Junction.

Ear­lier this year, the Depart­ment of Jus­tice awarded grants to researchers in Hous­ton and Wayne County, Mich., to study why such evi­dence is not tested and to develop prac­tices to improve the criminal-justice response to sex assaults.

Gen­er­ally, kits won’t get processed because a sus­pect has been iden­ti­fied, the vic­tim drops the case or inves­ti­ga­tors aren’t aware of the tech­nol­ogy, said Joe Latta, direc­tor of the audit­ing company.

“There is a nation­wide lack of under­stand­ing,” Latta said. “It’s not a Pinal County issue, and it’s not a Phoenix issue.… It’s hard get­ting every­one trained when not every­one under­stands the science.”

Just a decade ago, pro­cess­ing a kit was often use­less if the offi­cer didn’t already have a sus­pect in mind because he or she would have no DNA on file to compare.

But with the expan­sion of the Com­bined DNA Index Sys­tem, or CODIS, inves­ti­ga­tors could iden­tify sus­pects by enter­ing DNA records into the system.

Deputy Chief Harry Griz­zle was a detec­tive with the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office in the late 1990s, when some of the untested kits were collected.

Back then, Griz­zle said, inves­ti­ga­tors assumed that once they booked kits into the evi­dence unit, tech­ni­cians would send them to the lab so “we never fol­lowed up.”

Griz­zle recently looked through each kit col­lect­ing dust in the evi­dence room and their cor­re­spond­ing case files. He found 137 kits that should be analyzed.

“My ini­tial thought was we have some peo­ple out there that we can iden­tify as sus­pects that we have not done,” Griz­zle said.

It would not be effec­tive or prac­ti­cal to test every kit col­lected, said Todd Grif­fith, who over­sees the DPS crime lab. The ques­tion should be how many kits are from cases where DNA would be valu­able, he said.

“If you just go to a police agency and count out how many sex-assault kits are sit­ting there, you can come to a very large num­ber,” Grif­fith said. “What did the inves­ti­ga­tion show? That’s the first step.”

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