Across the nation, law enforcement agencies face a growing crisis in their evidence rooms. Here are just a few of the challenges they are experiencing:
- The facilities are filling to capacity.
- Some are operating over capacity.
- Inventory documentation isn’t keeping up.
- Procedures that violate evidence storage best practices may be used to accept and store new evidence.
The root cause of these issues is a lack of space in the evidence room – many more items have been and are being accepted than can be permanently removed. And this has been going on for years. Evidence is piling up everywhere within the facility, leaving it very disorganized and difficult to work in. Eventually, the inventory’s condition, the steadily rising number of operational problems triggered by the inventory, and the agency’s exposure to potential liability issues justify the label “crisis.”
Local government leaders should be prepared for the day the chief or sheriff requests additional resources to regain control of their evidence room operations. It may also begin a dialogue between government and law enforcement leadership, resulting in action taken before the situation becomes dire.
This two-part guide explains the crisis in depth and offers a real solution. In Part One, we’ll discuss the challenges of overwhelmed evidence rooms. In Part Two, we’ll share how a partnership with Fortress Plus Solutions can transform your evidence room into a model of excellence.
Overwhelmed Evidence Rooms
The fundamental role of an evidence room is to securely store, preserve, and maintain the integrity of evidence until trial and its retention period ends. But, decades of accumulation, inadequate facilities, and insufficient manpower have created widespread dysfunction. The consequences extend far beyond the evidence room itself. They include:
1. Compliance Risks: The law requires police departments to handle evidence in a manner that maintains its integrity and prevents contamination. An overwhelmed facility can make compliance almost impossible. Failure to meet these standards can lead to:
- Compromised investigations
- Inadmissible evidence
- Lost cases
- Legal ramifications
- Loss of public confidence.
2. Operational Inefficiencies: When an evidence room is in complete disarray, it takes significantly longer to locate evidence. This situation can impede investigations, alter the prosecution’s case planning, lead to missed court dates, and ultimately reduce a department’s ability to effectively serve the criminal justice system and the community.
- Chain of Custody: An unbroken chain of custody record must be maintained for each piece of evidence while under police control. The inability to locate evidence for any amount of time may break the chain of custody record, rendering the item inadmissible at trial.
- Documentation and Records: Maintaining accurate documentation and records for an out-of-control inventory is complicated, and it can be almost impossible if paper-only records are used. Over the years, paper records become detached from items, misplaced, and even lost entirely. Printing on labels and other paperwork fades over time, making some impossible to decipher. This situation makes accounting for individual pieces of evidence very time-consuming and tedious if it can be done at all.
- Officer Morale: Neglected evidence rooms can send unwanted signals to officers that the department doesn’t support their work, particularly in prosecuting their cases. Agencies that addressed the issue report improved officer morale and appreciation for the department’s investment in enhancing their evidence storage facilities and processes.
It’s important to remember that evidence collection, handling, storage, and preservation are among law enforcement’s most highly regulated functions. Best practices, laws, rules of evidence, the agency’s policies and procedures, and other guidelines must be followed throughout the evidence lifecycle. If a case goes to trial, everything about that lifecycle may be scrutinized, and if something wasn’t done according to the accepted standards, it may be challenged by the defense.
Inadmissible evidence may not corrupt an entire case, but it can weaken it and cause prosecutors to alter their plans on how to proceed. Except for number five, any of the problems listed above could lead to evidence being excluded from trial.
This watchdog environment makes rectifying the situation in the evidence room critical. Your support as government leaders is critical as well.
Staffing
Most law enforcement agencies neither have the manpower nor the daily activity to justify assigning a person full-time to their evidence room. Some assign a supervisor to manage it, but the evidence room is routinely the lowest of his or her assigned priorities.
Evidence management involves strict processes that would be closely supervised in a perfect world. Not having direct supervision or anyone responsible for the daily upkeep of the evidence room and its inventory creates some of the problems discussed here and their worsening over time.
It’s safe to say that most evidence rooms will never be staffed full-time. Hiring someone to work exclusively in the evidence room, even for a few hours each week, could make a significant difference for agencies that would benefit from part-time support.
Fortress Plus Solutions offers Fractional Property and Evidence Management services to help agencies address staffing shortages. Their team comprises of experienced former law enforcement professionals, ensuring cost-effective and expert management of property and evidence.
Evidence Disposal
Are you wondering, what about getting rid of the evidence? Surely, there must be some process for disposing of it. Shouldn’t that prevent the accumulation problem?
The simple answer is no.
There is a process, but it waits at the end of state-mandated retention periods. Retention periods require evidence to be held for several months or years after adjudicating a case. And just getting to that point can easily take months or years.
For homicides, the evidence must be held forever.
Those retention periods do have an end date, however. Once that date has passed, the agency files paperwork and a judge authorize the item to be returned to its owner or destroyed. This process isn’t conducted routinely at many agencies. These dates go by, but no one follows up on them. Agencies still using paper records are especially guilty of missing the dates because they have no automatic notification system. Departments that use an automated system can be notified of the dates and at least be aware of them.
But let’s remember all the open, inactive cases or those under investigation. Such cases could total in the hundreds or even thousands. Any evidence related to those cases remains stored in your local evidence room.
Considering the facts, it’s clear why evidence rooms are overwhelmed and why agencies struggle to manage them properly.
But there is a solution to this crisis. Fortress Plus Solutions (FPS) offers secure, off-site, long-term evidence storage and other evidence management services designed to transform your evidence room and its operations into a model of best practices.
In Part 2, we’ll examine how FPS can transform your agency.