Evidence rooms get examined

Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (Little Rock)
SECTION: NORTHWEST ARKANSAS
BYLINE: BY ADAM WALLWORTH ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Rogers, AR and Bentonville, AR

Police consider problems in keeping track of logged items

Beer cans and broadswords are among the items that fill the rows of shelves in one of the invisible places in police departments - the property rooms.

The eclectic collections hold evidence used to put suspects in jail or get them off the hook.

Recent audits of Rogers and Bentonville police departments' evidence rooms have pointed out issues with how the evidence was logged and maintained.

"Property rooms are the forgotten child until we have a problem in our organizations," said Joe Latta, executive director of California-based International Association for Property and Evidence Inc.

Latta's group works to foster best practices among property and evidence rooms that house thousands of pieces of evidence for cases from drunken driving to homicide, but have no governing body to set standards.

Latta said it is not uncommon for police administrators to get in trouble because of ignorance in the operations of a property room.

"There are tons of chiefs out there that have lost their jobs because of property rooms," Latta said.

Last month, Bentonville Chief James Allen asked the Commission on Law Enforcement Standards to revoke the certificate of a former officer who was in charge of the evidence room for his department.

Allen fired Michelle Margaret Smith in April as property control officer for failing to log 1,300 pieces of evidence in more than 300 cases.

It took more than a week and 300 man-hours for other officers to sort through the property and evidence. Allen and other officers have said that Smith did not compromise the chain of custody and that every piece of evidence could be traced back to the officer who entered it.

Allen's request at the commission's July 10 meeting in Camden came on the heels of an audit that found deficiencies in the Rogers Police Department property room. New Chief Steve Hamilton initiated the review shortly after his appointment in October.

Hamilton said his staff had problems with how evidence was packaged and accessed. The auditor found there were several keys to the property room, but no one knew exactly how many.

Now Hamilton said he is the only person besides the two property room clerks who have keys.

"I've never been in there by myself," he said.

Neither audit has led to a successful appeal of a criminal conviction, but Benton County Public Defender Jay Saxton said he will review numerous cases.

Benton County Prosecuting Attorney Van Stone said he doesn't anticipate any appeals coming out of either instance because the evidence wasn't compromised.

If there was a problem with evidence in a case, it would be his duty under the law to make sure the defense attorney knew about it, Stone said.

"On the cases we've prosecuted, we've not had any issues with chain of custody thus far," Stone said.

Stone said the fact that there haven't been any cases in Benton County where evidence was compromised doesn't diminish the importance of maintaining standards in processing evidence.

FEW ACCREDITED

The Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, a nonprofit group based in Fairfax, Va., is the only organization that can enforce standards for evidence rooms, Latta said. The group's authority extends only to departments that voluntarily seek accreditation from the group.

The organization accredits and recognizes more than 600 agencies in the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Barbados. To be accredited, departments must meet more than 400 different standards set by the commission. Recognition, usually reserved for smaller police agencies, requires 112 standards.

There are more than 17,000 local and state law enforcement agencies in the country, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics Web site. There are nine agencies in Arkansas that are recognized or accredited, including the University of Arkansas Police Department, which is accredited. Both Rogers and Fayetteville departments are in the process of applying for accreditation.

The Little Rock Police Department has been accredited since 1998, but it looks beyond the commission's standards when it comes to managing property, said Carri Frederick, property room supervisor and president of the Arkansas Association of Property and Evidence, an affiliate of Latta's organization.

Frederick said she researched policies used by other departments to develop those used in Little Rock. The main problem facing property rooms is a lack of space, she said.

Evidence is constantly brought in, but it takes time to get rid of it, Frederick said. She said her evidence room has about 80,000 items, including some that must be kept indefinitely, such as DNA or evidence from homicides.

It takes time to research each piece of evidence to determine whether it can be destroyed, Frederick said. She recently researched evidence in a robbery case and found the person was serving a life sentence from another jurisdiction.

Latta said property rooms typically lack the staff needed to maintain proper inventory control. Officers and detectives constantly deliver evidence, and if it's not disposed of, the property begins to pile up, he said.

"Ninety-nine percent of what we have is stuff we've collected that nobody knows what to do with," Latta said.

The other 1 percent will be brought up in court and have to be accounted for from the moment the items are seized.

PROPERTY PATH

Officers typically follow similar processes when handling newly acquired evidence, though each department has its own way of operating. Departments may favor a different type of bag - paper or plastic - to hold the items, but they all require the officer to initial the seal.

Once bagged - or boxed in the case of guns - items are placed in lockers that are only to be opened by the property room staff. Most departments use a bar code system to track the items once they are logged into the property room.

Different departments use different software, which is one of Latta's complaints. Some software packages are built as an afterthought to be sold with the computer aided dispatch software, he said.

The primary complaint against the former Bentonville officer was her failure to log pieces of evidence into the computer system for several months. Smith didn't log a single piece of evidence in the department's system from October to February, according to a report from Allen.

Bentonville officers are required to properly package and label evidence when they submit it to the property room, said Lt. Jon Simpson. Simpson said that while Smith wasn't logging the items into the property room, officers followed procedure in entering them into custody.

Stone said no trials or hearings were delayed because of the evidence problems. Benton County prosecutors, monitoring a computer tracking system for police evidence, questioned the Bentonville police when they noticed evidence was not being sent to the state Crime Laboratory in Little Rock as quickly as usual.

Proper use of the system doesn't guarantee some items won't show up on the wrong shelf, said Capt. Ron Hritz, the property room supervisor for the Springdale Police Department.

Springdale audits the property room every year and typically finds a few items in the wrong place, he said, adding that's not an indication of a mistake but rather the limits of the software.

The property manager may move faster than the software and not notice that the computer misses a scan, Hritz said. The piece of evidence would still show up in the system, but it would be in a different place.

Several steps ensure the chain of custody can be proven, such as limiting access to the property room, Hritz said. The property manager is the only person who has the key and alarm code, he said.

There are three people in Springdale who have the alarm code, but not a key, Hritz said. As property room supervisor, Hritz has a key, but has to ask one of those three people to accompany him into the room.

Evidence collection and management has been largely neglected, said Stephen Saloom, policy director for the Innocence Project, a New York-based nonprofit organization that reviews evidence for people who say they were wrongly convicted.

"This is the evidence used to determine questions of innocence and guilt in criminal cases," he said. "The integrity of that evidence is of the utmost importance, as is the ability to locate it when you need it." Saloom said his group is urging the U.S. Department of Justice's National Justice Institute to adopt best practices for managing evidence. Evidence management standards continue to become more important with advances in the use of DNA in criminal cases, he said.

"The inability to find evidence is one of our biggest impediments to proving wrongful convictions with DNA," Saloom said. "Evidence collection and handling practices have long been neglected and sorely need to be brought into the 21st century if we're to seize the incredible crime solving potential of DNA." To contact this reporter: This article was published 08/03/2009

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