Cleaning The Evidence Closet
The police department in Santa Clara, Calif., has developed an evidence-management system that eliminated a series of problems, including misplaced evidence, the mixing of old and new property, and maintenance of obsolete evidence.
The department replaced its collection of bulky, overflowing boxes with compact, individually labeled envelopes, which are organized chronologically and whether it is a misdemeanor or a felony.
The introduction of a database hosted by software package FileMaker Pro increased the efficiency of entering, tracking, and managing the department’s evidence collection.
The software prints labels with a property report and a matching barcode, which allows a wireless interface to scan the barcode and retrieve a complete history of a piece of evidence, including its location, which detective is handling the case, and the status of the case.
Officers can also enter a case number into the wireless interface to generate a list of all the evidence associated with a specific case and its location.
FileMaker Pro can collaborate with other computer programs, such as Excel, to create spreadsheets of evidence, and generate monthly reports to notify investigators of what evidence is still being held and which case it relates to.
According to retired Santa Clara Lt. Roger Luebkeman, who helped design the system, the new property room was designed to accommodate an annual 15 percent growth of evidence, but the use of the FileMaker system has kept annual evidence growth to between 3 percent and 4 percent.
Joe Latta, executive director of the International Association for Property and Evidence, points out that an ideal system would generate an inventory and exception report at least once a year, listing all missing or misplaced items in a specific box or file.
Abstracted by the National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center(NLECTC) from Law Enforcement Technology (08/03) Vol. 30, No. 8, P. 40; Mertens, Jennifer.
