Dallas city officials plan to call for independent investigation into police evidence loss

[Nevilledog]

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Kelli Smith
@KelliSmithNews
BREAKING: City Council members plan to discuss pursuing an outside investigation into Dallas’ massive loss of police evidence.
A banner is on display of former Texas Governor Ann Richards along Akard Street near Dallas City Hall in Downtown Dallas, on Thursday, June 24, 2021.

Dallas city officials plan to call for independent investigation into police evidence loss
City Council members plan to discuss pursuing a federal or state investigation into Dallas’ massive loss of police evidence, according to a memo obtained...
dallasnews.com
1:23 PM · Sep 2, 2021

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/politics/2021/09/02/dallas-city-officials-plan-to-call-for-independent-investigation-into-police-evidence-loss/

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Dallas police said that family violence and child abuse cases are among those lost in the initial batch of missing evidence, but the department is “highly confident” that it has backup records of the deleted data in filed criminal cases. It was unclear which units may have been impacted in the newly-discovered data deletion.

The IT department hopes to complete the audit by Sept. 30. Police Chief Eddie García has said he won’t know with “absolute” certainty which cases were included until then.

Although the initial evidence loss was discovered in April, police did not tell Dallas County District Attorney John Creuzot until August. Creuzot wrote a memo to defense lawyers Aug. 11 notifying them of the blunder and set in motion public awareness. Police and City Manager T.C. Broadnax have said they didn’t alert Creuzot or city leaders because they didn’t realize the magnitude of the loss and believed the IT department could still recover files.

If evidence is ultimately found to be missing and can’t be recovered, cases could be dismissed. Others where a person was already found guilty could be appealed and possibly retried.

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[ret5hd]

1. So...who's trying to hide what?

[stillcool]

2. that could be interesting

During an audit that began after the initial discovery of the deleted data, city officials said this week that they learned an additional 15 terabytes of Dallas police evidence and files from the city secretary’s office were missing. That brings the total of lost files to about 22.5 terabytes, which is the equivalent of about 7,500 hours of HD video, about 6 million photos or 150 million pages of Microsoft Word documents.

Dallas police had investigated the former employee for a possible charge of tampering with government records in connection with the evidence loss, according to records obtained by The News. They closed the case in June because “there was not enough information or evidence to substantiate a crime had occurred,” according to police spokesman Sgt. Warren Mitchell. The employee had been with the city’s information technology department for nine years.