now.

In Madison for, two and a half years. But before that, I was with the Reedville Police Department, and I was with them for seven and a half. So and, I took over there with a bunch of problems. They had some mishandling going on and the FBI investigation. So, that's kind of where we jumped into it. So you said paint a picture. What, from walking in, what we're looking at? Is that kinda what you're Yeah.

Yeah. Well, you want a good layout with your evidence room. Hopefully, your officer's packaging area is adjacent to the intake area for, your evidence room. So they have all their supplies. Right there, you would have your evidence lockers. Hopefully, you have actual evidence lockers. We like pass through lockers that pass through from the officer side into the evidence room, or into the intake room, I should say. We like them to not have have keys because keys can be duplicated. Keys can be lost. So we like those that are keyless. And then within that intake area, we would have kind of the office setting with the computer, for the evidence staff to be able to pull the items from the lockers, be able to physically check them to make sure that they're packaged to standard, that they are documented to standard and where they can physically check them in. That might be the location where they're adding a barcode. Sometimes the officers, depending on the setting or the computer system, they will actually adhere the barcode to each piece of evidence. And so that's kinda that intake area. And then we want to move that into the actual, evidence vault or evidence room. Everybody calls it a little something different. We locally here typically call it a vault. So that's like your secured storage location. That's your long term storage. Walking into an evidence room, it needs to be highly organized. With the IP, we talk about how we should organize that room. Right at the very front of the room, we wanna have our property for safekeeping or our found property as well. We want it right by the door because we're not gonna keep that very long. So we wanna be able to see it, constantly see it so we can get it out. Because the statute for found property says we don't have to keep it very long. And hopefully, we have a policy in place for our safekeeping property to not keep it so long. So we want that to be right there front and center so we can make sure that shelf stays clean. Moving in, you would want to have your general storage area, and that could be anywhere from a shoe to to a rock. Hopefully, don't get too many rocks. It could be anything, in the general storage area. You would wanna have a depending on the size of the agency, if it's a really large agency, you would have a separate room that would house your, guns and drugs. We would want to keep money also in that area, but we would want money not to stay long term. We would want money to be put into the bank or into our city finance because we don't want that target to stay in our evidence room too long. And we could talk about that for days. So we do wanna have a temporary secured area for that. That area should have a secondary level of security. So whatever method it took you to get into the main evidence room, there should be a different method to get to where the guns, money, and drugs are. You would also want to have a separate area that you would have your DNA evidence, your long term evidence, like your homicides, rapes, robberies, things of that nature, that's stuff you're gonna keep a long time. So you would want that to be kinda in the back corner of the evidence room because you don't wanna have to weed through that as often because you're, it's gonna be there maybe as long as your career in some cases. So, keeping that in the back area. We also wanna make sure that we have the ventilation in there because we're dealing with a lot of, toxic things. You know, we got the fumes from the drugs. Also, we have to take into consideration the bloody evidence and the smells that come from that. So we wanna make sure that there's some type of nice ventilation system in there to protect us. But that's what it's gonna look like. High security. We wanna make sure that it's, our it's secure as far as how it's built. So, like, for instance, we see in a lot of the new buildings, they put the drop ceilings in, you know, where you can pop the tile. We wanna make sure that you can't just pop the tile and crawl right from the captain's office into the evidence room. So we wanna make sure that we're looking up. So that should be a solid, surface or it should go the wall should go all the way, to the roof, to the trusses you could not crawl over. You wanna make sure that the doors are, the the steel CAD doors. I mean, solid doors. We don't wanna use wood or hollow core or anything like that. Solid core doors for that. And, yeah, I mean, if you're a small department, because I always I love small departments and their budget problems. They might not have enough room for a whole separate room for guns, money, and drugs and probably don't need one because they're not taking in as much. So that might just be a separate lockable cabinet within the general evidence room. Okay? Just something with that secondary security. So, depending on whether it's small or it's large, you're gonna still be following those same rules. It's just gonna look just a little bit different in size. Yep.

started my career actually, when I was in college, I worked for the Clark of Courts office. And I actually I loved working there, but I always wanted to be a police officer. But it's funny how what I learned, at 19, 20 years old working in the park's office with dispositions, I'll use now, twenty some years later. But started there, ended up, went to work for the Greensboro Police Department. I was a police officer there. After I had my son, I decided to pause my career, be a stay at home mom for a little while. And when it was time to go back to work, I really just I didn't wanna chase the bad guys anymore, but I still wanted to be in law enforcement. And so just really started looking to something that would fit who I was as a person and came across an ad for the property and evidence specialist for the Rietzville Police Department. Started reading over the, what the requirements were and who they were looking for in the job description, and it really kinda matched who I was as a person. It said highly organized, attention to detail. And I was that weird person that organizes my refrigerator. All my all my, Aquafina waters have to line up and be perfect. And, I'm just that's just who I am. So I was looking. I was like, you know, this might fit who I am and also my background in the court system and as well as law enforcement. So I went over and I didn't know much about Riesville. So I Googled the Riesville Police Department and the things that were popping up immediately was the SBI is in investigating the evidence room, suspicion of theft and mishandling. A third party company is coming in to do a full audit and inventory, all the things that were happening. And I was like, this should scare me, but it didn't. It did not scare me. So I went went ahead and went through the process, and I almost immediately knew through doing my research and dove right into the IEP professional standards that I wanted to know how are we supposed to be running this room. I wanted to do it right from the beginning, but I knew pretty quickly what happened there should have never happened. There there was no inventory, regular inventories, regular audits. There was no procedures in place on how officers should be packaging evidence. I could give 10 officers the same piece of evidence and they would do it 10 different ways, document it 10 different ways. There was no real standard of how they were supposed to be doing it. And so, I just knew that if all these things would have been followed, that they didn't have to be in the place they were. And I was watching criminal cases be dropped. I was watching us as an agency revictimize victims. And seeing that what happened there affected their case and how that case moved forward. And it broke my heart as somebody that got into law enforcement to help people that was totally against what I signed up for. And I just really became my passion to say, you know, if they so if everybody could just hear what we went through at Reedsville, then they would know what not to do. And so that's kinda how I this kinda just became a passion of mine. I got involved with the North Carolina Association for Property and Evidence. I was their conference committee chairperson for six years where I put on, helped, put on the conferences twice a year and got involved with that and ended up, with this opportunity with IEP to travel and teach. And I love teaching, so it kinda just fell right into, who I am and what I love.

IEP, the International Association of Property and Evidence, we have authored, the professional standards that agencies across this country should adhere to on how to manage the evidence room which governs, how often we should do inventories, how often we should do audits of our evidence room, who should be doing those, how we conduct them, all the security measures, things that we should have in our policies. I mean, you read the word policy in our standards hundreds of times. This should be in your policy. And so we govern those. We do have in the North in North Carolina, we have evidence statutes, but it doesn't really it doesn't tell us those things. There's no law that says you should be inventorying your evidence room once a year. Right? Or every time that you get a new chief, there should be an inventory of the evidence room. There's no statute that governs that. And so IEP, came in and developed these professional standards, and that's what we teach, best practices and professional standards.

Definitely audits once a year, inventories once a year, and you have to have solid policy in place, policies and procedures. You know, as well as I do, if the policy is not there, we we don't have to adhere to it. You have to have those that have to be solid and we have to be following them. We have to look at them once a year and say, we do we need to update this? We, tell you the IP that we should be doing an inventory. That's 100%. That's making sure that every piece of evidence you have matches what you your records say you should have. I say that's how I like to lay my head down at night and know everything's good because I know I've touched every piece. It's all there. For some agencies though, if you're a large agency, you might not be able to stop and do that just one time a year. You might have to break that up into small pieces. We just say you can do a little bit each month as long as you have completed all of it within a calendar year. Can just be an ongoing process. For a small agency like us here in Madison, we can stop for a week and make that inventory happen, you know, and do that once a year. So we want you to do that. As far as an audit goes, that could be done by your professional standards, division within your agency. But we also recommend, you know, occasionally going outside, getting a third party audit done. Somebody that has absolutely nothing to do with your agency to give that specializes in evidence rooms. There's folks all over the country that do that, but they can give you that fresh set of eyes that has no, no relation to your agency at all and can give you some hard truths and get you going in the right direction. We also, you know, just recommend, like I said, the procedures is another thing. We talk about having evidence room procedures as far as your staff knowing how to do their job. For instance, destruction. If we're not keeping up with destruction, we're gonna run out of room. One of the main things that my students across this entire country tell me, their number one problem is space. And usually by the end of the two days, I say, is space still your problem or is destruction your problem? Is your purging, you know, your destruction methods? So you take somebody, they're brand new in the evidence room, and you don't have any procedure to tell them how purging and destruction should happen, they're already behind the ball. They don't even know where to start. So having solid procedures in place so your evidence staff coming in new, they know how to work the room. They know what they're supposed to do. Purging is a big deal, for as far as management goes. Sometimes that cost money. We have to either buy incinerators or we have to pay companies to, incinerate our evidence for us, and we need to make sure that budget is there. Budget's a big concern that leads me into that. We need new things sometimes in the evidence room. Maybe a new computer system, maybe a new scanner, maybe new shelves, things of that nature. We want to make sure that we are including our evidence room in our budget. I see that with agencies across the board. It kinda gets forgotten about. Oh, they're good because we can't see it. They think they they're okay and they don't need anything, but we definitely need the money there to help with the improvements, to help get the destructions done, and to, kinda keep up with everything.

destruction. But, within a disposition you get from the court, it very well could say, the cell phone could be returned to the owner or the money needs to go to the school board, or and you can destroy the drugs. So you could have a case that you're going a couple of different directions with. When it comes to found property, you might be able to find an owner for that, or it might be something you have to you could send for auction or you could, you would just need to destroy. It just there's a lot of different elements there, with how a case gets disposed of. But, yeah, like one case, you could be going three different directions with, several different pieces of evidence you have.

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you asked about who should have a key. That's always just a sensitive topic, it seems like. We, the chief, should definitely not have a key to the evidence room. We see that across the board. We see it across the country where the chief says, I'm the chief. I need access to everything. And I'm always like, no, chief. Hang on. You're the ultimate decision maker for your agency. If you have access to that evidence room and something's missing, you are a part of that investigation. And you can't you're gonna struggle being that ultimate decision maker for your agency if you're a part of that investigation if there might be theft and mishandling happening. So we definitely don't want chief command staff, to be key holders. It really just needs to be our evidence staff. There are very, very, very tiny agencies. I had one in my last class I taught out in Colorado, two man agency. That was it. In that particular case, the chief's gonna have to have a key. So there's an exception to everything. But when you have even an agency my size, here in Madison, we are eight we if we're fully staffed, we are 18. I can have a backup person. So in no place should the the chief have a key here. We're we're big enough for that. Right? As far as you talked about actual keys and fobs and things like that, well, there's different options, and a lot of it is based off of the budget of your agency. We like there to be a multi level, security into the evidence room. So for instance, they there's all sorts of options. You can, have a card swipe and then also have to punch in a code to make the door open. That that's two levels. If somebody stole the card swipe, they wouldn't have your code. Or if they had your code, they might not have the card swipe. I've seen it where they have a card swipe, and then you also have a dead bolt. So it takes two things. One will unlock the magnet, and the other one unlock the dead bolt. So the harder we make it to get inside, the better The more money you have to spend, obviously, the more, they have the retina scans. They have the fingerprint scans. There's all sorts of options out there, but we want to do, like, a multilevel so it's makes it harder. If somebody somebody just couldn't steal your keys and be able to get into the room.

So, obviously, we're gonna public trust. If something comes out that evidence is missing, cases are getting lost, we're gonna lose our public trust. You're if one piece of evidence is missing or something was stolen, I've seen it where the district attorney's office says everything in that that room is tainted. All the chain of custody has been broken and we see multiple, multiple cases getting dropped. And like I said before, when criminal cases are being dropped, there is a potential that we are revictimizing a victim. This is not just stuff sitting on the shelf. I truly believe that every item sitting in my evidence room and every evidence from across this country represents a human being, whether it be a defendant, a victim, a someone. It represents someone, and we need to treat it as such. For me, seeing, seeing cases getting dismissed was painful. And that's why I won't I'll keep talking until they won't let me talk anymore so we can stop this from happening. But, you know, we don't need the the public already, I think, questions us a lot. So let's not give them another reason. We should just be doing the right thing. And then the last thing that, you know, and I try not to even harp on this much, but it's a reality for our town and city managers and our chiefs of police that there is a potential for lawsuits and claims with this where it could affect, you know, what's coming out of our our our money, our budget that we have to pay for attorneys and payouts for lawsuits. And these claims is gonna happen because if cases are being lost because you didn't manage your room right, then that's probably the fallout from that. It I don't like to talk about that. For me, it's more the personal. It's the personal of, you know, we have a responsibility as law enforcement to protect our victims and to also ensure that cases are, even with our defendants, we have to protect the evidence because there have been cases where we have had people sentence that were found to be not guilty. And they were exonerated later because the evidence was tested twenty years after the fact with new technology. So we have a responsibility not only to our victims, but also to our the to the defendants as well.

I would first my first question is, are we training our staff? Have we sent them to training so they know what they're doing? If we're putting if we're giving them the keys, let's say, giving them the keys of the kingdom, and they have no idea how to run that room properly and the standards that they should be following, they're gonna just guess. Or they're gonna ask somebody down the hall, and that person might not know either. And they're guiding them the wrong way. So I feel like training them, getting in, and I'm I'm not saying that IEP's classes are the only classes out there. There's other classes. But, I can tell you that if they come to our class, they're gonna be as a member, they're gonna be provided with our professional standards. And you can take our professional standards and write a wonderful policy if you just follow those standards. And if you follow those rules, at at the beginning of our class, we have them scan a QR code and there's, about a 10 question that they go down. Alright. Have you done an inventory in the past year? Has an audit been done in the past year? And I tell them, take those questions and start there. If you can answer yes to all of those questions that you get at that the first ten minutes of our class, then you're doing a pretty good job in your evidence room. So I believe the training is there that helps get your staff to where they know how to write that policy. Because a lot of times what we see is there's a cut and paste policy. We'll pull somebody will get a policy from a different agency. They change the the top to say their agency on it, and they roll with it. But there's no guarantee that that has everything in it that it should. So if we're getting them into training and they're learning how to write that policy, what should be in there. And then as managers, we have to set it up. We have to put in the policy that this is when the audit's gonna happen. Or every three years, we're gonna have an out a third party auditor come in, and we're gonna budget for that. And every year in July of every year, we're gonna do we're gonna start our inventory. Or if we're a large agency, we're gonna put into policy, this is how we're gonna continuously conduct inventory throughout the year. I believe those things in itself will set, your evidence room staff up for success, but in turn set the agency up for success. But you're right. We go to driver's ed and we learn, and then five years later, we might have an accident. Things happen. Okay? I also say there's human error in there sometimes as well. We are all human. But if we set things up, if we have the security, we have the alarm system, we have the cameras in place, we have the good locking system on our door. We're doing audits once a year. Once a year, we're doing that inventory to make sure it's all there. If somebody wants to steal from us, they probably could. But if we have all those systems in place, we're gonna find out very fast. Okay? And then we can say these were our policies. These are all the methods that we've done to prevent this from happening. We caught this very fast. As opposed to saying we haven't done an inventory in six years, we've never had an audit. And unfortunately, I see we see that a lot with agencies. They they kinda wanna avoid the the problem. They don't wanna know how bad it really is. But as as a brand new chief coming in, that should be your first your first item of it or one of your first items of business. I want the room inventoried. I want an I want an order to come in here to tell us where we are with this. Because as the chief, you are the ultimate response. You know, you're ultimately responsible for everything in that room and that it's accounted for.

You could it could simply just be filed in the wrong place. That's what I call human error. You know, that's easy to do. I put it in bin three. It was supposed to go in bin one. And as you're doing the inventory, you're gonna catch that, and that's easy to fix. That's a quick discrepancy. That that's not even a, you know, anything that would mean, like, a full discrepancy. It's just a quick mistake. You document that you fixed it. You put it in the correct place, and you move on. If you start having what we call unable to locate and you say you would document any missing items that you can't find. And after you do a complete 100% inventory and you still can't find them, you know, that's gonna number one, all inventory reports should be reported all the way up to your chain of command. But, asking the question, does this have evidentiary value? Does it have monetary value? If there's a yes to either one of those two questions, then that's gonna warrant more investigation. That's probably gonna warrant an eye investigation. And we might need to get the our district attorneys and all of us involved. It might be where we have to pass that along and have the, SBI come in. We don't wanna sit on that, though. We wanna make sure that we are doing our due diligence to find out where these items are, what happened. Sometimes things could be, checked out to court, and the clerk of court's office might have it. And that documentation just might not have got back to the evidence room because maybe somebody didn't follow-up on it the way they should have but looking into each item that's missing and just being transparent about it. You know, we don't wanna we always say that the fish is not it's gonna keep rotting, you know. So you need to put pass that on as evidence staff. You would pass that through your chain of command and let them decide what's the next steps. If, like I said, if it has evidentiary value or monetary value, yes, either one of those, you it's gonna need to be looked looked into.

that sort of thing? Yeah. I mean, they're they're if you Google evidence audits, a lot come up. So there's they're all over the place. I can give names of different folks, but, a lot of you can just check their I would check their background. Are they, certified with IEP? Do they have that kind of background and knowledge? I would ask the questions. What's your knowledge base of, the IEP professional standards? Also, if they have any knowledge base of the CALIA standards. You know, CALIA does accreditation. They have a section there for the evidence room. I will say that at IB, our standards are, heavier because we just that's what we do. That's our our specialty. But I would ask those pointed questions of the auditor before you brought them in to really hone in on what's your knowledge base of evidence. What's your background? Where is your certifications? How how have you worked with evidence before in the past? Questions like that. And, hopefully, you would be able to see pretty quick that they know what they're talking about.

Just that it doesn't matter if you're a two man department or you're a thousand man department. We all have the same problems. It's just a matter of zeros. Whereas me here in Madison, my evidence is not my only job. I wear about 10 different hats. Sure. But, so I only have about 10% of my time I can devote to evidence. Whereas at a big agency, you might have 200,000 pieces of evidence, but you have 10 people that do that job. You know? So the problems are the same. The rules, the standards are the same. Sometimes we have to, tweak them, like I said, even with the the tune in department with the keypad and the key. Right? Sometimes there's an exception to every rule. But the important thing here to take away, I believe, is just training solid policies and procedures, making sure those audits and inventories are done each year, making sure our security is where it needs to be. If you can break into your evidence room, so can anyone else. I think the hardest part for me to accept when I went into evidence is we put all these measures in place, but unfortunately, it's to protect us from our own people. In law enforcement, we always like to think we can trust each other. We don't trust the people on the outside in the outside world, but we can trust our fellow officer. Unfortunately, the majority of these cases and you can go to our website. We have all the every case listed, all the news articles, all the stories. It's internal. The theft is from inside. And so all these measures are in place to protect from our own. And I think that was a real hard pill for me to swallow when I got into this side of law enforcement. So we have to think a little bit different when we think about our evidence room. We have to always say, I'll I'll buy you groceries. I'll help change your tire, but I don't trust you with when it comes to my evidence room. We just have to be real neutral when it comes to that. So and just check your do your checks and balances. Make sure. Do well, do inspections. Walk through. Make sure that everything ask the questions. Why is that there? Why do we do it this way? Is there a better way of doing things? I think that's the best way to make sure that your agency is doing what it's supposed to do.

So, I encourage everybody in North Carolina get involved with the North Carolina Association for property and evidence, you can go to their website, they do two conferences a year in the spring in the fall, where you can go to their website and check out where it's gonna be next. And then also and that's gonna be your local stuff. They teach the the North Carolina general statutes. They get the lab to be involved, our crime lab, because it's important that we know what our crime lab will accept and what they won't because we want our officers packaging it the way the crime lab needs them to. So you'll get your North Carolina stuff there. We would love for everybody to check an IEP class. You go to iepe.org, and you go to our resources and our services, and we have our two day live class. We have classes all over the country. We actually have a class coming up in August at Cary Police Department. We have some openings in there, that we would love to have anybody across North Carolina join us in on where you can get those professional standards, the the general of how we should be managing the evidence room. We also offer an advanced class that is more of a hands on class. We're gonna do that in Cary too on the third day there. We're gonna have that class. That's where you can take a policy home with you. We're gonna write policy there in class. We're gonna write procedure. We're gonna write a small portion of an evidence packaging manual. And you're gonna be able to take that back with you. We talk about disaster preparedness, things of that nature, in that class. Who to hire? That was not the one I didn't get to to I forgot to talk to you about, but we need to be hiring the right person, for to put in the evidence room. Just because they made detective sergeant shouldn't mean that they just happen to get the evidence room as a part of their duties. We really need to make sure we're putting the correct person in there for that job. It's not for everybody. There's no bad guys in there. So if you signed up to chase bad guys, you might not want to be in the evidence room. But we talk about those things in our advanced class, and you can check that out on our web our website. Again, it's iep.org.