SALT LAKE CITY — Inspectors in August told Salt Lake City’s police chief that the department was unable to locate 2,316 pieces of evidence, including firearms, drugs, cash and jewelry.
Another 7,500 items were marked as out for forensic testing when, in fact, they are believed to actually be somewhere in Salt Lake City’s evidence storage, the presentation said.
The smaller group of missing items, too, are thought to be somewhere in storage or the items have been destroyed as part of standard purging, Derek Mears, the crime lab and evidence room director for Salt Lake City police, told FOX 13 News. Records for those 2,316 items likely haven’t been updated, Mears said.
“There's no indication that any of these items are out in the public,” Mears told FOX 13 News in an interview.
“Sometimes this happens,” he added. “It's human error, where somebody's going to scan an item to the wrong box, or as they scan a barcode on an evidence tag, it doesn't scan properly.”
The inspectors though, contended the problem went beyond whether the evidence is accounted for. In both the August PowerPoint presentation given to Chief Mike Brown and a related audit completed in June, inspectors warned many of the evidence storage issues were identified in a 2018 audit.
Five years later, the issues had not been addressed, the inspectors wrote. The Salt Lake City Police Department also hasn’t updated an evidence handling manual that the 2018 auditors warned “is woefully lacking in content and guidance.”
“The department would not want the document to be a part of a discovery motion and examined by attorneys,” the auditors wrote in 2018. The passage was cited in the evidence audit completed in June of this year.
The inspectors did not specify whether missing or misplaced evidence had hampered any criminal investigations or prosecutions, nor did they name suspects or victims whose cases could be impacted.
Steven Burton, the policy director for the Utah Defense Attorney Association, said the evidence problems could help convict innocent people.
“If somebody is falsely accused,” Burton told FOX 13 News after reviewing the documents, “the best protections against that are the evidence, the protections in the system and a good defense attorney.”
“And, you know, this decision to cover this up, undermines all three of those.”
Burton calls it cover up because, he says, Salt Lake City should have notified defendants years ago about evidence room problems. Now that the problems are public, Burton expects defense attorneys will be asking Salt Lake City detectives and evidence handlers more questions on the witness stand.
The June report and August presentation makes clear the missing or misplaced evidence includes items from homicides, property and drug crimes.
One problem: Salt Lake City is keeping too much evidence. In one example described by auditors, Salt Lake City had drug paraphernalia dating to 1997 even though state law and department policies allowed for such evidence to be discarded years ago.
Mears said Salt Lake City has about 230,000 items in its warehouse at 4710 W. 1525 South. To discard items like a rock thrown through a window, Mears said, evidence technicians typically need to confirm whether a case has been adjudicated or get permission from detectives assigned to the case.
Mears contended that the numbers of missing or misplaced items determined by inspectors is not accurate. When asked for the correct figures, Mears replied, “I'm not sure, OK. We don't have those numbers.”
When first asked for the evidence audit and presentation, Salt Lake City denied the station’s public records request, claiming the documents were drafts.
FOX 13 News obtained the documents independent of the police department. Nothing in the documents label them as drafts or otherwise suggests the findings were preliminary.
Salt Lake City police spokesman Brent Weisberg told FOX 13 News the department is undergoing another evidence audit. He did not know when it would be completed.
Inspectors recommended Salt Lake City hire more people to manage the evidence. That seems to be the one finding in which Mears agrees. He oversees a staff of seven. He said he’d like to double that.
Mitch Pilkington, the Crime Scene Investigation program director at Weber State University, has worked with an organization that accredits evidence rooms. He said it’s common for evidence rooms to be neglected.
After reviewing the documents for FOX 13 News, he called Salt Lake City police average.
“At some point, in some time,” Pilkington said, “every agency within the country has experienced a similar situation, and maybe not the same magnitude, as we see here, but those are always kind of lingering issues.”