The Emporia City Commission discussed a new system for the police department to manage evidence at the commission’s work session Wednesday morning.
Chief Gary Smith said the system is necessary because of the difficulty of accurately tracking and maintaining evidence. In many cases, the police department must hold on to evidence for years.
“The increased demands for scrutiny from the courts are coming on us for maintaining the evidence and being accountable for a very clear chain of custody from the time we are introduced to it until it’s either returned to the owner or disposed of,” Smith said. A computerized system will give the department “... the ability to retrieve and maintain and audit and show good accountability and transparency to the community and also to the courts when it comes to dealing with property and evidence.”
During the meeting, Chief Smith took the commissioners on a tour of the evidence room and explained how the current system works.
“Quite frankly, there’s a large amount of valuable evidence in there, and there are drugs and things that are in there, and we need to really be on top of that, accounting for every single gram of those types of things,” Smith said. “It’s really critical when it comes to having a good case, and the last thing you want to do is have a good case jeopardized or tainted just because we didn’t have it labeled right, we weren’t able to produce it as quickly as they wanted us to.”
Smith described the evidence room as “organized chaos.”
“We do have a good accounting system right now,” he said, “it’s just that as the demand grows, the number of cases continues to increase. In conversations with prosecutors, the best practices are that we need to look at other alternatives for more efficiency in maintaining that. ... It’s really taking advantage of technology to be more efficient. ...”
The commission also discussed improvements to the civic auditorium scheduled for this year. The project for 2009 is the replacement of the upper level seats in the auditorium.
“This is one of those items where it’s in the budget, and this may be something the city commission wishes to hold off on until we have some discussion, because these projects are scheduled to be paid in part from sales tax monies and in part from CVB monies,” said city manager Matt Zimmerman.
Zimmerman said the goal was to get bids out and make decisions on the project in time to replace the seats in July, during the arena’s slow time.
“We really are coming to you and saying, ‘Knowing what we know and what we don’t know right now, are you still thinking seats like the budget says?” Zimmerman asked. “Or would you rather do a series of smaller projects that we can mix and match depending on available funding?”
The commission decided to move ahead with the seat replacement project.