(Police) Property room mess included fetuses

[Blue_Tires]

Source: Cincinnati.com

Hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash was lying around.

Crack cocaine, marijuana and other drugs from criminal cases were tossed haphazardly in a metal bin.

Then, there were the two fetuses in the freezer from two sexual assault cases dating years back.

That was the chaos in the Middletown Police Department's property room last year, according to hundreds of documents filed in a civil case in Butler County Common Pleas Court.

The police property room is the epicenter for evidence in criminal cases. Items are supposed to be properly tagged and stored to protect their integrity as evidence and avoid tampering allegations.

Now, the incredible mess is at the heart of a fight between the city and the officer who was docked a day's pay - about $218 - because of it.

Officer Kim Robinson fought the punishment, and an independent arbitrator told the city to pay her back.


Read more: http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20090517/NEWS01/905180305/1055/NEWS/Fetuses+in++property+room

[MADem]

1. I think she got off light. She worked there how many years, and this is the mess she left?

$100,000 was in a safe but should have been turned over to the city finance department.

$50,000 was stored randomly throughout the property room when it should have been secured.

Another $9,000 was found in the property room officer's desk drawer.

Based largely on these findings, the commission recommended suspending the police department's accreditation. The honor recognizes that the department meets high professional standards for policies and procedures. To some degree, it can help protect the agency against lawsuits.

In response, three Middletown officers spent the next four months sorting through more than 10,000 items in the overloaded property room.....Schwarber cited a laundry list of serious problems:

Information logged into the computer on 455 items had errors. He didn't blame all those errors on Robinson, citing glitches in the computer program.

Missing property - "most notably a firearm which has not been located and over $7,000 in cash which was later found to have been returned to the owner but not documented."

A bag of cash totaling $1,224 in the safe marked "excess jail money" that wasn't properly tagged.

Forty-nine samples of blood and urine from criminal cases had not been disposed.

Two human fetuses also had not been disposed - one of which also was not even logged into the property tracking system.

The fetuses, from sexual assaults of girls age 12 and 14 in 2005 and 2006, provided DNA samples to link the attacks to the suspects, said Butler County Assistant Prosecutor Jennifer Muench-McElfresh. Both men pleaded guilty before their cases went to trial.

.....
Robinson did not respond to requests for comment.

She's still working road patrol and making about $56,600 a year while she sues the city. The city has not calculated how much it has spent defending against the discrimination allegations and trying to overturn the arbitrator's decision.

[LiberalFighter]

2. If she didn't report the problem and didn't try to do her job correctly.

She should at a minimum be suspended without pay for at least a couple of weeks.

The arbitrator is an idiot.

[MADem]

3. I have to agree. This kind of stuff is just fodder for the "Waaah, those unions are rip off

artists!" type complaints.

People who do wrong, and come on, it's not like she was there for a few weeks--she was there for years--should be held accountable. It gives the public faith in the system. I don't think she earned her pay.

[happyslug]

4. That is NOT even the position the municipality it taking

From the article:

"The issues with the property room go beyond the actions or inactions of Officer Robinson," City Manager Judith A. Gilleland wrote in a memo last July. "There are limitations with the facility and with the levels of staffing."

Sounds like the arbitrator recognize this as the result of telling someone to do a job and then NOT providing adequate resources to do that job and then punishing that employer when it comes out such a job can NOT be done given the resources allocated (The officer was told to do a job that COULD not be done, and when it became clear it could NOT be done, punishing the officer for NOT getting the job done).

No one is claiming the Officer did NOT tell her employer of the problems, but that the problems existed when she was in charge of the property room (Another example of the "Last Touch" rule, "you touched it last, you broke it, even through it was broke before you even saw it coming to you").

Sorry, I have been in such situations and once you realize that no one wants to hear your complaints, you just stumble forward. That appears to be the case here, she made some request for more resources in the early years when she was in charge of the property room, and then was told there were no resources to spare and she had to do whatever she could with the resources she had, she did so, enough to keep the property room audit-able so that when it was audited it still meet minimal Federal specs (So the department kept its federal funding) but not enough to do what is expected of a property room.

Remember no one is accusing her of losing any money, or stealing any money (The only missing money was missing because it had been returned to its owner without documentation, documentation that probably should have been generated at the time of the money was returned, probably by someone other then the officer in charge of the property room). The property room probably met minimal federal specs (Thus no lost of federal funding) and that is all her employer was willing to pay for and thus we have the results we do, and that is the decision of her employer NOT her.

[Soylent Brice]

5. not shocked.

i live in cincinnati. my only surprise is that the money and drugs were still there.