Moving again!  In one of my first articles published in the I.A.P.E., I had the opportunity to share with the membership my reorganization and move into a larger facility (I.A.P.E. - 1994 Vol. 4, No. 2).  I was extremely pleased with the accomplishment of moving from a closet to a real room.  At the time, I thought the move into the new property room would take care of our needs for many years.  I even advised the chief and city government that we were there.  No more problems with storage in our evidence room.  Boy, was I wrong!

After a relatively short time, the property room was full again.  At first I thought that I had been slipping by not returning and destroying as much as I should have been.  I contacted the chief with my problem, and we decided to do an unscheduled full audit and reevaluation of our storage and purging procedures.  What we found was something we at first didn't believe.  There was no policy or procedural problem.  We simply had outgrown our facility in less than two years.  At least I took some comfort in the fact that my career was not slipping into a retirement mode.  Being human, I had made a misjudgment in my forecast as to how much property our new facility could handle.

Since we could not do anything else to expand our current property and evidence room we began lobbying efforts to obtain the only available new area which happened to be under the control of the Fire Department.

Our main police and fire stations are located in a renovated historic building in the downtown area.  The building is basically divided down the middle, with the exception of one section in what we called the tower.  This tower area was used by the Fire Department to store their outdated equipment and historical items.  We negotiated with the Fire Chief for quite some time, and he remained quite reluctant to give up this area for use by our department.  In his defense, he was in need of storage space, too.  Indeed, the fire station was full, and the Chief really didn't have any other available space.  So back and forth we negotiated, resulting in a stalemate.

We were getting so desperate that we were considered utilizing our old property room as an overflow area.  Our old storage closet had since been converted to a records supply room, and even though it was already bulging at the seams with records storage, the security of the room was still intact.  The sergeant in charge of records supplies then began to worry that I was going to run him out of his space.  This could have him scrambling for storage space, and would more than likely have him resorting to his personal locker and all the file cabinets he could find.

We thought all avenues had been exhausted, but our management team continued tense and seemingly futile negotiations with the Fire Chief.  Our recently promoted Assistant Chief, Van Ingram, then kicked in his personal charm and utilized every aspect of his current "honeymoon" period with the Fire Chief, and finally persuaded him to give us the desperately needed room.  Fortunately, we got our way, but I think Assistant Chief Ingram certainly used up his entire honeymoon favor with the Fire Chief.  Assistant Chief Ingram had been a detective for many years, so he knew first hand of the problems we had in the property section, and fortunately he felt that the struggle was worthwhile.

Once we obtained the room, there were still major renovations necessary for it to suit our property storage needs.  Since we had worked so hard and used up so many favors in our negotiations, and also in the later part of our budget year, we only asked for new paint and a few new shelves.  What we ended up with was far more than we could ever have wished for.  Major renovations were approved to make the space ideal for our property storage uses, and a target date to complete the project was established.  For the next Evidence Log issue, I will send photographs along with my first hand account of our move upwards, not only into the tower, but in the property and evidence world.  

Lt.  Michael Rigdon is a distinguished member of I.A.P.E. and a regular contributor to the Evidence Log Magazine.  An 18 year veteran police officer, Michael was recently featured in the Lexor Independent Newspaper for his work as a police officer and for law enforcement articles he has written.