Dear IAPE Member,

Happy New Year! And it was a really happy old year, too.

On behalf of the Board of Directors and staff of IAPE, I would like to personally wish our members, advertisers and readers a happy holiday season, and thank everyone for their support in 1997. During the year our training took IAPE staff to Lexington, KY, San Diego, CA, Redmond, WA, Ashland, OR, Kansas City, KS, Arlington TX, Napersville, IL, and Richmond, V A.

IAPE was able to provide training to representatives from over 500 police agencies, while increasing our membership by approximately 70%. Much of the increase was from class attendees joining the Association to help keep their knowledge current through our Evidence Log magazine articles.

In 1998, IAPE's goal is to continue providing members and seminar attendees the most comprehensive property room training available anywhere in the world.

In addition to our highly regarded training classes, we will continue to make the Evidence Log a resource tool for all levels of property room personnel. We hope you find the Standards column, the Design Corner, the member articles, the resource advertisements, and every other feature useful, enjoyable, educational, and in many cases even entertaining.

Every issue will continue to share news stories from around the country, gleaned via the internet, illustrating how poor policy, weak supervision, indifference and criminal activity have destroyed individual careers and ruined the reputation of organizations. We hope theses stories serve to emphasize to executive management and to each of us the importance of every element of the property and evidence function of a law enforcement agency.

The intention of our Evidence Log advertising is to provide you with both standard and innovative property room supplies, equipment, and services through vendors that support our Association. Our advertising goal is to feature only vendors of those products or services that are beneficial to you and your organization in the collection and storage of property and evidence.

You may have noticed that this Evidence Log issue has increased by four pages over previous issues. The new layout is primarily to allow sufficient advertising space, without reducing the editorial content which our membership seems to find so useful. This change, and hopefully everyone that you see in our organization, is directly aimed at benefiting the property room professionals of our Association.

Sincerely,

Joe Latta Executive Director