Thanks to Sgt. Greg Thomas of the King County Sheriff's Office in Seattle, Washington, for this article.  He responded to The Evidence Log's regular rhetorical question (It could be worse, but how?) by answering, "You could have been me!"

The King County Property Management Unit manages five major functions for the Sheriff s Office.  Fleet Control, Quartermaster, Headquarters supply, Department inventory and Evidence.  The Fleet control function manages 600 police vehicles.  The inventory process has my unit responsible for 14 million dollars worth of inventory.  The Quartermaster system services 750 officers.  The supply function is responsible for ordering, receiving and issuing outside supplies to the headquarters complex and for supplying our four remote Precincts, and a regional justice center.  As of April, 1997, we were also the custodians of 325,000 items of evidence!

I have often wondered how it was that I came to be responsible for so many non-traditional Police functions.  I had 15 years of police experience, primarily in patrol, with six years as a first line supervisor.  I was looking for something different, and when this position became available I thought it was the hardest thing going for a true test of my abilities ... and then I found out that there wasn't a silver lining in this cloud.

The evidence room itself was in total chaos.  There had never really been adequate staffing to handle the growing needs of a department our size.  An 8 foot high ceiling room was used to store evidence, using any available container, shelf, pallet, cabinet, closet, table, chair or empty space to store evidence.  We used 74 standard file cabinets for paperwork and evidence storage.  Our practice of keeping alcohol containers for minor violations (cases of beer, six packs and 32 kegs of beer) totally stymied our space (I hate to admit it, but it was my unit featured in The Evidence Log Volume 97, Issue 4).

In December of 1997, I.A.P.E. Executive Director Joe Latta had done a brief tour of this facility while evaluating a possible building site for our evidence unit.  The condition was obviously in need of immediate attention, a driving factor being that the whole operation was to move out of our courthouse to a new location.

My immediate chain-of-command elected to try and purge as much of this property as possible to reduce the amount of property needing moving.  Five Detectives and one Detective Sergeant, who would share supervisor responsibility (one Detective per precinct, one from our special operations unit and one from our major crimes unit) were assigned to the unit.

Starting in March, 1997 (one month before I came on-board) they developed the process, criteria and manner in which the purge operation would be administered.  This was new territory for all of them and many different techniques were tried.

Unknown to the department at the time, the use of experienced investigators for this process would pay astonishing dividends to the end product.  In fact, the chain-of-command should receive high praise for its investment of these skilled officers on this type of project.  I would speculate that most departments would not have put their best officers into a project that had such a negative reputation as our evidence room had at that time.  On April 1, 1997, 1 took command of this bedlam.  I have often been ribbed by my peers about taking this assignment
on All Fool's Day.

Upon taking my new station, and with the effects of shock slowly wearing off, I worked closely with the detective Sergeant and crew to hone the best techniques for achieving our goal.  In July, 1997, the department made another wise decision: they hired Joe Latta as a consultant to come back and do a full blown review of our evidence room, policies and procedures.

Without sounding like a commercial, Joe did a terrific job reviewing our operation.  By his estimate, our evidence room had 325,000 items of evidence in active storage!  A department our size would normally be expected to have only about 70,000 items, so somehow we had to trim 255,000 items out of our evidence storing unit.  Not only were there a lot of items, but combined with mismatched storage systems and item stacking (where you move 20 items to retrieve one) we truly had our task cut out for us.

The problem was so bad that the only logical way to approach the purging process was to take a geographical area, pull all the items out, record the case and item numbers and then go to the files and pull the paperwork.  Literally thousands of items were found to have been marked for disposal, many cleared years ago, but remained because there had not been the physical manpower to remove them.  Some cases went back to 1963.  The project detectives, with their vast experience, proved to be invaluable in this part of the process.

The "regular" evidence room personnel consisted of one supply officer, one quartermaster, two clerks who worked primarily in clerical and intake functions, one intake employee, a property officer and the supervisor.  The crew had been pretty devastated by the rapid turnover of the prior property officer and the retirement of the unit supervisor so close together.  I elected to build them into a close working team and apply many of the refined management skills that our department has been working to improve.  They say the best managers surround themselves with good people; all I had to do was wade in amongst them.

I needed to build a team out of these competent employees of which we could be proud, and then become a part of it.  First, we created a uniform for them.  I had several talented employees create a unit patch and we put the whole team into a modest uniform.  This was the start of both unit pride and recognition.
Second, I encouraged creativity, promoted free thinking and empowered them to take action on their ideas.  We supported those ideas when they succeeded, and when they failed we tweaked them and made them work anyway.  We encouraged ownership of a project.  Each phone call coming into the unit was "owned" by the person taking the call until the issue was resolved.  We also gave guidance, encouragement and credit.  Some of these techniques were pretty new to a lot of these employees.  It was very rewarding to see them open up and swing into the direction we were heading.

Many wonderful things began to happen: morale soared (and is still incredibly high), the work product improved, and service and courtesy became a real, tangible way of doing business.  We streamlined, analyzed and implemented ideas and processes.  We held weekly meetings to give everyone a voice.  We also solved employee stress, cleared the air over issues, shared information and learned to respect each other.  All their best attributes came to the surface, and
the department as a whole... noticed!

The "fix" involved a huge amount of overtime, so the cost has been significant.  Our approach to this was to target officers, mostly detectives, with a wide range of experience to work overtime for us.  They were assigned to the unit for three month intervals and allowed us to keep up the rapid pace set by the first group of five detectives.  These officers knew how to gather information and make determinations on evidence dispositions, and they were quick to use peer pressure to effect change in their fellow detectives.  Consequently, over the past year about 60 different officers have been involved with the purge project.  This is a lot of people into an evidence environment, but close supervision and policies removed the credibility/accountability concern.  I consider myself extremely lucky to have had one of these detectives elect to stay with the unit as the property officer.  His contributions have been a significant building block to our success.

We received an unexpected dividend.  Each officer who worked with the unit ultimately left to become a disciple who promoted professional evidence handling and effected change on a broad scale at their work site.  The message on how to improve our whole evidence function was getting out!!  They also added their ideas to our way of doing business.

The department did a tremendous job of supporting, funding and staffing this monumental project.

Looking back over the past year (we had a celebration to commemorate our beginning together), it is obvious that we have accomplished an incredible amount.  Over 127,000 items have been purged from our system.  Department auctions have resulted in a profit to the Department of $73,000, and $197,000 worth of department issued weapons and equipment have been secured via gun bids.  That is $270,000 in tangible dollars that is a direct benefit to our taxpayers and department.  We are managing our property and evidence, instead of having it manage us.  Thousands of items have been converted to department use, again saving money for other important uses.  Previously the mere mention of the names of the state auditors made us shudder, but now they are welcome.  We feel very secure in our process and progress.

We aren't quite done yet.  we still have the move of our unit and property room to a new building to look forward to.  We are worked hard to develop a computer tracking system and implement bar-coding into our managing practices.  we will have to place a bar-code label on each remaining item, which currently numbers 198,000 items, perform data entry, and then store them in a new state-of-the-art facility.

I hope to do a follow-up article in a few months and let you know how we're doing.  If we can help you with your problem, just give us a call.  Perhaps we can help you find a "fix" you haven't thought of yet.