Dear IAPE Member,

Our Association is growing, classes are filled to overflowing, and interaction between property officers at various agencies seems to be at an all-time high.  Life is good!

Please read carefully the following thoughts about how we can make it even better.

Sincerely,

Joe Latta Executive Director

As most of you do, I find myself wearing a variety of hats. In addition to serving as the Executive Director of IAPE, I also wear the hat of Police Lieutenant for the Burbank (CA) Police Department, and for over 10 years I have been an active member of the California Association for Property and Evidence. CAPE, in fact, provided the impetus years ago for the founding of IAPE.

In 1996, CAPE held its annual Conference in San Francisco. Several of the attendees, including this author, promoted the increasing need for Property Officer Associations throughout the country to become politically involved in the legislative process for the good of law enforcement property management.

If the property laws in your state are anything like they are in California, they were written in the 18th Century by people with no understanding of law enforcement property room operation. It is very unlikely that they have ever been rewritten or even substantially updated, and equally unlikely that many people fully understand them, including property managers, defense attorneys, prosecutors and the courts.

In most cases their is no statutory direction or relief for the everyday operation of the property room. A very simple solution was proposed at that conference just two years ago: if you don't like the laws, rewrite them. With that in mind, CAPE committed itself to changing the statutes.

CAPE appointed a Legislative Committee to explore the changes which would be necessary to make the laws "property room friendly." For the next six months, CAPE committee members talked with various law enforcement associations with lobbying experience. All of them told us how difficult the legislative process was, and how we needed to start with at least $10,000 to hire a professional lobbyist to support any legislative changes we wanted to propose. Our feeling was that if we had the right motives and were proposing good legislation, we didn't need a lobbyist - especially since we didn't have $10,000!

Our next objective was to identify a "trial balloon" issue to send up. It needed to be an issue that affected the vast majority of California property rooms, and one that was unlikely to gamer opposition. The Legislative Committee agreed that Property for Safekeeping was the area most appropriate for action. The statutes that governed handling of Property for Safekeeping were almost non-existent, and resistance, if any, was expected to be minimal. After a year of developing the groundwork.

We knew from experience that a significant portion of law enforcement's Property for Safekeeping came from arrests, with some of the worst situations being arrests of transients or homeless people for warrants. The suspect usually ended up in jail for a brief period, but his or her back pack, sleeping bag, shopping cart, trash bags, dog food and personal affects ended up in the bowels of the property room frequently for a much longer sentence than that served by the arrested person.

Notification to the owner was difficult in most of these cases, and almost impossible in the case of those who were homeless. Most property rooms operated under a policy that required Property for Safekeeping to be kept until a set time period after the owner had been notified to claim it within that period, or forfeit ownership. Those property rooms were saddled with violating their own policy and possibly law by disposing of the property, or with keeping the property forever. CAPE decided to propose legislation that would provide statutory relief to property room personnel by codifying a procedure authorizing disposition of such property.

With this in mind CAPE authored a statute which would require the arresting officer or booking jailer to provide such information to any arrestee whose property was taken for safekeeping. The arrestee would be provided a property claim notice at the time of booking, describing how and where to claim the property, and officially notifying the person of the statutory time limit in which the property must be claimed to avoid forfeiture.

This procedure would provide documented notification of the arrested property owner of his or her responsibility to either claim the property within the established time period, or forfeit ownership. In the event the owner did not file a claim on the property within the established time period, the agency would be free to dispose of the property on the following day without any liability.

After identifying the issue and developing a draft of the legislation to be proposed, the Legislation Committee needed to find a state congressperson to carry forward the proposal. The CAPE Legislative Committee found a receptive ear in Senator Richard Rainey, and after months of legislative reviews, revision, and even input from a Pawnbroker's association that had been opposed to the legislation, Senator Rainey introduced the proposal as Senate Bill 1707 . With much support from property officers across the state, the Bill moved through the Rules, Judiciary (7-0) and Appropriations Committees. After passing in the Senate (36-0), the Bill was forwarded to the Assembly for a similar process.

The bill currently is in the Judiciary Committee. With an expected approval there and in the Appropriations Committee, the bill would then be sent on to both a full senate and full assembly. A factor in almost universal support of the Bill is that many CAPE members and executives from their respective agencies have contacted their Senators and Assembly Members urging their support. We hope that by the time you read this article, the SB 1707 will have been sent to the Governor's Office for signing.

The point of this rather long description is to illustrate that property officers can make a difference. We can control our destiny, but we can't do it without a pro-active effort by individuals. With the right motivation, good legislation, and a lot of effort, we can improve our own profession. Don't wait for someone else to do it-get involved now.

For those of you who do not have a state property officer association, I would encourage you to take that first step forward. You need a unified voice to resolve those state issues that make the management of our property room more difficult.

Hopefully by our next issue, California will have a signed bill, which will result in the Property for Safekeeping law being codified effective January 1,1999. What then? On to bigger and better changes!