A Property and Evidence Room is More Than Just a Warehouse

Many property and evidence management systems focus on bar coding but do little to really automate critical property room functions. Perhaps they are grounded in systems design specifications from the late 1970s and 1980s, when PC-based property and evidence management systems were developed to replace mainframe "legacy" systems or manual index cards. On the other hand, maybe these systems reflect the misconception that a property and evidence room is just a warehouse and barcodes represent an efficient tool for handling the inventory.

If these early bar coding systems users and developers did view the property room as a warehouse that hosts an Inventory, It probably explains their systems' design. Their bar coding systems functions focused more on storage management, inventory control, and goods retrieval. They probably assumed that these functions could be efficiently addressed by introducing bar codes. Back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, bar codes were a new, widely used technology that could be implemented without much risk and at reasonable costs - even super markets were starting to use bar codes.

However, a property and evidence room is not just a warehouse. It doesn't just store goods or materials. Rather, it stores staggering quantities of unique items ranging from narcotics and confiscated money to stolen art and bloodied clothes. Often its unwilling suppliers are not honest manufacturers but individuals in trouble with the law or their unknowing victims. However, because of the educational efforts of professional organizations such as the International Association for Property and Evidence (IAPE) that narrow warehousing conception has changed dramatically.

The Mission of Property and Evidence Management

Property and evidence personnel have a primary mission: be the custodian of property and evidence that comes under the control of law-enforcement agencies. They perform several property and evidence management activities on a day-to-day basis to fulfill this mission:

• Accept, record and store items received it from law enforcement officials.

• Make it readily available for investigative and legal purposes.

• Document its chain of custody from the time it is acquired until it is disposed.

• Return it to its legitimate owner as soon as possible.

• Dispose of it when and in a manner authorized.

Digital Technology and Property and Evidence Room Management

The designers and developers of automated property and evidence room systems have a plethora of digital technology tools, hardware and software that can be employed to automate these activities (and bar coding is just one). A fully automated property and evidence room management system should maximize and integrate the use of other readily available digital technologies:

• Document scanners
• Digital cameras
• Signature pads
• Digital signatures
• Hand-held, wireless devices
• The Internet

A property room can become virtually paperless by using document scanners. Scanners allow documents such as vouchers (a.k.a. property tags) to be scanned and stored as digital images on a computer system. Once a document is digitized, it can be easily retrieved, viewed, and printed if needed.

However, document scanning does have some limitations. A scanner digitizes the scanned document's content and stores it as a bitmap. A bitmap is a collection of thousands of pixels representing an image. Unlike text in a word processing system, document bitmaps are not searchable. Therefore, the information on scanned documents such as a voucher still needs to be entered manually in a property and evidence computer system.

However, a well-designed system should have searchable indexes associated with each document, such as a case number or an invoice number. More important, scanned documents contain hand-written text, names and signatures, which represent the cornerstones in the chain of custody.

Other documents also make perfect candidates for scanning information into a automated property and evidence management system. For example, it might make sense to scan the driver's license of an individual recovering property, an affidavit on behalf of an owner unable to recover the property in person, a court disposal authorization, or a lab report for a piece of evidence. Document scanners make it easy and efficient to attach information to property and evidence.

Digital cameras:

Digital cameras can take pictures, ranging from a still frame to full-motion video. Like scanned documents, pictures from a digital camera are stored as digitized images on a storage device such as a computer hard drive. In a fully automated property and evidence system, digitized pictures can easily become part of the database, which means they can be easily viewed or printed. The benefits for including digitized pictures in a property and evidence system database include:

• Protection from damage claim. A picture of property taken at the time of delivery documents its condition upon arrival and protects the personal and the local authorities from any possible damage claim by its owner - a picture is worth a thousand words.

• Assistance in criminal investigation. A digitized picture of property stored can be viewed on a network by authorized investigators, even from remote locations. Further, a catalog of pictures with case details is likely to provide clues in criminal case solving.

• Improved customer service. Property and evidence room personnel do not need to physically retrieve an item from its storage location to identify it. They can ask a claimant to describe it on the phone, while they look at its picture on a computer monitor. This provides faster identification and improved customer service.

• Assistance in the recovery process. To expedite the recovery process, a property room can publish (display) digitized pictures of valuable, stolen property on the Internet. For example, pictures of recovered artwork or collectibles, whose owners are unknown, can be viewed on the Internet. This represents a public service, which is exactly what the London Metropolitan Police has done in Operation Bumblebee, which resulted in a new partnership between the police and public.

• Chain of custody. A digitized picture of an owner recovering his property seals the chain of custody for an item and the picture becomes part of the property database.

• Increased public confidence. A full-motion, digital video of the money counting process will satisfy the most scrupulous auditors and make property and evidence personnel transparent to public scrutiny.

• Online auctioning/disposal. Often, local law enforcement agencies and governments sell unrecoverable property via public auctions. An online catalog can help prepare for these auctions and even pave the road for Internet auctions. This also can accelerate the disposal process.

Signature pads like those used for credit card purchases in retail stores also can be used by a fully automated property and evidence system. They digitize a person's signature, which means it can be stored on a database. This makes it easy and efficient to acknowledge and record exchange transactions. For example, a signature pad can easily record the movement of property in and out of the property room: transfer to a lab or the court, release to owners, or the deliverance of receipts.

Digital signatures:

Digital signatures represent unique codes belonging to a particular individual on a particular device. The US Congress has recently passed important legislation towards the legal recognition of digital signatures as an imperative for e-commerce. Digital signatures can validate remote access on a webenabled property and evidence management system. For example, they can be used to validate authorizations for release or disposal of property.

Hand-held and Wireless devices:

A hand-held device such as a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) can capture information from any location. For example, a Palm Pilot(r), is a PDA. A module of a fully automated property and evidence system could allow law enforcement officers to complete "property tags" on location using PDAs. Then the system would allow transfer of the information from a PDA to a property database either wirelessly or by "hotsync".

Handheld and wireless devices can benefit the property and evidence management process:

• Eliminates double entry. Using handheld and wireless devices would allow property vouchers to be created once, digitally (rather than having to be created twice: once on paper, and second time on the computer). This minimizes the possibilities of errors caused by dual entry. It also reduces the workload of the property and evidence room staff without increasing the work of law enforcement officers.

• Reduces the initial time gap in the chain of custody. A handheld and wireless device can extend the definition of "Acquisition Time" to include the actual collection time by the law enforcement officer. This allows a property and evidence management system to track the lower boundary of the chain of custody, which reduces or eliminates the initial time gap.

• Provides traceability.  Each hand-held device has its own digital signature, which can be attached to a voucher in the property database. The digital signature identifies the handheld or wireless device operator.

Web-enablement:

With stringent security requirements, webenabled property and evidence management systems can allow for the sharing of information between investigators, law-enforcement agencies, and courts. Sharing can be at the local, regional, state, and even national and international levels.

Integrated Digital Technologies - The Key Requirement

No two property rooms or property and evidence management systems are alike. Each has unique procedures (or habits), standards, rules, methods and limitations. However, both need to move beyond using barcodes as an inventory management technique. Both need to enter the digital age by taking full advantage of available digital technologies. The potential return on the investment of a fully automated property and evidence management system is tremendous. It will dramatically increase property and evidence personnel productivity, a direct and immediate taxpayer benefit. More important, it will increase public confidence and respect for law enforcement agencies.

Converting a property and evidence room from a manual or semi-automated system into a paperless environment is a major undertaking. However, it does not represent an impossible task. Several property and evidence management information systems are commercially available. Functionally they range from basic barcode-based, inventory management systems to fully automated systems. Some fully automated systems effectively integrate digital technologies - the key ingredient.  

Willy Waks has 18 years of software design and development expertise internationally with several companies and as an independent consultant. He joined Kart Digital, Inc. as Director of Technology in 1999. Under his guidance, Kart Digital has developed PRIMS, its Property Room Information & Management System. PRIMS is currently installed at the Police Department of the City of Dallas, Texas. Mr. Waks holds a B.A. in Social Sciences, a M.A. in History and a B.Sc. in Information Sciences from Paris University. He can be reached at:
willy.waks@kartdigital.com