NYPD: The Money That We Seize Without Filing Charges Can’t Be Counted

Naturally, pressure has been building up to force the department to keep better records of what it takes. But according to the NYPD, they can’t afford to do so because even attempting to retrieve such records could possibly cause the computer system they are kept on to crash.

The department’s claim is especially audacious as the system they use was widely hailed as state-of-the-art when they first transferred their records to it from their earlier paper form. In any case, this means that more cases like that of an Illinois couple who had $107,000 unjustly taken by cops will occur in New York:

“The system, the Property and Evidence Tracking System (PETS), was built on top of SAP’s enterprise resource planning software platform and IBM’s DB2 database by Capgemini in 2012, and was used as a flagship case study by the company. PETS replaced the long-established paper-based evidence logging system used by the department, and was supposed to revolutionize evidence and property tracking. It was even submitted for the 2012 Computerworld Honors, an awards program honoring ‘those who use Information Technology to benefit society.’

Even with the system, however, the NYPD’s Assistant Deputy Commissioner Robert Messner told the New York City Council’s Public Safety Committee that the department had no idea how much money it took in as evidence, nor did it have a way of reporting how much was seized through civil forfeiture proceedings—where property and money is taken from people suspected of involvement in a crime through a civil filing, and the individuals whom it is seized from are put in the position of proving that the property was not involved in the crime of which they were accused.”

Source: Ars Technica