Evidence Notes

Nitro-Evidence Notes

Best practices in utilizing Nitro-Evidence

It is not unusual to find a law enforcement agencies Evidence retention program to be, well, a little less than organized. It seems that evidence control normally comes in last place in the day to day priority category. Though this may not immediately catch up to an agency, the day will come when some heavy explaining may be necessary as to why a certain piece of evidence cannot be located, or was released or disposed prematurely. For these reasons, and for court based evidence reliability, every agency, from 1 man to 100,000, needs a working evidence system in place. That is where Nitro-Evidence comes in to play.

We will look at some good practice recommendations for evidence storage, but first a question or two to see where your agency is at.

Does your agency have the ability to quickly and efficiently locate any piece of evidence that you are currently storing? Do you have a system in place that tells you which evidence should be cycled out either by releasing it or destroying it? Are your evidence records secure, yet accessible to the officers that need information about the evidence that they have collected? Do you have a means of creating a professional, consistent evidence label for your evidence? Do you have the ability to ascertain, within a moderate amount of time, where a certain evidence item from say, 5 years ago, is now?

Those are just a few of the things that a professional evidence management system will accomplish for your agency. Nitro-Evidence has been specifically geared towards creating an evidence storage environment that allows the agency to store and release evidence in a hassle free manner. Below are some tips on best practices for turning your evidence room around by using Nitro-Evidence along with a little bit of experience that has come in creating this software.

Physical setup

Nitro-Evidence is designed to be installed over a network, with the Database itself residing on the server. Runtime files are then installed to any accessing workstations as well as a shortcut to the database.

The software is designed to be utilized in one of two ways.

(1)-With access available to all officers. Officers create their own cases and enter their own property items into the database (This works well as the officer knows all of the case specifics needed for data entry). The officers place the entered items into a mutually accessible storage location. Evidence clerks then take the items from the temporary location and place the items into the evidence room. This method is recommended in cases where the evidence is retrieved by the officer on the street, and where the evidence will be placed at a later time. For instance, this setup works best in smaller agencies that do not have full time evidence staff. The evidence technician can look in the system when he/she start their shifts, view and identify unplaced property and place the property. Utilizing the system in this manner would still allow for an evidence technician or property manager to enter all necessary information on scene in a search warrant or large crime scene using a laptop computer, bypassing any street officers. This method of sharing the data entry work load appears to work best in most situations and is recommended by Code Blue Designs.

(2)- The second scenario has the property manager creating all case records and entering a property specifics using other reports and narratives created by the case officers. This scenario will work best where there is a dedicated property manager. This method, though more consistent, is more time consuming to the property manager.

Temporary Storage

A temporary storage area is required by any agency that does not have a full time property manager. Of course, that covers most Law enforcement agencies.

Why do we need a temporary storage area? Because, we want to limit access to the actual evidence storage area to one or two people only. This access limitation allows for some evidence accountability that is not available when everyone has access to the evidence room.

To accomplish this, we recommend that a closet, or like area, be established as the temporary storage location. This closet must be secured (keypad locks work great for this), yet must be accessible to any officer that will be submitting evidence. Small lockable boxes or lockers can be placed in the closet for sensitive items such as cash, firearms or narcotics, with the key then being placed in an area only accessible to the property manager. The property manager then takes the property to the evidence room, places the property in a suitable location, marks the property as 'ACCEPTED' in Nitro-Evidence, noting where the property was placed. Once the evidence is taken from the temporary storage area, the evidence clerk is then responsible for it's well being until its release, transfer or disposal.

Setting up the evidence room

Code Blue Designs uses Dymo Labewriter label printers with Nitro-Evidence. We have been using these printers during the entire process of development and testing of the Nitro-Evidence software and the Dymo printers have worked without a glitch. These printers are thermal printing and do not require ink. In about a year and a half of moderate use, I have not seen one of ours need any type of servicing (except for labels of course).

If the street officers will be entering their own data into the system, then they must have access to a label printer to print their labels for their property. There should also be a dedicated label printer for the evidence room itself. This will allow the property manager to print any labels that need updating as well as to print labels for storage locations. These printers are currently running about $129.99.

In the evidence room itself, you should set up some sort of shelving. Some areas should be large, most should be small, however, as most evidence is fairly small in size. Each shelf should be divided up reasonably and then named and labeled. For instance, if you have a shelving unit that has three shelves, you might divide each shelf into 5 smaller sections. Then, we'll name the shelves. Let us say that the top shelf is Shelf A, the middle B and the bottom C. Then, Each section on each shelf could be named A-1, A-2 and so forth on down the line. Once you have divided your shelving or storage areas, you can create this location in the 'Location manager' within Nitro-Evidence, which will then allow you to A. Select this new location for the placement of property in the system and B. Print a bar-coded 'Location' label to identify the location. Location areas should be small enough that you do not have a large area to search when looking for a piece of property that has been assigned to the area.

A computer, with access to the Nitro-Evidence system should be closely available to the evidence clerk. A dedicated computer may not be necessary in small agencies or in areas where the evidence room is in very close proximity to the main work area, where computers are present. There also should be a readily accessible label printer (1 provided with the system) as well as a standard printer for printing reports.

More will be added to this page later....