CLEAN UP POLICE PROPERTY ROOM MESS

IF THE charges are true and large quantities of drugs and other confiscated
or stolen items have been disappearing from the Memphis Police Department's
property and evidence room for years, two questions leap to mind.

How could such brazen thefts have happened? And what was done, or not done,
to keep them from happening? City taxpayers are owed prompt and full
answers to both questions.

A federal grand jury has indicted 16 people, including three current or
former civilian employees of the property room, on charges that link the
alleged thefts to a multistate cocaine ring.

FBI agents seized a suburban Atlanta mansion owned by a former
$18,975-a-year property room worker. Authorities also confiscated more than
$1 million from the car and Cordova home of a veteran property room shift
supervisor; he and another indicted property room employee have been
suspended while the investigation proceeds.

Federal officials also seized 29 vehicles, many of them luxury models,
along with jewelry, cash, drugs, guns and real estate during raids in
Tennessee, Mississippi and Georgia arising from the property room
investigation.

The crimes described in the indictments allegedly took place between early
last year and last month. To his credit, Memphis Police Director James
Bolden, who has been in the job for barely seven months, appears to have
taken a properly proactive stance.

Acting on an internal tip about alleged property room thefts, Bolden called
in the FBI to investigate and the state Comptroller's Office to audit
records. But problems with the property and evidence room long predate the
period covered by the federal indictments.

The property room ostensibly is under round-the-clock video surveillance
and all items are supposedly documented in a computerized database. But
state and internal audits dating back to 1999 describe various
deficiencies: improper recording of seized cash, excessive crowding,
weapons and drugs left too long in the room, marijuana on the floor.

Police brass at the time pledged to take corrective measures. If they were
implemented, they evidently didn't work.

The property room investigation may have broader implications. Some cases
that have been made, in part, on the basis of seized evidence could be
compromised.

And there is the corrosive effect on public confidence in the integrity of
police operations. If the property room probe diminishes that confidence,
the honest, competent and hard-working officers who make up the
overwhelming majority of Police Department employees will suffer unjustly.

That's all the more reason to impose effective controls on property room
operations and to fix the problem - immediately, conspicuously and permanently.