SUPPLY AND COMMAND

Patrol needs to be dealing with locksmiths

Five hundred pounds of marijuana disappeared last week. But it's the
evidence room in the Highway Patrol office on U.S. 301 that got burned.

A thief (or thieves) earned maximum profit for minimal effort - little stood
in the way of making crime pay. All it took to net drugs with a street value
between $500,000 and $600,000 was the ability to break glass in a door and
turn a knob.

The office had no security cameras. No alarm sounded. The average new car
offers more security than was found in the patrol office. It's natural to
assume that a law-enforcement office would be the first place that a crook
would get caught. Not in this case. It's embarrassing when law enforcement
gets hit with a crime wave in one of its own offices.

Red faces aren't the worst consequences, however. Drugs are back on the
street. Evidence held for the prosecution of a drug case vanishes, and this
could mean a suspect walks without having to answer charges. Depending upon
the suspect and the evidence taken - and what happens to the drugs later -
the consequences could be serious indeed.

Joe Latta, a consultant on securing evidence rooms, says his personal file
contains 3,500 newspaper clippings about evidence room break-ins. It's not
an unusual crime. Sometimes it's an "inside" crime. Sometimes it isn't.

The break-in isn't the first time an evidence room was tampered with - not
even in Cumberland County - but it ought to be the last. The patrol office
is more accustomed to holding paperwork for traffic violations than for drug
cases. But the office didn't even have a simple deadbolt, which indicates
that the patrol needs to put out a security alert for itself. Or shop for a
better watchdog.