6 Critical Questions The Police Chief Should Be Asking About Property and Evidence Management

Police Chiefs:

Here are six questions I asked my evidence technician, and so should you.

The answers can tell you very quickly whether your agency has strong accountability systems in place or hidden liability developing inside the property and evidence room.

1. How many narcotics items do we currently have in the evidence room?

The answer should be exact, not “around,” “approximately,” or “ish.”

An evidence room handling narcotics should be able to immediately account for what is currently being stored. If your agency cannot provide an exact number quickly, there are likely deeper issues involving inventory practices, chain of custody, RMS management, or overall accountability systems.

2. When was the last full inventory of the evidence room completed?

This is one of the most important questions a chief can ask.

If you took over as chief and a full inventory was never conducted, or if evidence room personnel changed without a complete inventory occurring, your agency may have inherited unknown liability.

The evidence technician responsible for maintaining the room should never be solely responsible for conducting their own inventory. If theft, diversion, or accountability problems are occurring, the agency may never discover them if the same employee responsible for the room is also verifying the inventory. Independent verification matters.

3. Who currently has keys or access to the evidence room?

Do you have a key control log?

The more people with access, the weaker the integrity of the evidence room becomes.

If evidence or money comes up missing, anyone with access can potentially become part of the investigation, including the chief. Defense attorneys may argue the person making disciplinary decisions was also a potential suspect because they maintained unrestricted access.

4. When was the last destruction order submitted to the court?

Evidence rooms are not designed to become permanent storage warehouses.

If destruction orders have not been submitted recently, evidence begins piling up unnecessarily, storage conditions deteriorate, and liability increases. This often signals breakdowns in prosecutor coordination, evidence review procedures, staffing, or supervisory oversight.

5. Are we actually using our barcode system the way it was intended?

Is your technology working for or against you?

Many agencies purchase barcode scanners, place barcode labels on evidence packaging, and then rarely scan the items during intake, movement, court transfers, audits, or inventories. Instead, staff revert back to handwritten movement logs, manual entry into RMS fields, or simply typing information into reports without scanning the item itself. If your agency has barcodes attached to evidence packages but staff are not consistently scanning them throughout the evidence lifecycle, that is a significant operational concern.

6. If our evidence technician left tomorrow, could someone else successfully operate the evidence room?

If the entire operation depends on one employee’s memory or personal system, your agency is vulnerable.

Policies, workflows, packaging standards, inventory procedures, destruction processes, and RMS practices should all be documented and understood beyond a single person. A properly managed evidence room should survive retirements, resignations, promotions, illnesses, and investigations without collapsing operationally.

The property and evidence room is one of the highest-liability areas inside any police department, yet it is often one of the least understood by executive leadership.

At Police Evidence Audits, LLC, we help agencies not only identify these issues through inventories, audits, operational assessments, policy development, and consulting, but also provide practical solutions to correct them before they become major organizational problems.

Sometimes the right questions asked early can prevent major problems later.