AUDIT COMMITTEE SUMMARY
February 19, 2019
Audit of San Antonio Police Department
Property & Evidence Room
Report Issued January 14, 2019
Audit Objective
Determine if chain of custody and evidence preservation controls are adequate for SAPD Property and Evidence Facilities.
Background
The SAPD Property and Evidence Room (property room) has custodial responsibility for all property and evidence confiscated by SAPD officers. They are charged with protecting the integrity of all evidence, personal property, or property confiscated by SAPD. Their responsibilities include intake and logging all items received, assuring its safe storage, managing the chain of custody, and ensuring the proper disposal of items.
Chain of custody is the chronological, documented record of the location and possessor of evidence from its initial collection through potential testing, court use, storage, and disposition. The property room uses the FileOnQ system to manage all evidence, personal, and found property
Items of evidentiary value represent approximately 98.6% of items in the property room, with the remaining 1.4% being found and personal property. Typical items maintained include firearms, narcotics, currency, blood samples, clothing, backpacks, bicycles, sexual assault kits, bullet casings, etc. The property room performs periodic inventories of currency, firearms, and narcotics. Additionally, the Integrity Detail, the quality assurance unit of SAPD, performs periodic audits of the property room each fiscal year. The property room manages an inventory of almost 500,000 items with daily increases as evidence, personal, and found property are delivered into their custody by SAPD.
Audit Scope and Methodology
The audit scope included chain of custody and evidence preservation controls from FY2015 through FY2018. We conducted observations of the property room and the drop-off facility to determine proper physical security. We reviewed inventories, as well as conducting a...
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