Cleaning house at APD

By LINDSAY WHITEHURST

June 02, 2006 07:37 pm

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They call it organized chaos.
From unmarked paint cans to shot guns to flats of Mountain Dew to bags of cocaine, it’s all in the Anderson Police Department’s property room.
It’s where the police keep all evidence and property seized during investigations or simply left behind.
The 2,700-square-foot room at the station is full to brimming, as is an 800 off-site square feet.
And with 25,000 to 30,000 items — some dating back to the 1980s — so much evidence is mounting that it needs an overhaul.
“We have a problem,” Lt. Leon Wasilewski, who oversees the room, said. “We have an overcrowded property room.”
To fix it, the department is turning to an eBay-like Web site, www.propertyroom.com, to sell it.
Until now, benign property that was no longer needed — the statute of limitations was up or no one claimed it — was sold at an annual local police auction, while things like drugs and guns were destroyed. The drugs and guns will still be destroyed but about everything else will be up for grabs.
Before selling anything, the department does background research to make sure it’s done with the evidence, Wasilewski said.
But that process simply isn’t going fast enough.
“We’ve got to do something,” Chief Frank Burrows said. “We have a mess in there.”
To that end, the department will use a federal grant to pay for a new system that will assign a bar code to every piece of evidence there.
Though the room is organized enough to find evidence now, the computerized system will allow police will be able to put their hands on a particular piece of evidence more quickly, Wasilewski said.
That system will be installed on July 1. Soon after propertyroom.com will begin picking up items for sale online.
Founded in 1999 by a former police detective, the Farmington, N.J.-based company works with more than 500 law enforcement agencies around the country, including 10 in Indiana, according to their Web site.
They don’t charge the department anything to come and pick up the items, instead taking 50 percent of the proceeds from every sale under $1,000 and 25 percent of every sale over $1,000, then sending the rest to the department in a semi-monthly check form.
They would come to pick items up once or twice a month, Wasilewski said.
When the items get to the company’s warehouses, they’re professionally appraised. The company gets double or quadruple what a local department would at their own auction, Wasilewski said.
“We’re very, very good at taking evidence in,” he said. “We’re not so good at bringing it out the other end.”

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