This article was original published in The Denver Post on January 17, 2008.
The following clarification ran on this article: Aurora police Lt. Paul Fenstermacher said in 2003 that then-Police Chief Ricky Bennett initiated an investigation into a discrepancy over $600,000 in the cash evidence vault but could not resolve the issue. This story attributed that statement to current Division Chief Ken Murphy, who provided that statement in a memo to the current chief this month.
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AURORA — About $600,000 from the Police Department’s cash-evidence vault is unaccounted for, but officials blame the discrepancy on a computer data-entry error dating back 12 years.
A preliminary report from an accreditation commission found other flaws in how the department handles and stores property, but the money discrepancy was the most egregious.
“No crime has been committed,” Deputy Police Chief Terry Jones said Wednesday. “We would have done a criminal investigation had we thought that.”
Police say they will hire an outside firm to investigate.
Lt. Fred Thompson of the Henderson, Nev., Police Department and another law officer conducted the assessment in December for the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, or CALEA, which Aurora hired in its pursuit of the prestigious certification.
Police officials say they were unaware of the problem until Thompson informed them at a December meeting. But they later learned that several past officials knew of the problem but did nothing to fix it.
Current city auditor Ann Marie Isaac-Heslop said the discrepancy was due to an error that occurred when Aurora upgraded software in 1996.
The problem was identified in 2004 through an internal audit but never resolved by then-Chief Ricky Bennett, according to Division Chief Ken Murphy, who currently oversees the property room.
During the software change, the balance of the money was entered into the wrong data field, Murphy said. When funds were legitimately dispersed, the amount was never reduced, he told Chief Dan Oates in a memo dated Jan. 11.
Murphy said the city’s information technology team knew about the issue in 1996 but didn’t say anything because no money was missing. The auditor in 2004 also learned of it, Murphy said, but a decision was made at that time “to record items going forward.”
“From the testing we have done, we are confident everything is in there that should be in there,” Isaac-Heslop said.
Aurora Mayor Ed Tauer was traveling Wednesday and could not be reached for comment.
Councilman Ryan Frazier, who is on the city’s public-safety committee, said Aurora officials need to clarify exactly what happened.
“All this has certainly gotten my attention and I think requires further investigation,” Frazier said. “The $600,000 is not anything to blink at. We need to make sure that the money is accounted for and in the future this doesn’t happen again.”
CALEA’s Mock On-Site Assessment report recommended the department conduct “an entire inventory” of its evidence vault.
Jones said there are more than 250,000 pieces of evidence in the vault, so an entire inventory would be prohibitive. The department does perform periodic sample inventories of about 2,000 to 3,000 items.
In CALEA’s report, Sgt. Pat Smith, one of two officers who are custodians of the evidence room, voiced concerns last year about taking over the reins. “As the new custodian, I can not ensure that all items indicated in the system are in fact in our possession,” he said in the report.
But Murphy on Wednesday produced what he said was the second part of that statement that was not in the CALEA report. The second part read, “However, the sample inventory completed indicates that all items are present or accounted for from the locations chosen.”
The Aurora Police Department is one of few departments that hold cash evidence in its own vault.
Jones said the department doesn’t put cash in a bank partly because trackable serial numbers could be lost forever.
In the memo to Oates, Murphy outlines several recommendations, including: compiling all the money stored in different areas into a central location; performing a complete inventory of the cash vault by an outside firm; clarifying with the city’s IT department what happened; and developing a process to account for the whereabouts of checked-out property.
The following clarification ran on this article: Aurora police Lt. Paul Fenstermacher said in 2003 that then-Police Chief Ricky Bennett initiated an investigation into a discrepancy over $600,000 in the cash evidence vault but could not resolve the issue. This story attributed that statement to current Division Chief Ken Murphy, who provided that statement in a memo to the current chief this month.
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