Mounting evidence
By RALPH BARTHOLDT
Staff Writer
COEUR d’ALENE — The Coeur d’Alene Police Department will get a new addition to its evidence room, a cold storage unit to keep rape kits, blood and DNA evidence that must be maintained at uniform temperatures.
The $13,900 expenditure will be paid from the department’s current budget, and it is just a small piece of a larger picture.
Across the county, law enforcement agencies must plan for the evidence that is collected daily, and is required to be kept, sometimes indefinitely.
That means expanding current facilities, or planning for future expansion.
At the Kootenai County Sheriff’s Office, a larger expansion is being planned to store the approximately 650 pieces of evidence collected each month, which is added to the more than 10,000 pieces it already has in storage, said Det. Dennis Stinebaugh.
That means anything from firearms to cash, sexual assault kits and cars, drugs and DNA evidence and other items such as backpacks and bicycles must be housed until they are claimed, or in the case of criminal evidence, until the case is adjudicated.
Automobiles require more room, and evidence that may not be part of a criminal case is stored in a pole shed on county property, which is also being considered for remodel.
“We can get stuck holding on to vehicles for years,” Stinebaugh said. “Boat crashes, vehicle crashes, as long as it’s an active case, we have to keep the evidence, so that’s a storage consideration.”
The county’s evidence storage expansion, valued at more than $200,000, is set to be bid this fall.
The three-pronged plan is to convert a 2,400-square-foot work release center into an evidence room, add insulation and heating and air conditioning units to an unattached facility and refurbish the existing evidence room by adding moveable shelves.
The idea is to maximize the space that we have,” said Shawn Riley, the county’s building facility manager. “It’s a complete remodel.”
The Coeur d’Alene Police Department has 5,749 items in evidence, Chief Lee White said. Of those, 222 items are kept in the freezer and 54 must be refrigerated. The department also has 190 pieces of evidence at the lab pending tests. Once the tests are complete the items will be returned to the department for storage.
White told City Council members Tuesday his department seeks to upgrade to a cold storage unit because what it has now, to store biological evidence, are refrigerators and freezers like those sold at appliance stores.
The upgrade would have a monitoring and alert system and would increase capacity for evidence collected in the future.
Sexual assault kits must be refrigerated until they are processed at a lab, and DNA samples retrieved from the kits must be kept frozen.
In the past, when cases were no longer being investigated as a crime, if victims chose not to seek charges, the prosecutor’s office would authorize the kits to be destroyed.
Under the latest law, even those kits must be refrigerated and stored in evidence for between 10 and 55 years depending on the case, White said.
That means adding cold storage space — preferably with a monitoring and alert system in case the temperature rises above a threshold.
“With the additional time frame for retention of evidence, it is important that we reduce concerns associated with the destruction of the evidence due to temperature variations,” White said.
The department reported last year having 444 drug and narcotic cases, 397 drug equipment or paraphernalia cases, 40 rape cases and 278 DUI cases.
Each of them had the potential to require that evidence collected by officers be stored in the department’s evidence room.
Kootenai County last year reported 521 drug cases, 572 drug equipment cases, 17 rape cases and 282 DUIs.
Post Falls had 163 drug and narcotic cases, 155 drug equipment cases, six rape cases and 109 DUI cases.
Chief Scot Haug said the latest law concerning sexual assault kits has not put pressure on his department to upgrade.
“Rape kits add a little bit of a challenge, but we don’t get a lot of those,” Haug said.