City council meeting tonight–I’ll be there
I’ve spent about year now being frustrated by the Tucson Police Department’s record retention policies.
If you get attacked by a motorist and you call the police, the officer will create two documents. The first is a “police report,” which is a simple form that will include the date, your name, and that you were assaulted. No details about the incident will be recorded on the form.
The other document is called a “police narrative.” This document gets typed up in the squad car and includes all the details, as best as the officer can get them down, in standard narrative fashion.
The police narrative is then emailed to the station where it is reviewed by a supervisor. But guess what happens then?
The supervisor prints out a few hard copies and then deletes the file. The file is no longer preserved on a computer, which means it cannot be used for computer searches.
Say you want to know how often a bicyclist gets assaulted on the streets of Tucson. One thing you could do is take a wild guess. The other thing you could do is conduct a computer search of all the police narratives that contain the words “bicycle” and “assault.” Except you can’t do that because the narratives only exist on hard copy, and there are thousands of them created every year.
There are a lot of reasons this rather important crime-fighting tool should be preserved, and I can’t think of any good reasons to go to the effort to delete these files. I have asked many Tucson Police Department representatives the reasons for this practice, and have never gotten an answer.
So, tonight I’ll raise it with the City Council. We’ll see if anyone bites.
–Erik Ryberg
October 16th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
hey, invite them on the community ride afterwards