D.C. police have mislaid hundreds of reports from some of the city’s most violent neighborhoods and officers are feverishly trying to reproduce them, internal documents show and a police source said.
The reports document police actions in response to emergency calls. At least 389 emergency calls, logged between January and May in Ward 8 and ranging from “sounds of gunshots” to sexual assault, have yet to be reconciled with detailed police reports, according to department documents.
A police source said department brass had ordered officers to start from scratch and to rewrite the reports from memory.
The missing reports, detailed in an Aug. 11 police memo, raise disturbing questions for Chief Cathy Lanier, who promised to yank the department into to the 21st century with computer-supported reporting.
D.C. Councilwoman Mary Cheh, D-Ward 3, said she was discomfited to hear of the missing reports.
“We’ll have no good handle on the trends and the appropriate responses unless we have some way to track these things,” she said. “I’m very concerned about whether this is going to compromise, or has compromised, any actual prosecutions that we were going to make. If that’s the case, we need an immediate and dramatic fix.”
In June, The Examiner uncovered an internal department memo that showed more than 3,700 criminal reports had been lost citywide in the first part of the year. At the time, Lanier’s spokeswoman claimed the reports were accounted for but merely hadn’t been entered into the computer.
Lanier didn’t respond to e-mails seeking comment.
Last year, the department lost more than 11,000 reports that were supposed to be sent to federal law enforcement officials for the FBI’s Uniformed Crime Report
Cheh said she is considering asking for hearings into the matter.
“We have to get into this century, not last century,” said Cheh. “I hope our Judiciary Committee looks into these things closely.”
Got a tip on the D.C. police? Call Bill Myers at 202-459-4956 or send e-mail to [email protected].
