The District announced that it will build a state-of-the art police evidence warehouse at a site on the grounds of St. Elizabeths Hospital, citing inadequate security and an antiquated intake system at the crumbing facility in Southeast Washington.
D.C. Police Chief Cathy Lanier said maintaining evidence was critical to the District’s ability to fight crime. The old white-bricked facility in Anacostia housed millions of pieces of evidence and still used a paper-based system.
Evidence that should have been purged years ago continued to pile up, and the working conditions at the rusted facility were unfit for the city’s finest, she said.
“It’s in danger of becoming an embarrassment,” Lanier said.
The new facility will use state-of-the-art technology that allows officers to retrieve evidence with the push of a button, she said.
Police have already begun to clean out the high-risk evidence. For the last four weeks, police and heavily armed officers began hauling money, drugs and guns to an undisclosed location in the city, Lanier said. Some of that evidence will be auctioned off, some will be returned to the new warehouse.
Much of the evidence shouldn’t have been stored at the facility in the first place, Lanier said.
“There’s no reason for us to store large quantities of drugs or weapons,” she said.
Mayor Adrian Fenty said the city will put the project out for bid next week and expects to have the new facility built in 18 months. The mayor did not say how much the project would cost or how large the warehouse will be.
The city had planned to house the evidence warehouse with the new headquarters and a forensic lab at 225 Virginia Ave., SE. But Fenty scraped that plan this summer.
Lanier said she wanted to build a warehouse from the ground up instead of trying to fit it into an old building.
The District has promised to have the planned $219 million forensics crime lab by 2011.
