The D.C. police department is scrambling to figure out what went wrong with its breath alcohol machines, causing the city to toss out mountains of evidence in drunken driving cases and creating chaos in the court system.

Earlier this month, city attorneys began reducing charges against suspected drunk drivers and tossing out breath-alcohol scores from the city’s Intoxilyzer 5000 EN machines. As word leaked out, the Fenty administration issued a mass e-mail acknowledging “a potential problem with the accuracy” with the machines that had an impact on “certain DWI cases during a specific time frame.”