DESPITE A budget crunch, the NYPD hopes to get $25 million to fund an urgent need -- a computer program to track millions of pieces of evidence. For more than a decade, the NYPD has tried to get a computerized system in place for it's evidence collection process. Fomer Commissioner Howard Safir pulled the plug on one such attempt in 1998, after the department invested $7 million over seven years with series of computer companies with no results, records showed.
If it doesn't get additional money for the project, the NYPD may have to shift other funds to pay for the new technology, such as $50 million earmarked to rehab the Central Park Precinct, sources said. The property clerk division processes 1.6 million invoices a year and has more than 10 million pieces of property in storage, NYPD documents show. The collection includes evidence from crime, stolen property, contraband, vehicles and prisoners' property.
Capgemini, a technology and consulting firm headquartered in Manhattan, is in negotiations with NYPD for this latest attempt, sources said. Capgemini referred questions to the NYPD.
It was unclear how much of the evidence backlog would be inventoried, a key demand from defense lawyers.
Human rights advocates argued the lack of a tracking system has kept at lest one innocent man in jail when the NYPD could not find key evidence.
Alan Newton spent 21 years in prison after a wrongful 1984 conviction for rape and robbery in the Bronx. According to the Innocence Project, the NYPD said for years that it could not locate evidence for forensic testing in Newton's case.
Twelve years after Newton's first motion for DNA testing was denied, the evidence was found in the bin at Pearson Place warehouse in Long Island City, where it was supposed to be all along.
The evidence was located only after a Bronx assistant district attorney asked Pearson Place supervisors to look for it. From nydnews 3-19-2008 -p26 by davidsradiotv2000
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