Police property room has the goods—lots of them

DALLAS (AP) - Kimberley Cole is guardian of the goods - 2 million scraps of crime and lost property. And she says she knows how to find every piece.

Vials of blood. A human rib cage. Empty caskets. Counterfeit Air Jordans. Stolen couches. Almost 2 tons of metal, knives, swords and machetes. Beer kegs from an underage drinking bust. Boxes of misplaced keys and sunglasses from the State Fair of Texas.

“If you can name it, I have it,” Cole told The Dallas Morning News (https://bit.ly/1sD82LW) outside her fortress, a rustic red-brick warehouse on Baylor Street, near Deep Ellum.

In the field, police and detectives are in control. But in the Dallas Police Department’s heavily secured property room, Cole calls the shots.

As manager of the 52,000-square-foot warehouse, she’s a vital link in the city’s crime-fighting efforts. Any tampering or misplacement of materials there could blur the line between an acquittal and a conviction.

Besides serving as a giant evidence locker, the warehouse is open to the public five days a week as the city’s lost-and-found.

Cole and her staff, along with dozens of surveillance cameras, keep the items organized by bar codes.

“There’s no room for mistakes. . When we bring officers here, we tell them, ’This is your foundation,’” Cole said. “’How you handle your evidence makes or breaks your case.’”

The DPD property room is nestled between Interstate 30 and DART rail tracks.

Even if buzzed in, you can get only to the front desk and a small waiting area. The rest is enclosed by a gray door and a red sign: “DPD badges or ID cards must be worn in open view.”

“There’s a couple million pieces of court evidence here,” Cole said. “It’s not something for public display. It’s somebody’s life.”

Cole’s office in a corner of the warehouse, above the main entrance, overlooks a property check-in area and thousands of brown boxes stacked neatly on a maze of gray shelves.

A few police officers spread out in the check-in area, filling out paperwork and packaging evidence into envelopes, boxes or tubes, depending on the size.

Lost items, such as a bicycle found on the side of the road, also wind up in the property room.

Deliveries can be as small as an envelope or as big as a trailer. A lot of evidence, especially biological evidence, stays in the warehouse for a long time.

Cole said she was particularly fond of a set of Klingon weapons that came in a few years ago.

“They were cool,” said Cole, a Star Trek fan. “You put them on your arms and they had knives sticking out.”

For decades, a few remnants from President John F. Kennedy’s assassination were stored in the property room.

Some of the items - including pictures of Lee Harvey Oswald when he was arrested and a motorcade officer’s helmet that had splatters of brain matter - were transferred to the Dallas Municipal Archives in 1992, said property unit coordinator Cindy Schoelen.

A watch and rings are kept in an evidence bag. Items at the warehouse are “somebody’s life,” says Kimberley Cole, who oversees the unit.

The property room’s operations haven’t always been spot-free.

A 2008 city audit found that the property unit was disorganized and lacked proper climate control.

In 2010, the property unit accidentally sent to the City Store, where the city’s surplus property is sold to the public, a file cabinet filled with 123 bags of illegal drugs. A city employee doing an inventory of the file cabinets found the drugs.

When Cole took over the property unit in 2012, she adopted recommendations from the audit and made other changes, including a new system of monthly internal audits and heightened security.

Cole, 56, has a master’s in political economy from the University of Texas at Dallas. She expected to have a job in finance. But she said that after being the victim of stalking as a young adult, she decided to pursue a career in public safety.

She spent 15 years at the 911 call center and was transferred to the property unit in 2012.

Although her job description is different now, Cole said the essence of customer service is still the same.

“Every citizen that comes in here, whether they just got out of jail or whatever their circumstances, we are still the custodians of their property,” she said. “We are not their judge or jury, so I want them to all be treated with courtesy and dignity and respect.”

That, she said, is why she likes hiring “obsessive-compulsive people with charming personalities.”

Cole said she isn’t really worried that the property room will run out of space, but is constantly looking for ways to make its storage-and-release system more efficient.

But the unit cannot arbitrarily decide what to dispose of and what to keep, she said.

That decision is left to the detectives, who have to submit a card to the property room, stipulating whether evidence can be disposed of, sold or released to the owner. Unclaimed items are sold at the City Store.

Metal is ground up, money goes to the city, counterfeit goods are buried at a landfill and biohazardous materials go through a disposal company.

And, every so often, Cole and her crew are able to reunite lost goods with their owners.

In May, a group of New York police officers, in Dallas for a baseball tournament, reported that hundreds of dollars of equipment was stolen from their minivan, parked in their hotel’s lot.

Dallas police recovered a few of the uniforms and three bats. The cleats, helmets and gloves are still missing.

Cole recently mailed the recovered bats to NYPD Sgt. Dave Mendez, the team’s third baseman.

“To open up the box and see the bats, it was a great. It was like Christmas,” Mendez said.

Those who’ve lost something have to provide proof - photos, receipts, information - to get it back.

The unit regularly gets callers who try to con their way into claiming some of the property.

“But we shut ’em down,” Cole said.

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Information from: The Dallas Morning News, https://www.dallasnews.com