The Locker With No Log
At 23:50 you finish a closing sweep of a six-story office building and find, on the second-floor stairwell landing, a black backpack containing a wallet with a DC driver's license, $180 in cash, and a smartphone with a cracked screen. The floor is empty and the building is closed. You photograph the items where they lie, carry the backpack to the lobby desk, and place it in the property locker. At 07:55 the next morning the day supervisor opens the locker and finds no property receipt was ever completed. Your narrative says "property secured at approximately 23:55." Body-worn camera shows you picked up the phone bare-handed at 23:58 and put it in your pocket "for safekeeping" before returning it to the bag.
1. Identify every defect in the chain of custody and in the narrative, and explain what a defense attorney or a disciplinary board would do with each.
Read the worked answer
The chain has more holes than links.
| Defect | Why it matters | How it gets attacked |
|---|---|---|
| No property receipt at intake | The item's custodial history starts 8 hours late | "Who had it between 23:55 and 07:55?" - no answer exists |
| No second-person verification or seal | Anyone with locker access is now a suspect | Contamination, substitution, and theft arguments all become plausible |
| Bare-hand contact with the phone | Destroys latent prints and transfers DNA | The defense argues the only prints on the device belong to you |
| Phone in your pocket, unlogged | Undocumented possession of a device with private data | Suggests tampering, whether or not any occurred |
| "Approximately 23:55" | Vague times are unusable times | The narrative cannot be reconciled to the camera |
| Narrative contradicts body-worn camera | The most damaging defect of all | Credibility collapse - everything else you wrote is now suspect |
The pattern that matters: no single defect is fatal. Together they read as a custodial gap followed by a narrative that smoothed it over. A disciplinary board does not need to prove you took anything; it only needs to find that the record cannot be trusted. A defense attorney uses the same facts to argue the phone was never in a controlled chain at all, which can make it and anything derived from it unusable.
What was done right: you photographed the items in place. Keep that instinct; it is the only reason the scene is documented at all.
2. How do you correct the record, and what must you absolutely not do?
Read the worked answer
Correct forward, never backward.
Do:
- Complete a property receipt now, with the true time of recovery, the true time of intake, and a written note that the receipt was completed late and why.
- Write a supplemental report, not an edit. State: original report filed at X; this supplement corrects the property-handling timeline; the phone was in my pocket from approximately 23:58 to ______; here is why; here is who else was present. Sign and date it.
- Bag and seal the items now - the phone in a proper evidence bag, the cash counted by two people with both signatures, the wallet inventoried item by item.
- Give the supervisor the whole picture, including the missing receipt, so the facility can fix the process (locker access log, dual sign-off, a receipt pad at the desk).
- Preserve the body-worn camera footage and note its existence in the supplement. The footage is your best and only corroboration; do not let the retention window eat it.
Do not:
- Do not backdate anything. A backdated receipt is a falsification, which is a far bigger problem than a late receipt.
- Do not alter or re-create the original report. The original stays in the file, errors and all.
- Do not "adjust" the time to match the camera clock or the camera to match the report. Document the clock offset separately if one exists.
- Do not ask another officer to sign as though they were present at intake.
- Do not discuss it with the shift before writing it down.
3. At 08:10 the phone rings in the property locker and a "Find My Device" alert appears on the screen. What do you do?
Read the worked answer
Log the event; do not interact with the device.
- Do not answer it. You are not the owner, you have no authority to speak for the property, and anything you say about the phone's location or the wallet's contents creates a factual record you cannot control.
- Do not use it. No scrolling, no checking messages, no "just seeing who it is." The device is not yours and its contents are not yours to view.
- Record the observable facts: 08:10, phone rang/alert displayed, whether it stopped, what the screen showed at a glance, and who was present.
- Preserve condition, not content. Follow facility and MPD direction on power state; do not power-cycle or factory-reset a device you do not understand, and do not let the battery die if the agency wants it preserved.
- Route the property. Found property of this value with an ID in it typically goes to MPD or through the facility's lost-property process; either way it needs a receipt and a named custodian.
- Expect the owner to show up. When they do, verify identity against the license, do not hand over the cash without a count and a signature, and if there is any indication the backpack was itself stolen or abandoned during a crime, it becomes evidence and the owner does not simply get it back.