Evidence That Was Made,
Hidden or Lost

The analysis documents a pattern in the records, not an accusation, and it characterizes no one. Intent, honesty and whether a right was violated are questions for the finder of fact and for counsel, whatever the pattern shows.

In a claim of fabrication of evidence, the records question for an item said to be found is provenance: where and when the item first enters the record. Scene photographs and sketches, body-worn and dash video, the dispatch record, the first report and the evidence log each either register the item or do not, and each carries its own time. The account of the find, meaning who is said to have recovered the item, where and when, is set against those first records one source at a time.

Divergence takes three forms: time, place and description. A dispatch entry may report the item before the officer named as finding it had arrived; video covering the place the account names may show no item there; the first log entry may carry a description the account of the find does not match. Each divergence is entered with its sources and times, and where the first records and the account agree, that agreement is entered with the same sourcing, one standard for a practice retained by both sides.

Times from different systems are first aligned, as in the record chronology, so a divergence in time is the difference between what aligned sources record. Provenance ends where custody begins. Packaging, logging and each transfer after collection belong to chain of custody, and what scene practice asks of photographs, measurements and logs is set out in crime scene documentation standards.

Whether testing ties an item to a person or a place is a laboratory question, deferred to qualified experts. This page treats fabrication of evidence as a question about an item; where the issue is the narrative that describes the item, the work belongs with falsified reports.

An item that can no longer be found is read through the property and evidence record: the intake entry, the storage location, each movement the record shows, and the last entry before the item leaves it. Where the item was destroyed, the analysis reads any destruction authorization for who signed it, on what date and under which provision of policy. Any inventory or audit of the property room covering the period is read as the agency's own count of what it held.

The measure is the retention schedule that governed the item's category on the date it left the record: what that schedule required the agency to keep, for how long, and what it required before disposal. Recordings follow rules of their own under body-worn camera policy, and a recording that aged off is read on the same facts: its category, its period and its date.

Loss is never assumed to be deliberate. A disposal that followed the schedule is recorded as following it; a disposal outside it, or an item whose record stops with no entry explaining why, is measured against what the agency's own policy required. A departure found there is a practices finding on the handling of the item, and such a finding is distinguished from a constitutional question in the guide to generally accepted police practices.

Whether a hold appears in the property record or the camera system, when it was entered and by whom, is reported as the record shows it. Whether and when any obligation to preserve arose is a legal question for counsel, as is what follows from a loss. Questions about the integrity of a recording or a digital file, including editing and enhancement, are deferred to qualified experts in digital forensics and forensic video. Where a file is reopened long after trial, wrongful-conviction review draws on this reading of the property record.