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‘Pattern of negligence’ — Officials chide NYPD for decades of destroyed evidence in warehouse fire
By
Giulia Heyward
Published Jun 20, 2023
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By
Giulia Heyward
Published Jun 20, 2023
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City councilmembers and NYPD officials are quarreling over what decades of destroyed DNA evidence will actually cost New Yorkers — six months after a massive fire wiped out the contents of a police storage facility in Brooklyn.
During a Council hearing on Tuesday, members took the police department to task over its management of the facility and the potential harm the loss of evidence would bring to people seeking justice.
“There may be little momentum to catalog and safeguard these items in the unlikely possibility that someday they may be relevant to an investigator or attorney,” said Councilmember Gale Brewer, chair of the oversight and investigations committee. “But for those cases, or appeals, where individuals do need to take another look at a piece of physical or biological evidence, losses are devastating.”
A backup generator was still powering the Red Hook Erie Basin Auto Pound while the authorities tried to repair damages to the warehouse’s electrical grid from Hurricane Sandy more than a decade earlier. An electric blowout caused a three-alarm fire in December 2022 that destroyed all but eight barrels of evidence, according to the FDNY.
The NYPD previously said that repairs to the warehouse’s damaged electrical infrastructure were expected to begin shortly before the fire began. But the warehouse has been demolished since being scorched by the fire, the authorities said on Tuesday.
Councilmembers, criminal justice advocates and legal groups also voiced frustration that the NYPD “was not in a better position to track and compile a comprehensive inventory of the evidence stored at Erie Basin before the fire occurred,” according to Councilmember Kamillah Hanks, chair of the public safety committee.
“The loss and damage of evidence not only hampers the pursuit of justice, but also raises doubts about the integrity of the criminal investigations and potential wrong convictions,” Hanks said. “The absence of effective evidence preservation laws in New York further compounds these challenges.”
Police downplayed any tangible losses from the destroyed evidence. Michael Clarke, who heads the NYPD’s legislative affairs unit, said the warehouse contained evidence previously damaged by the hurricane, and that most of it had already been tested, even before that incident.
“The results of those DNA tests were not stripped by the fire,” Clarke said.
Clarke also said it’s “impractical” for the NYPD to comb through its inventory to see what particular evidence was stored at the warehouse, and that the department had already set up an expedited process for attorneys – or individuals – who want to know whether specific evidence was affected by the warehouse fire.
But advocates – including Elizabeth Felber, who heads the Legal Aid Society's wrongful convictions unit – said the warehouse incident follows “a pattern of negligence by the NYPD.”
“The unanswered questions about what steps, if any, they took to prevent this disaster and what property were destroyed – for us at least – are unfortunately not surprising, given NYPD’s repeated failure to produce vital evidence for cases where the conviction integrity units at our request to retest or test DNA,” she said.
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City Council
fdny
criminal justice
Giulia Heyward
Giulia Heyward is a breaking news reporter on the Day-Of desk. She previously worked at NPR, as a breaking news reporter, and the New York Times, as a reporting fellow on the national desk. Her work has also appeared in CNN, The Atlantic and Politico. Got a tip? Email [email protected] or more securely on signal at 917-715-1458.
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