Page 377 - NIXBOOK

PROPERTY & EVIDENCE ROOM CUSTODIAN

One day early in my career, one of my sergeants caught me a moment of naïve vulnerability. “Hey Nick, how you would like to
be…. the…. custodian in charge of the property and evidence room?” For some reason I said sure. It was a regrettable decision. I
quickly realized that I had been suckered into a much bigger job than I had imagined, once I realized how disorganized all the
evidence and paperwork was, but I was stuck there because nobody else wanted to take over. Like all my other collateral duties,
I took care of this one in my free time when I wasn’t patrolling. So whenever the 911 dispatchers needed me to go do something
while I was doing evidence work I’d simply lock up the room and get back to it later. I usually spent several hours a week in
there trying to organize several years’ worth of bad filing.

The evidence room was set up in the doctor’s office old operating room where he would perform minor operations, so there
were still light green tiles on the floor and halfway up the walls. For a little bit of decoration, I hung a license plate on the wall
that I had taken from a lawbreaker; the plate was not an official state-issued plate but instead came from the church called
“Kingdom of Heaven.”

Previously all of the property and evidence had been overseen by whichever officer was working as the detective and none of
them ever enjoyed that extra work. It didn’t take me long to regret my decision and as the months turned into years I regretted
it more and more but I did the best I could. I developed a new filing system using a lot of boxes and notebook binders.
It took several months to clean out the evidence room but I managed to eventually get everything squared away enough to pass
our department’s first ever State Accreditation, which was a comprehensive three day audit of absolutely everything in our
department that we had to prepare for during the previous year. I also kept all the property and evidence inventoried well
enough to get re-accredited a year later without any problems. Both accomplishments were pretty a pretty significant testament
to my organizational skills, yes, thank you very much.