VIDEO: The Next Step After The Evidence Room
CHICKASAW COUNTY, Miss. (WCBI) – Seizing; guns, narcotics, or money is part of the job for law enforcement.
It can happen during a traffic stop or drug bust or other crime.
“We keep all of our weapons, hand guns, riffles, assault riffles. We keep everything that we seize from drug dealers locked up in our evidence room. We also keep in our evidence room, in an area there, drug labs meth labs that we have found. We keep marijuana, pills, cocaine, heron,” said Monroe County Sheriff Cecil Cantrell.
Chickasaw County Sheriff James Meyers has been in law enforcement for more than 25 years. He says confiscating items may sound simple but that couldn’t be farther from the truth.
“Chain of custody is everything now in court. When something is picked up on the road from a suspect, that’s not the end of it it goes from there to the immediate supervisor, which most of the time is the chief deputy. If it’s narcotics we may in turn, turn that over to our narcotics officer and then they sign off on it. Then it’s stored in a safe in our narcotic office. There’s a chain of custody. We sign off from one person to the next until it gets to the crime lab or where it needs to be,” said Meyers.
The seized property sits in the evidence room until the suspect heads to court or pleads guilty.
If there’s a guilty verdict, Cantrell says the department makes good use of the seized items.
“We take those weapons and we sell those. We sell the vehicles. We take the money and what we do with it is, put it in a drug fund over at the chancery court and as we need to buy equipment, we let the drug dealer buy the equipment and anything else that we need,” said Cantrell.
The seized items must be locked up and inventoried.
“Myself or my Chief Deputy we go in and look at anything they need in there, work wise, to look at the drugs see where we’re at. We make sure everything is ready to go and that everything’s been sent to the crime lab. Just everything so when we go over and present a case to the grand jury, we have all our information and all of our evidence in the proper manner,” said Cantrell.
” Every officer has to follow policy, especially when you seize something from somebody. Six months down the road, depending on what happens during that court case, if it’s not nothing illegal it could be awarded back to that person. We have to keep up with it and make sure it’s in working order and be able to get our hands on it,” said Meyers.
After certain period of time, narcotics in the evidence room will receive a destruction order and be disposed of properly.
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