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Top City Officials Take ‘Full Responsibility’ for Not Revealing Police Data Loss

Why did it take four months for prosecutors and City Council members to learn about the possible deletion of police investigation files?
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Kelsey Shoemaker

City Manager T.C. Broadnax said in a memo to City Council members late last week that “there should have been better communication” between the city officials who knew about a bungled data transfer that potentially affects an unknown number of felony criminal cases — and the elected City Council members and Dallas County prosecutors who didn’t.

Broadnax and other top city officials have known for months that an employee in Dallas’ IT department accidentally lost terabytes of data from police investigations. The mayor, most City Council members, and the Dallas County District Attorney’s office only learned about this last week, after prosecutors asked about missing files in pending cases. DA John Creuzot then broke the news to defense attorneys and to everyone else.

“In retrospect,” Broadnax writes in his memo, this was not an ideal way for the news to spread, “and we accept full responsibility.” But “[t]here was no malice here, nor was there any intent to delay notification to the District Attorney’s (DA) Office and City Council. At the time, we believed the data could be recovered and of the 22 Terabytes of information in question, 14 Terabytes were retrieved.”

The city has put some new policies in place to prevent something like this from happening again, requiring that there be a two-person team for data transfers and that City Council members and the mayor be notified about such data losses promptly.

Depending on what exactly was lost, which is still being sorted out, the snafu could lead to some pending or already resolved criminal cases being thrown out. Broadnax said in his memo that the city is working with the DA’s office to “identify which cases have been affected, if any.” The Dallas Morning News has reported that a jailed murder suspect set to go on trial last week will be released on bond while attorneys determine whether any evidence is missing in his case.

City Council members will talk about the data loss behind closed doors Wednesday. A public hearing with the City Council’s public safety committee and government performance and financial management committees is set for Thursday; it was called at the behest of the mayor, who said he was “blindsided” by news of the data loss.

“This is a very serious matter,” Mayor Eric Johnson said in a memo last week. “Public safety is the bedrock of our city government. Missing evidence could have major consequences for pending criminal cases, which could leave victims without justice and undermine our efforts to build a safer city. The people of Dallas deserve answers.”

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