The V.I. Police Department has destroyed a huge number of confiscated guns and other weapons from St. Croix evidence lockers in recent weeks, and on Friday, displayed dozens of bins full of filthy metal gun parts before they were crushed and shipped off the island. The push to destroy old weapons is a follow-up to the destruction of 337 weapons in July.
The department is emptying out old evidence to make room for construction of a new evidence storage facility at the Police Department’s Rainbow Building facility. At the Patrick Sweeney Police Headquarters on St. Croix Friday, Deputy Chief Christopher Howell and Police Chief Oakland Benta stood next to the massive pile of weapons debris — flanked by members of the police K-9 and Forensics squads who did the actual dirty, hard work of breaking up the weapons — and talked about the disposal push.
"There are 1,407 weapons in these bins, from pellet guns to assault rifles, all of which have an unpleasant history," Howell said. ""There are weapons here that date back to the late ’70s. … But the ugly days for these weapons has come to an end. What remains in our vaults now are only those weapons needed as evidence."
They have all been cut up so that no parts can be used again, Howell said.
The trove accounts for about 75 percent of weapons stored as evidence. The other 25 percent are still needed for ongoing trials and appeals, he said.
"Just because a case has gone to trial does not mean the evidence can be destroyed," he said. "There is an appeal process and the evidence has to be available to the court."
While the department planned to destroy the weapons anyway, the immediate impetus for doing so now was to get rid of them before building a new evidence facility so they would not all have to be re-logged, tagged, dated, categorized and so on and moved into the new facility for orderly storage, then later destroyed.
The new storage will have several sections, hardened to prevent unauthorized access. There will be new, state of the art DNA evidence storage freezers, two steel cages for storage, video surveillance cameras, and a generally much more controlled, orderly, state of the art system for handling the evidence, said Howell, who will be overseeing the evidence storage facility.
Asked about findings earlier this year in a U.S. Department of the Interior audit that some weapons were determined to be missing from evidence storage, Howell said in some cases, the missing weapons were not really missing but could not be found quickly.
"Going forward, any piece of evidence will be tagged, given an identification number and logged so it can be found immediately," he said.
Benta was more blunt.
"Yes, we did have some missing items," he said. "Yes, we have had problems before. Yes, we have had items stolen from the evidence storage, and yes, in some cases officers filled out the paperwork so poorly the items cannot be found based on their description."
But moving forward, the department is working to be transparent, to document every item thoroughly, and in the future will be better able to both quickly find items and if anything turns up missing, to investigate who had access, then identify and prosecute the culprits, he said.
