Police evidence for sale

By Abigail Goldman

Thursday, May 28, 2009 | 2 a.m.

Most of the items in Metro’s evidence vault are what you’d expect: stolen car stereos, bloody clothing from crime scenes, weapons seized during investigations.

But you wouldn’t have counted on the hot air balloon or the 34-foot-tall wooden bear sculpture or the box of cremated remains sitting on evidence vault director Sheri Bingham’s desk last week — anonymous, abandoned, turned over to police and waiting to be cataloged.

When stolen or lost property can’t be traced back to its owner, or a case is closed and the evidence is no longer useful to police, Bingham and her colleagues must find something to do with it. In the past they held public auctions two or three times a year; events that catered to a small crowd of regulars who didn’t buy much.

So last May, Metro made a decision to start selling the evidence online. For the past year the department has been handing over all its salable, expired evidence items to PropertyRoom.com, a California company that does online auctions for police departments across the country. The company picks up Metro’s merchandise, photographs it and sells it to an online audience. The company keeps half of the proceeds as payment, and the other half goes to Metro’s general fund. From the beginning of the fiscal year, in October, to date, proceeds have totaled about $16,000, Metro spokesman Bill Cassell said.

All police are protective about their evidence vaults, and Metro officers are no exception — they won’t reveal their vault’s address, its size or the number of items inside. They even decline to provide a detailed list of items sent to PropertyRoom.com for sale. The Web site is no help because the origin of the evidence being sold on the site is never disclosed. Bingham, however, was willing to give examples of things that have been submitted for online auction in the past: a gazebo, a generator, a treadmill, a power washer, innumerable power tools and handyman items, watches, costume jewelry by the bag, collectible coins, suitcases emptied of their contents, computers wiped clean of their data, digital cameras cleared of photos, tons of car stereos, a few washer and dryer sets, a few refrigerators, strollers, couches and electronics from any era, including a Betamax player, which was last cool or useful in the mid-’70s.

“Obviously we don’t have the Hope Diamond,” Bingham said. “We usually have what we hope is a diamond.”

The stolen hot air balloon never made it to auction. Its owner eventually claimed it. The 34-foot bear became part of a civil dispute, so the department didn’t have to deal with it. Sometimes, people turn in money they’ve found — and if nobody claims it in 90 days, the finder can become the keeper. People have turned in $4,000 at a time, Bingham said. People have also turned in found $20 bills.

In the end, if leftover evidence can’t be sold, it has to be thrown away or, if possible, donated to someone or some organization. It would cost the department too much money to store useless items. This doesn’t mean everything is disposed of, however. Evidence from unsolved cases, homicides in particular, will sit on vault shelves for years, if not forever.

And some things Bingham just won’t accept.

“They tried to impound a live snake one time, but we weren’t taking it.”