Internal APD audit shows sloppy record-keeping
Posted at: 07/31/2012 10:44 PM
| Updated at: 07/31/2012 11:31 PM
By: Mike Daniels, KOB Eyewitness News 4
It is something each and every officer carries, a gun.
A March 2012 Internal Albuquerque Police Department Firearms audit shows the department is not tracking its weapons as well as it should. In an examination of SWAT weapons, from a total of 166 firearms, a sample of 21 firearms shows that 14 were not in the official APD gun database.
A lot of officers carry a personal weapon that's not a problem. However the audit found in a small sample of 12 officers out of the 1,200 it employs, one of them didn’t have the necessary authorization form and range test on file. Last year officer Trey Economidy shot and killed someone with a personal weapon that hadn’t yet been cleared to use by the police department.
Albuquerque police explain.
"There weren't any police officers not registered with their personal weapon, we had the paperwork it was just in the wrong file," explained APD’s physical manager Aubrey Thompson.
The audit found 14 people in the database who were not APD employees. Of the 14, nine were inactive reserve officers, two worked for Albuquerque Fire Department but were not arson investigators. In 2009, one officer did not return his weapons when he retired. Since the audit, APD said, “If somebody leaves we now collect their guns during their exit interview."
The department did not have its guns in a centralized system and did not keep track of the guns as well as they should have.
Since the audit they are keeping track of the guns more accurately and in a central database.
"APD requested this audit so we could look for ways to improve the department," Thompson said.
You can read the full report, click here.
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