Police work to change procedures after lost evidence

Department says it needs more staff to ensure proper and timely processing

The Santa Fe Police Department has begun to make changes to its evidence-handling procedures after a court-ordered audit conducted in August by a Santa Fe County Sheriff ’s Office crime scene technician showed the department was not following its own policies on evidence tracking, storing and handling.

The issues were brought to light after the loss of several pieces of evidence in the murder case against Christopher Garcia, who was accused of killing his girlfriend, Selena Valencia, in 2017. Prosecutors agreed to allow Garcia to plead no contest to a charge of voluntary manslaughter and serve a 12-year prison sentence because it was too risky to go to trial with evidence missing, they said during a court hearing.

“We took a hard look at it to see what worked, what failed and what can be improved on right here and right now,” said Deputy Chief Ben Valdez.

All evidence technicians and custodians were trained in evidence-handling protocols, Valdez said. Supervisors must now validate any items being submitted into evidence to make sure the process is being done properly.

“If any of those items are identified to be either improperly labeled, they left a box unfulfilled or if there is some information that was unclear, we gave our property custodians and technicians the authority to say, ‘Hey, full stop, this needs to be corrected,’ ” Valdez said.

They can now ask officers to come in immediately to correct any mistakes, he said.

Valdez also said they need more sta≠ to make sure evidence is processed in a timely manner.

What they have found, he said, is that since there are no evidence custodians and technicians working on the weekend, the employees who come in on Mondays are overloaded with work. They want to hire more employees so that the evidence facility is staffed seven days a week.

A full audit of the department’s evidence-handling procedures will be released sometime after the new year, Valdez said.