From 14-year-old cake to Madonna’s sexy sweater... it’s the great police jumble sale
And let’s not forget a rotten potato and compost for plants
IT’s the evidence that proves – beyond all reasonable doubt – that our police officers are in dire need of a tidy-up.
Police Scotland are carrying out Operation Deep Clean, a once-in-ageneration de-cluttering exercise.
Officers across the country are trawling through their productions departments – storerooms where evidence from cases stretching back decades is kept.
As well as the usual suspects, such as replica samurai swords and bricks thrown through windows, they have found weird and wonderful items including a 14-year-old scone and a sparkly top worn by Madonna.
Officers even found gold coins worth £25,000 and a rotten potato.
The clear-out is focused on material gathered for evidence as well as lost or stolen property.
Police Scotland were given special permission from the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service last year to undertake the mammoth task of sorting out – and disposing of – around 1.5million items from its evidence stores.
Superintendent Andrew Allan said more than 970,000 items have been processed since the roll-out of the operation in January and it is thought the project will be completed within the next few months.
Officers and civilian employees were asked to use discretion over how best to get rid of productions – whether they might be saved for donation or sale or destroyed.
And when they came across a gold cropped sweater together with images of the garment being worn by Madonna, they realised it had to be saved.
Mr Allan, of Police Scotland’s criminal justice division, said: ‘We had the item in our evidence store from a very old fraud case, well over a decade. The jumper was worn in the film Who’s That Girl.
‘The evidence in the inquiry was suspicious so we checked with an auctioneer and there were a couple of other items they weren’t sure about but the provenance of this one was properly authenticated.
‘We put it to a specialist sale and it sold for around £5,000 at auction. If it hadn’t been for it being in a box with photos of Madonna wearing it the top might have been chucked out – we can’t expect the Antiques Roadshow to check everything.’
In another example, a family understood to be living in Wales received good fortune after a safe deposit box filled with £25,000-worth of krugerrands – South African gold coins – was found.
The production had been stored as potential evidence but when it was confirmed to be a lawfully-held possession the relatives of the deceased owner were traced and presented with the bounty.
Bizarrely, among the items processed so far was a scone that had been kept in a cupboard since 2001. Mr Allan said: ‘It could have been thrown at somebody, it could have been stolen, it could have been taken for forensic teeth examination – it could be anything. ‘It was a bit old and wrinkly. ‘Another one that was a mess was a production in an assault – a potato that had had long metal nails pushed through it and had been thrown.
‘After lying there for five years, all that was really left was potato soup and rusty nails.’
Equipment seized from illegal cannabis farms has also been given a legitimate new use. For example, expensive UV lights used to grow plants have been gifted to school biology departments and agricultural colleges, while unopened bags of high quality compost used by cannabis farmers have been donated for school gardening projects.
A variety of weapons – including enough poor-quality samurai swords to ‘kit out several Hollywood movies’ – were in the stores and while the majority have been destroyed, the knives have been saved for a special arts project.
They will join thousands of blades being collected throughout the UK and handed over to a Shropshire company which will form a 25ft sculpture dubbed Knife Angel.
Mr Allan said: ‘There had been a procedural hiccough in all the legacy forces with regards to disposal policies for items coming to us, so when the eight came together as Police Scotland we were able to release some of these things. Many are low-level items like bricks used in vandalism or stolen pipes and some will be stolen property but we have never been able to trace who they’ve been stolen from.
‘Other things might have been used in a crime and ordered to be forfeited by the court. We need to keep them for the case and some of these can be in court a year or two down the line but some of the backlog goes back more than a decade.’