The Windsor Police Service is explaining how $25,000 worth of cocaine went missing from its vault back in 2013.
A Windsor judge recently made it known in a ruling that evidence from the case he was presiding over had gone missing, and that Windsor police could not account for it.
Chief Al Frederick says an officer regularly purges the lock-up of old evidence no longer needed, and 250 g of the drug was misplaced.
"It got mixed up with another case," he explains. "There's 168 cases, all the exhibits, going into a big huge bin, and they pulled something off a shelf and destroyed it without it being earmarked for destruction."
Frederick says there was record of the drugs going into the vault in the summer of 2013 after an arrest, there was a purge that September, and then when the evidence was needed in November, it was discovered to be missing and reported immediately by the officer who oversees the vault.
He's confident it was destroyed and not stolen because of the police service's spotless track record in evidence keeping. In ten years, the chief says there have been 4,500 items that have gone in and out of that vault and only this once has anything been reported missing.
Since 2013, the Windsor Police Service has installed 12 cameras in the vault area, adding to the one it had previously. There are now two officers with access to the vault instead of just one. And they no longer transport drugs in and out of the lock-up for news conferences.
