At least five top city of Dallas officials knew that a raft of police evidence had been lost in a data transfer months before the mayor, district attorney and other elected officials were told, the city confirmed Thursday.
Assistant City Manager Jon Fortune said in a prepared statement Thursday that he, City Manager T.C. Broadnax, Police Chief Eddie García and former City Council member Jennifer Staubach Gates were all told about the data loss not long after the files went missing.
“No other notifications were made at the time,” the city said.
But late Thursday, Gates, who was the chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee at the time and left the council in June after hitting the council’s term limit, said she learned of the data loss from Chief Financial Officer Elizabeth Reich.
Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson said in a memo sent Thursday to City Council members Adam McGough and Cara Mendelsohn that he was “blindsided” by District Attorney John Creuzot’s announcement Wednesday that the city had lost 8 terabytes of police evidence data, potentially affecting an unknown number of criminal cases.
Johnson wrote that the news “was especially stunning because this problem apparently has been known to some City of Dallas officials for months.”
Fortune said the city’s IT Department told García and police command about the data loss in April. He said he was informed about the matter after García was told and that he then notified Broadnax. Soon after, while officials were still under the belief that “the data could be recovered,” Gates was briefed on the issue, Fortune said.
D.A. was only told of missing files Friday
Creuzot told defense attorneys in a memo on Wednesday that his office only learned of the date loss on Friday after prosecutors asked why pending cases were missing files.
City officials said in a written statement Wednesday that an IT department employee lost the files while moving them from an cloud-based storage archive to a city server. The employee didn’t “follow proper, established procedures,” the city said.
Creuzot said in his memo Wednesday that 22 terabytes of data were initially deleted by the city between March 31 and April 5, and that all except eight terabytes had been recovered.
In his memo to McGough and Mendelsohn, who lead the council’s Public Safety Committee and the Government Performance and Financial Management Committee, respectively, Johnson said he wanted the two to call an open special meeting to publicly discuss how the police files were deleted and what’s being done about it.
“The people of Dallas deserve answers,” Johnson wrote.
But city executives are tentatively planning to have the meeting next week behind closed doors.
Fortune told The Dallas Morning News that plans are in the works to brief the council next Wednesday during executive session. That would bar discussions from being open to the public — a necessity, he said, because the lost evidence involves security and legal issues.
Why was only one elected official notified?
When asked why Gates was the only elected official briefed about the deleted evidence in April, Fortune said it was because “we really didn’t have an understanding of the magnitude of what it was.”
“At the time, we believed the data could be recovered and at that point it was still being assessed and determined what the next level of notice should be,” he said.
Tristan Hallman, the mayor’s spokesman, confirmed Thursday that Johnson did not know Gates was briefed on the matter months ago.
Gates said that after Reich, the chief financial officer, told her about the file deletions, she had the impression that the amount of data lost was still being quantified.
The former council member said she assumed other elected officials were being told as well and didn’t know until this week that she was the only one informed.
“My concern was that an investigation be done and that this wasn’t an intentional act,” she said. “I was told an internal investigation was done and the person that made the error was held accountable.”
Gates said that she wasn’t sure what happened to the employee but that said she’d been assured the evidence wasn’t lost on purpose. She said she knew it was an ongoing investigation when she left office.
Mendelsohn and McGough told The News on Thursday that they were working to figure out when a public meeting could occur and what the format would be.
May take weeks to know scope of deletions
McGough said it could be up to 40 days before city staff are able to determine the full scope of what is missing.
“They’ve done an initial assessment, and now they are doing an audit to find out what specifically each piece was,” he said.
Mendelsohn said she wants to consider a policy that would require serious IT incidents to be reported quickly to the council and the public. The city has no such policy now, she said.
The city said Wednesday that the files consisted of images, video, audio, case notes and other items gathered by Dallas police, and that those that are still missing are believed to be unrecoverable.
On Thursday, the city said that the incident is under investigation and that officials “will determine what disciplinary action is appropriate for any involved employees.” Fortune declined to say if any employees have already been disciplined.
The city added that the incident is classified as a data compromise, which requires notification to Dallas’ executive leadership team.
Chief told his department about loss in April
García, who on Wednesday called the incident “unfortunate,” sent an email to all department employees on April 19 warning staff about the missing files. The email did not disclose how much evidence was missing.
“IT Services have received reports of missing files or folders from network drives,” read the email, which was obtained by The News. “All departmental personnel are asked to please check to see if any files or folders are missing from their network drives.”
He added that anyone missing files or folders should follow steps in an attached document to restore them.
The district attorney’s office wasn’t told sooner about the lost data because “it was our intention to fully evaluate whether the data was recoverable or not [and] to know the full extent of the problem if any,” the city said in its statement.
Creuzot said the data was linked to cases opened before July 28, 2020, and that it was too soon to say how many cases would be affected.
