Updated at 7:55 p.m.: Revised to include more information.
The loss of files containing Dallas police investigative information during a city of Dallas computer system migration earlier this year may affect an unknown number of criminal cases, the Dallas County district attorney’s office said.
District Attorney John Creuzot notified defense lawyers of the data loss in a memo Wednesday. Dallas police and city officials are working to identify which cases are involved and have said the loss of data applied to cases that were investigated by detectives and that occurred before July 28, 2020, according to Creuzot’s memo.
“At this time, it is too soon to estimate how many cases will be affected and what the impact will be on those individual cases,” Creuzot said in a prepared statement sent to journalists.
The city of Dallas said Wednesday that the files were lost when an employee in the IT department was moving files from an online, cloud-based storage archive into an on-premise server in Dallas’ data center.
While transferring the files, “the employee failed to follow proper, established procedures, resulting in the deletion of the data files,” the city said in a prepared statement.
The potential impact on victims and defendants awaiting trial is unclear, as is whether any of the cases with missing data have resulted in plea bargains or guilty verdicts.
Private defense lawyers are waiting to hear if their cases are among those affected. Lawyers in the Dallas County Public Defender’s Office are combing through cases to see if they can pinpoint any they suspect were affected, Chief Public Defender Lynn Richardson said. Once cases are identified, lawyers could ask judges to dismiss cases or even overturn judgments.
City officials learned of the issue four months ago, on April 5, according to Creuzot’s memo, but only informed the district attorney’s office on Friday after prosecutors asked why pending cases were missing files.
The city said it didn’t alerted the district attorney’s office sooner 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.”
Creuzot said in his memo that Dallas police and the city told his office Friday that multiple terabytes of police data were lost in the migration. Creuzot’s office requested more information and received a response Monday afternoon, his memo states.
The response said 22 terabytes were deleted between March 31 and April 5. Officials were able to recover about 14 Terabytes of data, “but approximately 8 terabytes remain missing and are believed to be unrecoverable.”
One terabyte equals about 1,000 gigabytes of data. That’s the same as about four laptops containing 256 gigabytes each, about 250,000 photos or 400 hours worth of HD video streaming.
The city said the files consisted of images, video, audio, case notes and other items gathered by Dallas police. Files that aren’t opened for at least six months are moved into longer-term, cloud-based storage as part of an archive process, the city said. The data loss happened while the files were moving between servers.
“However, metadata for each data file was retained,” the city said. “Each of these record ‘stubs’ provides the file name, file size, data of last access, originating source and other information, allowing the city to maintain an auditable record of each deleted data file.”
Dallas Police Chief Eddie García issued a brief statement to The Dallas Morning News, calling the incident unfortunate and directed other questions to the city.
“We’ve been working with city [Information and Technology Services] to ascertain what occurred, why and how to ensure this doesn’t happen again” García said. “I have spoken to DA Creuzot, and we will be working through whatever issues arise.”
Creuzot said all prosecutors have been instructed to verify with detectives which pieces of evidence they uploaded to the district attorney’s evidence system and what, if any, evidence is missing.
“It is possible that much of the missing evidence had already been uploaded to this office’s data portal prior to April 5, which would have a limited impact to cases,” Creuzot said in his news release.
The city said the data files deleted from the archive are “believed permanently deleted and unrecoverable,” but added that Dallas police may have previously uploaded the original files into their case management system.
“The city is conducting a full audit of all files subject to archive deletion and will provide a full accounting of impact once the audit is complete,” Dallas officials said in a statement.
State law requires prosecutors to turn over to defense lawyers all evidence against a suspect, even if the prosecution doesn’t intend to use it. Defense lawyers will want to know if their cases are among the ones with missing data because information, and the lack of it, can affect a verdict or determine if a case will even make it to trial, said Amanda Branan, president of the Dallas Criminal Defense Lawyers Association.
“It can affect the outcome of these cases if there’s mitigating information in the data that’s missing,” Branan said.
Defense lawyer Danielle Uher offered an example in a shooting death case she has pending. In a body camera worn by a patrol officer, a witness is heard saying the victim held a gun, which could support a self defense claim from her client. But the patrol officer didn’t write a report, so the only way Uher knows about the witness’ assertion is because she watched all the body camera video footage that was supplied to her. If that video had been deleted, she wouldn’t know.
“They might have had videos that have exculpatory evidence and no one will know about it because they’re gone,” Uher said.
As affected cases are identified, lawyers could file motions to dismiss cases or set aside outcomes.
Lawyers in the Dallas County Public Defender’s Office are worried that the accused at the center of some of the lost data cases have already resolved their cases, Richardson said. Her office gets up to about 30,000 new cases each year.
If the accused in an affected case has already taken a plea deal or been convicted, the defense may ask the judge to set aside the judgments, Richardson said. Lawyers give advice and the accused make decisions based, in large part, on the information they’re given, so defense strategies might have been different had more information been available, Richardson said.
The city said that to prevent data losses from happening again, it has implemented a requirement that file transfers be handled by two people instead of one in order to ensure that no steps are missed. It also has changed configurations so that deleted files in storage will now go to a recycle bin for 14 days before the deletion becomes permanent.
The city said it is also “performing a top-to-bottom assessment” to enhance the system’s capabilities.
City Council member Cara Mendelsohn, who serves as the vice chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, said in a prepared statement that she was “very surprised” to learn of the data loss, especially since the news came from the district attorney’s office instead of city management.
Mendelsohn said she will add a briefing on the situation to an upcoming meeting of the council’s Government Performance and Financial Management committee. She said that she spoke with the city’s chief information officer, William Zielinski, and that “he is doing everything possible to address the situation in terms of data recovery and updated IT policies.”
“There is no city policy that requires reporting of critical IT incidents to the City Council and public as appropriate, and I look for development and adoption of such policy to improve transparency and accountability,” Mendelsohn said.
Staff Writer Cassandra Jaramillo contributed to this report.
