Dallas’ IT department lacked adequate policies and procedures as well as planning and oversight, resulting in a mass deletion of police department files this year, a report released Thursday revealed.
Here’s five things to know about the findings:
How did it happen?
A city IT employee, who was fired in August, was supposed to move archived police files from online storage to a physical city drive starting March 31. The transfer, which was scheduled to take five days, had been initiated to cut costs of storing the information on a cloud server, according to the report.
But the process was canceled about halfway through after the employee deleted 22 terabytes. The city said it recovered all but 7.5 terabytes.
The employee “insufficiently assessed and documented” how risky it was to move the data in the way that he did, the report said. The review also found that the employee apparently ignored warnings in the city’s software system that he was deleting files instead of moving them from online storage to the city server, according to the report.
Three IT managers signed off on the data migration, the report says, but either “didn’t understand the actions to be performed, the potential risk of failure, or negligently reviewed” what the employee was undertaking.
Dallas has no set rules for how employees should back up archived data. It also has never implemented the practices spelled out in the city’s data management strategy document, which is now out of date. The report concluded that the city has not prioritized best data management practices, including by ensuring employees are properly trained.
What’s missing
The city initially said 22.5 terabytes of archived data, involving cases dating back to 2018, were deleted in separate instances. But the report has narrowed that to 20.7 terabytes.
About 4.1 million photos, videos, audio, case notes and other items — or 7.5 terabytes of files — kept in a police storage archive have been permanently erased. Another 4.6 million files — or roughly 13 terabytes — are missing, and some could still be restored if the original copies are found on police laptops, cameras and other devices, according to the report released by the city’s IT department.
What’s the impact
Police and the Dallas District Attorney’s Office have identified 1,000 criminal cases as priorities in the file-recovery process, according to report, and nearly 17,500 cases may have been impacted. So far, the IT department has reviewed 142 cases and recovered more than 140,000 files that were thought to be permanently lost.
The files came from several police department divisions, but the majority involved evidence gathered by the family violence unit, the report said. The audit confirmed that the city’s most violent crime cases were not affected.
Although city secretary files were also thought to be affected, the forensic audit determined that was not the case.
What’s changed
Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax outlined new policies in an August memo, requiring two IT employees to oversee the movement of any data and instituting a 14-day waiting period before files are permanently deleted. Broadnax also said city elected leaders will be informed of any data compromises within two hours of his leadership team learning about them. There was no such requirement before.
What’s next
The city plans to bring in a law firm to oversee an outside investigation of the incident. Council member Cara Mendelsohn has said she hopes to have the recommendation for an outside firm on the Oct. 27 City Council agenda for a vote. The law firm would hire a computer forensic company to determine what happened and how to prevent future data losses.
The FBI’s Dallas bureau also is helping the police department determine if the electronic evidence was deleted on purpose after a previous police investigation found no apparent criminal intent. The police probe, however, couldn’t prove or refute if the files were intentionally erased.
