Digital Forensics Dispatch

Dallas Police Seek FBI Assistance with Potential Criminal Evidence Destruction

September 14, 2021

Recently reporter Kevin Krause reported on an incident in The Dallas Morning News that has prompted the Dallas Police Department to reach out to the FBI for assistance. The department needs help reviewing the circumstances of an incident in which approximately 22 terabytes of digital evidence were deleted by a city employee. Representatives for the FBI have agreed to assist the department in looking into the incident to help determine if a crime was committed.

The incident occurred in late March when the former city employee was tasked with moving about 35 terabytes of digital evidence collected by the police department from cloud storage to a local storage location the city had available. The process was projected to take approximately five days. However, at some point, the proper established procedure was deviated from and a large portion of the data was lost. Recovery efforts were put into place but more than 7 terabytes of the data are still lost at this time.

The city also plans to conduct an outside forensic audit of the situation and is in the process of selecting an outside law firm to conduct it. The law firm would be responsible for hiring a digital forensic company to assist in establishing exactly what happened and how similar situations could be avoided in the future.

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