Poor management and lax oversight resulted in a Dallas IT employee deleting more than 8 million police department files, a city review released today has found.
About 4.1 million photos, videos, audio, case notes and other items — 7.5 terabytes of files — kept in a police storage archive have been permanently erased. Portions of 4.6 million files 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 on Thursday.
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Police and the Dallas District Attorney’s Office have identified 1,000 criminal cases as priorities in the file recovery process, according to the 131-page report. There are nearly 17,500 cases that may have lost files. So far, the IT department has sifted through 142 cases and recovered more than 140,000 files that were thought to be deleted.
You can read the full story from our media partners at The Dallas Morning News by clicking here.
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