An industrial strength shredder will soon erase reminders of the past for some area residents.
“There are probably a lot of Sweet Home residents that still live here that will sleep better once this shredding takes place because the last records of their youthful indiscretions will be gone,” Police Chief Bob Burford said.
In a new storage building at the Sweet Home Police Department are stacks of boxes full of records dating back to the 1940s. At the moment, those stacks represent about one-third of the department’s records.
“One box might have 15 years of records,” Chief Burford said. In more recent years, “we have 15 boxes representing one year of records.”
The standard for writing reports has increased over the years, Chief Burford said. One drunken driving report from the 1950s wasn’t even a half page. Now, a standard drunken driving report will easily include 25 pages.
“Simply, with the volume of paperwork that modern police work creates, we’ve run out of room for storage,” Chief Burford said. Preserving the records would be preferable, but buying the technology and personnel time to save them electronically would incur high costs.
State archives law requires police to keep most records for seven years, Chief Burford said. “We’re going to be more conservative yet.”
The department will preserve a minimum of 10 years of records, although exactly how many years is being debated.
“I’ve seen too many times in my career when an investigation will come up and being able to look at old reports gives some insight into the current investigation,” Chief Burford said.
Communications Supervisor Penny Leland is busy going through all of the records and keeping the records the police are required to keep longer, primarily homicides for at least 75 years. The department also is keeping all death investigations and records of sex crimes.
Last week she went to work on records dating back to 1987, the first year Sweet Home’s records were computerized. Using a database, she is able to search for and find all death investigations, so she knows where to find them among the physical records.
“If it was a death investigation, we’re just going to keep it,” Chief Burford said. The reason is that a death investigation may turn into homicide investigation many years later as new evidence comes to light. Right now, the department has reopened a death investigation from the 1970s because it received new evidence it may have been an intentional death.
Eventually, the department will maintain all of its records digitally. Starting in about 1999, the department began including the entirety of its reports within its database. That can be downloaded to high-capacity storage media, such as compact discs and digital video discs.
“Once we get down to the old, old records that we want to keep, we may convert those to some electronic format,” Chief Burford said. The department will shred everything else.
“Some of this stuff’s really interesting,” Chief Burford said. “There’s no two ways about it.”
Inside the boxes are piles of half-page reports.
“I had to sit down and go through the ’86 cases and the ’87 cases,” Leland said. “I’d catch myself reading these old cases.”
In one decades-old case, boys were shooting a .22 inside city limits. They were told not to do it any more.
Now, “if they were shooting a .22, the officer would have little to do but arrest,” Chief Burford said. That highlights one of the ways law enforcement has changed.
“Officers could feel fairly confident in dealing with juveniles at the time, if they were taken home and parents told what had taken place, there would be some sort of punishment,” Chief Burford said. “Now, a lot of parents have abdicated these duties … and more formal action has to take place.”
Looking back, “I don’t see near the issues of the ‘neighbors are too loud'” or other neighborhood complaints, Chief Burford said. “I think people talked to their neighbors more then and worked out their differences without law enforcement involvement.”
People are quicker to call in law enforcement now, Chief Burford said.
The records had been stored in the City Hall basement where they some were damaged in the February 1996 flood. Later they were moved into an unused jail cell and then a shed behind City Hall.