(Trigger warning: geeks & bureaucracy in eye-glazing levels)
I hate to sound like I’m giving them an “out” on this, but I have seen some reporting systems used by Federal land agencies. I can imagine that their incident reporting system is probably a group of forms each with about 100 fields defined as char(255) with names like “Text001”. At the end is probably a field titled “Notes” used to store output from an RTF field as a blob. Of course there would be a single, flat table used for every different type of form.
The “design” would be the culmination of months of deliberation by people who attend meetings for a living who decided that they just wanted the computer to have screens that look “just like the paper reports” so as not to confuse their clerks.
If the police can’t keep track of how much money they have, wouldn’t a defense attorney be able to argue that their sloppy record keeping may also have tainted or lost evidence of his or her client’s innocence?
Take me and one decent data scientist and we’d have text analyzers running over those columns and rows so fast it would make your head spin. And it would be running just fine on a 266 MHz Celeron (over clocked to 400 of course).
(Yes, I am being flippant, but I was raised on Perl and LAMP. Parsing text and wrangling databases is what I do on a weekend for fun. Which reminds me…)
My thoughts: If the city brings your stuff to court, can you hire it a lawyer and argue it isn’t competent to stand trial, perhaps by virtue of mental defect (aka not having a mind)? Actually, if they seize your stuff, do they even notify you if/when they bring charges against it?
They often seize items as soon as someone is arrested or suspected of a crime, regardless of if they are guilty.
In many cases, they will not notify you about your stolen belongings if you are found innocent or the stolen property does not pertain to the crime. You have to go out of your way to get them back. This can result in more court appearances.
From what I understand, they do not keep tabs on how much money they steal, so it is rare to get all of your money back. In many cases, hiring a lawyer to get back your stolen property costs more than the value of the property itself, so many people don’t even bother to try and get their stuff back.
