Earlier this month, the Dallas Police Department (DPD) admitted that it had managed to accidentally lose 8TB of data, including images, video, audio, and case notes related to active investigations and legal proceedings.
As Gizmodo reports, the amount of data initially lost was 22TB when a data migration of the DPD network drive went horribly wrong through human error. Thankfully, 14TB of that data has been retrieved, but the Dallas District Attorney’s Office has confirmed the other 8TB is unrecoverable. The lost data is associated with cases for offenses committed before July 28 last year, but it’s unclear how many court cases this is going to negatively impact.
The loss of occurred over the course of six days between March 31 and April 5. For some reason, the DPD did not inform the District Attorney’s Office until Aug. 6—four months after the incident, when the DA started asking questions about missing files. As to why the data got deleted, the official explanation is that an employee of the City of Dallas Information and Technology Services Department (ITS) “failed to follow proper, established procedures,” and clearly nobody was supervising the work otherwise it may have been spotted after day one of the migration.
As Fox 4 News reports, the Dallas mayor has called for an investigation by the city council into how this data loss was allowed to happen, especially when the data is so important for ongoing investigations and legal proceedings. Local Councilman Adam McGough said, “Between the two communities that we have on this, and the mayor’s leadership on this, we will address it and we will figure out what happened, and we’ll figure out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again, at least as best as best we can.”
