A technology failure that caused the loss of some 15 months of dash camera footage for all 130 Hamilton County Sheriff's Office deputies was not reported to the Hamilton County District Attorney's office for a month to six weeks.
A letter acknowledging the software failure was hand-delivered to the county's top prosecutor last week.
It's not that District Attorney General Neal Pinkston could rush over and fix the problem, but surely some secondary measures about the missing information could have been taken.
As it is, footage between Oct. 25, 2018, and Jan. 23, 2020, is gone and apparently cannot be recovered. And the district attorney's office must now make a case-by-case analysis to determine whether any potential prosecutions can go forward.
As Hamilton County Sheriff Jim Hammond himself said, it "couldn't happen at a worse time."
In the recent past, the sheriff's office saw one of its own, now former deputy Daniel Wilkey, charged with six counts of sexual battery, two counts of rape and nine counts of official oppression. And the county itself has been under fire for its lack of adherence to open records law.
One lawsuit has been filed against the county over open records, an attorney has said the county typically slow-walks record requests to run out the statute of limitations on cases, a citizen recently accused the county of stonewalling record requests, and the county recently admitted records the Times Free Press sought had been destroyed.
Unlike many private business, where companies often have to make do with the technology they have, government offices often get what they request when they request it and replace it before they ever need replacements. That's why it's shocking to us that the sheriff's office relied on a 13-year-old server.
When department officials determined in mid-January the server was moving slowly, it also was learned the software hadn't properly been backing up copies of data over certain periods of time. Attempts by internal information technology employees, by the vendor and by an outside vendor for "catastrophic data recovery" ultimately could not retrieve the missing data.
Hammond said video from "hot-button cases" already had been downloaded and was thus preserved, but before the failure was made public, several requests for footage during the lost time were made. Deputies after the failure were told to upload their dash camera footage to their cameras, which could store it until a new server was in place.
A new server was put in place by Jan. 23, but the DA's office wasn't informed until last week. We hope any future problems of this magnitude would find the sheriff's office immediately contacting their partners in prosecution. We also would expect any new system purchase would include more than adequate back-up systems and service guarantees by the vendor. Anything less is unacceptable.