A stuffed dog, a samurai sword and 42,439 weapons: in an NYPD basement
Tens of thousands of pieces of evidence and lost property arrive at the Manhattan Property Clerk's office. A small group of officers and civilians must cope with the constant pressure.
Charmain Carryl walked purposefully through the dark, cavernous room.
She walked into a shadowy aisle of rolling library stacks and scanned the shelves until her eyes fell on the object of her pursuit: a samurai sword.
The sheathed knife, an identification tag attached to the gold handle, is just an oddity kept in the basement of the New York Police Department headquarters.
The Manhattan Property Clerk's office, as it is known, is an underground repository for lost property and the tangible aftermath of crime and misfortune. Ms Carryl has been a police evidence and property specialist there for more than a decade. Thousands of people walk through One Police Plaza every day, unaware that an archive that makes the criminal justice system possible is just one story beneath their feet.
Nearly every item that passes through the borough's 22 boroughs must go to the basement to be numbered and cataloged to be preserved as evidence for a trial or await its rightful owner. Some objects come from crime scenes. Others were brought in after being left on a park bench or sidewalk.
Ms. Carryl oversees the meticulous accounting. She keeps track of the expected – guns, drugs, DNA samples – and the bizarre: a gold dental grill, a half-drunk bottle of Smirnoff and a weathered brown suitcase. It is filled with muskets.
On this Thursday afternoon, Mrs. Carryl put the sword back in its proper place, brushed the dust from her long blue skirt, and walked through the maze of stacks. To her right, an ornately carved wooden stick stood next to a stack of umbrellas. At the end of another aisle was a plastic bag containing a single subway coin minted in the 1990s. Nearby was a plush dog with red ears that has been there since 2008.
But police face the same problem many New Yorkers face: a lack of storage space. Even this cavernous basement is only so big.
To make room, employees routinely inventory which items meet strict criteria for disposal. Two white sheets of paper pinned to a bulletin board remind us: Lost property worth at least $5,000 must remain for three years. This also applies to weapons used in crimes. And any evidence related to a murder, sex crime, arson, explosion or internal affairs investigation has a simple note: “Never destroy.”
Sergeant Surabi Consuegra, the head of the clerk's office, keeps careful track of the figures. Standing next to Mrs. Carryl, Sergeant Consuegra read the data. She said 60,733 items came into the clerk's office last year, an average of about 235 per day.
Then she cleared her throat and smiled. Mrs. Carryl played a drum with her palms against a filing cabinet.
A total of 146,001 items had been cleared for destruction, Sergeant Consuegra said.
“Last year was a very good year,” she says. She emphasized the last digit of the count: “That '1' matters.”
But the stock is constantly growing. During business hours, five days a week from 8 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., a procession of officers passes through doors that resemble those on the Death Star. The clerk's office has a rolling schedule for the grounds to help deal with the inexorable accumulation of items. The officers carry clear, sealed plastic bags filled with what was left behind when the laws were broken.
Before Ms. Carryl's time, the basement housed the .38 caliber revolver used to kill John Lennon in 1980 and the bullets that shot mob boss Paul Castellano five years later.
The only time the basement was empty was most likely in 1973, when the police station opened, a fourteen-storey building designed in the imposing brutalist style of the time. Mayor John Lindsay said at the time that the police department had outgrown their former center on Center Street and that the new building would give them more space.
It did not take long. Overwhelmed with items, the clerk's office put up for auction in 1981 more than 250 unclaimed items, including a $5,500 diamond-encrusted Cartier pocket watch discovered during a narcotics raid in the Bronx, the New York Daily News reported year. Another auction in 1986 included a 1949 Bentley, a 1981 Audi and a vehicle whose value was reduced by bullet holes and dried blood.
The police are still pushing unclaimed property is auctioned off, but not before every effort has been made to locate the owner. Last year, Ms Carryl helped track down a lost mobile phone belonging to a French journalist visiting New York. After lengthy verification, she had the device shipped back to him across the Atlantic Ocean.
Part of the stock reduction will naturally take place. Directly inside the Death Star doors is a waiting room for people to pick up their belongings. (Wallets, keys and cell phones are among the most common.) When called, everyone heads to a long counter to check in. A fence separates them from the employees, whose documents are illuminated by a single task light.
Some items have been in the basement for decades. Many can never leave.
A few steps beyond the doors lies the dusty domain of Sergeant Consuegra, where items arrive for an initial inspection. The clear evidence bags cannot be opened while in the registry's possession: contaminated evidence can mean the difference between conviction and acquittal.
On this day, Sergeant Consuegra watched as Eugenio Ramos, an evidence specialist, examined a black toy gun. He then reviewed the associated paperwork to check for errors. Whenever he discovers a mistake, Mr. Ramos must return the evidence or property to the police station where it came from, and the process begins again.
“This is quality control,” Sergeant Consuegra said, adding, “You can't break that chain of custody.”
Items that pass inspection are assigned a number that determines where they are stored. The most sensitive – weapons, drugs and money – are kept in the two rooms of the basement vault.
Tricia Samuel-Williams, an evidence specialist, is one of the few people who has the combination. On this Thursday she turned the lock and swung the door open.
Inside, rows of ceiling-high shelves were filled with 42,439 firearms. On one shelf was a faded brown backpack containing ten Smith & Wessons, their wooden handles and chrome barrels still polished to a mirror finish. The revolvers have been in the basement since 1978. One of them was used in a murder.
They should all stay here, Ms. Samuel-Williams said. Every weapon used in a murder, and the weapons found in it, cannot go away. That includes firearms linked to crimes with outstanding warrants – where the shooter has never been arrested or the case remains unsolved. Every year she goes through the inventory to see whether cases have been closed and room can be made for a new weapon.
Next door are narcotics. The room remains at a comfortable temperature of 28 degrees Celsius and the temperature and humidity are controlled through a complex air exchange system. Money used to commit crimes also flows through here. To make the notes unusable, they are all perforated with a number and the word 'PROOF'.
Despite the lack of space, some items are too valuable to get rid of.
On the other side of the basement is the 9/11 room. There, cardboard boxes contained pagers, Motorola flip phones, Casio watches and American flags covered in the rubble of Ground Zero. An invoice is attached to each plastic zip lock bag detailing any attempt made to locate the owners of the item.
Mrs. Carryl has been watching over them since 2013. Once a year, around September 11, a woman calls Mrs. Carryl to see if her brother's gold ring with an emerald stone has turned up. Every time, Mrs. Carryl says no. Still, she searches – even for a single gemstone in case the gold band should melt in the fire.
She puts an orange sticky note on the wall above her desk with the names of the woman and her brother, along with a description of the ring and a phone number.
One day she hopes to report it with good news.