An internal city audit says Cincinnati police have been playing catch-up with their own evidence, flagging sloppy labeling, missing signatures and long-delayed cleanups in the department’s property room that could come back to bite prosecutors in court. Inspectors reviewed the Court Property Unit and test-checked 50 guns, cash stashes, shell casings and drug seizures; roughly 30% of that sample was missing required signatures or proper labels, one of 16 weaknesses the review identified in the system.
According to a report by the City of Cincinnati's internal auditors, those 16 deficiencies “could negatively affect prosecutions” and point to shaky oversight both at district intake points and inside the central Court Property Unit. Auditors said officers often mislabel items, forcing Court Property Unit staff to ask for corrections, and a notable share of those requests went unresolved during the review period. The report urges the department to centralize correction logs, clear out a backlog of items earmarked for destruction that dates to mid-2025, and put many categories of property on a regular inventory schedule instead of leaving checks to chance.
As reported by WKRC Local 12, the department told auditors it is juggling roughly 124,000 items, and that staffing limits how often it can physically account for every last piece of property. A spokesperson for the city manager’s office told the station the administration plans “a material investment in the forthcoming recommended budget” to tackle the findings. Defense attorney Jay Clark told Local 12 the audit “gives the defense somewhere to look for chain of custody issues,” while Council member Scottie Johnson said the report “doesn’t concern me” so long as the problems get fixed.
How the audit says the system slipped
The auditors note CPD rolled out the Axon evidence-management platform in March 2025 and trained officers on it later that year, but say the tech upgrade did not solve basic process and oversight gaps. According to the city audit, there is no centralized dataset of corrections, some required quarterly inventories were skipped in 2025 and auctions for surplus items have not taken place since 2018, which adds pressure on already crowded storage areas. Internal auditors recommend naming district-level property liaisons, creating centralized correction logs that can be reviewed for trends, and setting a regular cadence for auctions and destructions so the backlog does not keep piling up.
What officials say they'll do
CPD’s written responses, attached to the audit, say the department “agrees” with most of the recommendations and is assigning property liaison supervisors at each district to tighten oversight. The department pushed back on three findings related to background-screening measures, arguing those steps could conflict with union rules. WKRC Local 12 reports the city manager’s office says the administration intends to fund the fixes in the recommended budget and that CPD will follow through on the audit’s action items. Officials say the changes should help the Court Property Unit run inventories more consistently and finally start chipping away at the destruction backlog.
What this could mean in court
The audit itself warns that weak labeling, missing signatures and spotty inventory work “could negatively affect prosecutions,” a red flag for any case that leans heavily on physical evidence. Defense lawyers note that gaps in chain-of-custody records can give them room to challenge the reliability of evidence or slow cases down while records are sorted out. Prosecutors and public defenders now have a detailed document to consult when sorting through older files packed with exhibits, and the report underscores the need for routine trend analysis so recurring mistakes are spotted sooner. City leaders and CPD insist they are taking the findings seriously; the next question is whether the promised staffing and budget shifts will show up on paper as cleaner, more airtight evidence trails.
