The Auburn Police Department's annual spring cleaning of its evidence rooms makes residential cleanouts feel like a breeze.

Four officers spent 128 staff hours earlier this month inventorying 7,852 individual items from 2,950 cases, according to Sgt. Joseph DiVietro, the head of the APD's Identification Bureau.

The 928-square-feet that holds the thousands of APD's evidence items are a little bit cleaner and clearer after the effort, but DiVietro estimates that only 20-percent of the APD's evidentiary items are destroyed or disposed of following a cleanup.

Three rooms and several refrigerators are packed with the APD's evidence at the North Street station.

A total of 28 guns and drugs from 183 disposed criminal cases were destroyed following this year's inventory.

Between $5,000 to $6,000 in drug money was turned over to the district attorney's office.

The ultimate point of all this spring-cleaning is more than stocking the APD's auction of unclaimed items or getting rid of useless junk.

The APD must keep track of all the evidence officers collect in cases pending in the local criminal justice system.

“It's important for us to be able to account for the evidence we're responsible for,” DiVietro said.

During the inventory, one person handled an individual item of evidence and called out the correlating criminal complaint. A second person verified the evidence corresponded with the hard copy of the APD's evidence inventory. A third person on a laptop verified the evidence corresponded with the department's computer database and checked to see the status of the criminal case the evidence belonged to.

Seventeen pistols and 11 long guns were destroyed at Nucor Steel as part of the cleanup. A team of officers must stay with the guns - ensuring there is more than one witness as the guns are dropped into a fiery electric arc furnace. The guns are destroyed and recycled into other steel products.

The officers must make sure the guns are “not put back out in the public,” DiVietro said. The APD first must get permission from the Department of Criminal Justice Services to destroy the guns.

Officers also must stay with the narcotics from disposed cases until they are burning at the city's sewage treatment plant. A small door to a huge incinerator is too hot to the touch, so the drugs must be flung quickly into the burning chamber. A fellow officer marks that the drugs are destroyed on the APD's hard copy inventory. Another officer is purely a witness.

APD generally keeps evidence from violation cases not involving arrests for two years and from misdemeanor cases not involving arrests for three years.

Evidence from cases involving arrests are kept until the cases are disposed of. Evidence from serious felony cases like homicides are kept forever. Evidence from less serious felonies without an arrest are destroyed after five to seven years.

Besides DiVietro, Identification Officer Andrew Skardinski and evidence technicians and patrol officers Jim Moore and Christine Treat were on the inventory detail this month.

Staff writer Amaris Elliott-Engel can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 282 or at amaris.elliot-engel@lee.net