Miami’s Vices Exceeding the Police Storage Space

The Miami Police Property Room has become a kind of macabre museum that mirrors South Florida’s problems: overwhelmed, overcrowded, understaffed, besieged by drug smugglers, guns and illicit cash, strangled in red tape and riddled with corruption.

A comparison of statistics from a decade ago with more recent figures illustrates the evolution: In 1977, 33 employees took 8,777 pieces of property into the room, where items taken as evidence are stored. In the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 1987, 41 employees filed 24,721 pieces--pieces of everything.

Besides drugs, cash and weapons, the property room has an area set aside for voodoo artifacts and an accumulation of pornographic materials.

“If we rented a movie house and showed all our porno movies and sold some of our marijuana, we could double our budget,” said Col. Kenneth Harrison.

Rats Fearless on Dope

A decade ago, Harrison witnessed what may have been the first clue to the property room’s future. In 1977, rats got into the 40,000 pounds of confiscated marijuana and then boldly ventured out into the room in broad daylight.

“They were so high they didn’t care about anything,” he recalled. “They were walking across our typewriters, perfectly calm. It was really weird.”

The Miami property room is unique among its counterparts across the country, according to The Miami Herald.

For example, it’s probably the only property room in the United States where police once considered offering surplus cocaine to local crematoriums.

The theory: Cocaine could be burned as fuel for the cremations, and this method of disposing of the drug would be in the public good. The crematoriums turned down the idea out of concern for potential liability problems.

Too Many Guns

Then, too, Miami’s property room is perhaps the only one that must consider environmental factors before dumping its surplus guns into the ocean. Miami police seize so many guns--more than 25,000 in the last decade--that they can’t be dumped in one spot, for fear of harming marine life.