BRIDGEPORT – The Bridgeport Police Department has received a $23,195 grant through the Ohio Collaborative Law Enforcement Accreditation Program to modernize its evidence room.

Assistant Police Chief Darby Copeland said the department began the process of becoming state-accredited last year, which it achieved. With that accreditation, the department is able to apply for a variety of grants from the state.

Bridgeport became the 11th police department in the state to be accredited, Copeland said. Since then, 24 more departments have achieved accreditation status.

“This grant was released to accredited agencies, so we obviously applied and the grant is geared towards meeting or improving the accreditation standards,” Copeland said. “This was specific to modernize our evidence room which already meets accreditation standards now, but we’re kind of taking it from good to great.”

He added that the modernization will make the evidence room even more secure than it currently is.

“Every police station has an evidence room and there are procedures that you have to follow when you bring evidence in to maintain the chain of custody and the security of it, Copeland said. “Because you don’t want to get into a situation in court where somebody says, well, that wasn’t secured or maybe that isn’t the evidence that it was when you brought it in. Maybe somebody added something to it. Maybe somebody took something for it.

“It’s critically important that the evidence rooms are run correctly and that they meet not only best practices, but in this instance, we’re going to exceed those expectations,” he added.

He added that the department will be modernizing the evidence room by replacing computers, implementing key fob access so that the department can track who comes into the evidence room.

“The big thing in criminal proceedings is chain of evidence and security of evidence. We surely don’t want to have a case go south and somebody not get justice because we didn’t have things the way we could have,” Copeland said.

He added that the funds have not yet been sent to the department, but it will hit the ground running on modernization when it arrives.

“We’re working with ERB Electric, so it’ll just be a matter of as soon as we have all the official rules and regulations, then it will be up to us to just get the award to contracts and get on people’s schedules,” Copeland said. “I’m hoping that we have this wrapped up in a month or so.”

He added that being able to apply for grants like this due to the accreditation status is a huge win for not only the department but the entire village.

“We are a small agency, and nobody has a bunch of extra dollars laying around. This is work that otherwise would not have been able to be done in our local budget,” Copeland said. “I think the real take home message from it is that we’re able to put $23,000 worth of safety and security into our evidence room that our community didn’t have to pay for via levy or some other type of tax.”

Copeland believes anytime the department can provide a better service to the community at no cost of the community is a win for everybody.