Faribault Police Department, Property & Evidence Technician Gina Palan 

1). Full Name, Department you work for, How long at Department, Number of officers, official title.  Gina LaCanne Palan,  Faribault Police Department, 17 years, 33 sworn, Property/Evidence Technician

2). Who is in the evidence department with you?  I am the only Evidence Tech, we have a Captain and a Sergeant that can fill in if I am gone.

3). What is your involvement with MAPET? Member

4). What are some of your favorite evidence technician/property room manager tasks? Working with our multijurisdictional Drug Task Force agents.  Having the opportunity with our agency to do a 1 hour training with new officers.  Destroying evidence!

5). What is the most unique/weird item currently in your Property room? Nothing anymore.  I had a frozen cats tail but, it was disposed of.

6). What is currently your biggest challenge?  Getting officers to put the correct information in the item description for firearms to run a proper E-trace and getting them to label their Axon video correctly and in a timely fashion.

7). Recent victory in your property room?  We are purged up to 2019 and a bit beyond. Not only house Faribault PD’s evidence but, all the agencies evidence for the DTF which is a multijurisdictional so pretty excited about the purge success. Passed 4 different audits in 2022.  Also had Axon given to me in September unexpectedly and was able to learn how to manage the evidence in there to disseminate to prosecutors and outside agencies. I guess that is few victories but, they sure do make an evidence tech happy. 

8). What advice would you give to new techs in the field?  Document, document, document!!!