Sheriff Jim Hammond told the County Commission on Wednesday that there is still hope when it comes to recovering the Sheriff Department’s lost video footage. The loss of dashcam videos occurred when the decade-old server the videos were stored on experience software issues. This occurred on Jan. 13, and all video from Oct. 25, 2018 through Jan. 23 of this year was lost.
“As you know, we’ve been dealing with the situation,” said Sheriff Jim Hammond. “Because of the loss of the data from the system, we did reach out to several companies from across the U.S. who are premier in recovering lost data.”
He said that initial efforts to recover the video were unsuccessful, despite the office’s efforts to contact companies near and far.
“We were told that it just wasn’t possible,” said Sheriff Hammond. “When we reached out to county IT they agreed it was impossible.
However, there may still be some hope in recovering the footage. Sherriff Hammond told the County Commission. “A company that has had a lot of success in this has reached out and said, ‘We’d like to go at it and we think we can (recover the lost video).’ ”
Sherriff Hammond then said that the department would have to wait until a judge ruled on an injunction before he could respond to the company.
“The reason I can’t reach out now is that lawyers in several of the cases have filed an injunction to be heard by a judge asking him not to allow us to do anything with what we’ve got,” said Sheriff Hammond. “So now we’ve got to wait on that ruling before we can reach back out and see if that’s recoverable.”
Even though no footage has been recovered at this time, Commissioner David Sharpe still thanked the department for attempting to recover the lost video.
“I think the community would be appreciative knowing that we are working in that direction and I appreciate your efforts there,” said Commissioner Sharpe.