Department looks to upgrade technology nearly five years after evidence from fatal shooting deleted – Hawaii News Now

HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The Department of Law Enforcement still does not have equipment that would automatically record and save dispatch calls or radio transmissions.
Their law enforcement officers are also not equipped with body cameras.
Those issues are still being addressed, nearly five years after deputy sheriff Gregory Bergman shot and killed Delmar Espejo, an unarmed, disabled homeless man with an open container of alcohol on the Capitol grounds in February 2019.
The state and Bergman tried to use self defense when Espejo’s family sued, but a judge denied that defense because evidence that could prove or disprove it was destroyed.
“Body camera footage is gone. Video from the state Capitol is gone. Audio transmissions are gone. A reenactment video is gone,” said Terry Revere, one of the attorneys for the Espejo family.
“The state was completely out of control in the amount of evidence that they lost, didn’t preserve,” Revere said.
The court sanctioned the state after agreeing with the Espejo’s legal team that audio recordings pertaining to the shooting vanished.
The team from the state Attorney General’s office said the equipment automatically records over itself and no one saved recordings before that happened.
Other pieces of evidence like the internal affairs report for the shooting was “permanently destroyed by the state of Hawaii,” the court record showed.
Among the sanctions, the judge told the jury, prior to deliberating, that they could draw the inference that the missing recordings would have supported the Espejo family’s claims and contradicted the defense.
The jury awarded Espejo’s family $2.27 million.
“The judge did the right thing,” said Myles Breiner, another attorney for Espejo’s loved ones.
In an effort to better preserve evidence in the future, the Department of Law Enforcement said it has purchased some new equipment.
The DLE called it “a phased upgrade that will streamline workflows, improve data retention, result in faster response times and allow for greater accountability.”
The two consoles cost a combined $155,000 and would allow dispatch calls to be automatically recorded. However, those recordings can only be stored for 24 hours, meaning the agency would need to manually save the evidence within that short window.
DLE said it’s working to expand that window before the devices go online, but it’s not clear when that would happen.
DLE said it “cannot be sure of a specific date” because it is working with vendors and other agencies.
Internal policies on preserving evidence are also being reviewed.
Copyright 2025 Hawaii News Now. All rights reserved.

source

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Back To Top