Those cases came out of the corruption table.
I insisted on it.
When an investigator proves herself willing to remove allegations that do not hold up, the allegations that remain become harder to dismiss as bias.
The unexplained total dropped from $186,740 to $128,300.
Then forensic accountants traced $52,000 of that to a specific pattern involving Sergeant Nolan Price, two members of Vance's former Special Enforcement Unit, and a civilian evidence clerk named Frank Dobbins. Cash seized in the field was counted once on handwritten sheets, entered at a lower amount into the digital system, and then deposited at the lower amount. The difference was split through prepaid cards and cash payments disguised as informant expenses.
Vance's name appeared on four of those seizure scenes.
No financial trail showed money reaching him.
But he signed two supplemental reports that falsely described the original count as mistaken.
When Cho confronted him during a proffer session, he did not deny the signatures.
"Price told me the rookies counted wrong," he said.
"Did you see them recount it?"
"No."
"Did you know the original field sheets existed?"
He stared at the table.
"Yes."
"Then why did you sign that the higher number was an error?"
His answer took a long time.
"Because Vale said the case would collapse if the property record looked dirty."
"So you made the record cleaner than the facts."
Vance looked up.
"Yeah."
That single word ended his attempt to describe himself as merely obedient.
He had known exactly what he was changing.
The body-camera review produced similar complexity.
Some hidden clips truly were duplicates. Some were corrupted. One had been labeled non-evidentiary because an officer accidentally recorded forty minutes of a dashboard and no citizen contact at all.
We removed those too.
But twenty-six clips still had no defensible reason to be excluded from discovery exports, and fourteen directly affected contested searches, force incidents, or witness statements.
The vendor's archive preserved system events showing the exclusions came from four administrative accounts.
One belonged to a records supervisor who had already retired.
One was a generic service account.
Two were assigned to Professional Standards.
The retired supervisor, Karen Mills, agreed to an interview. She brought a spiral notebook from home containing dates and ticket numbers because, she said, "I stopped trusting the system before I stopped working there."
Mills described being asked to mark files duplicate when supervisors believed portions would "create confusion." She did it at first because the requests came from people above her.
"Then I started noticing the same officers," she told us. "Same unit. Same supervisor chain."
"Why didn't you report it?" I asked.
She gave me a look that contained neither pride nor excuse.
"I wanted my pension."
The bluntness hurt more than a better answer would have.
"Did you know evidence was being withheld from defendants?"
"I knew clips weren't going into the normal export. I told myself prosecutors could ask if they needed more."
"Did prosecutors know more existed?"
She shook her head.
"Not unless somebody told them."