A huge data loss from the Dallas police department should be investigated by the Dallas City Council, Mayor Eric Johnson has said.
A mistake by an employee undergoing a migration resulted in the loss of a massive amount of data, Dallas police had said in April. While a large portion of the data has been recovered, about eight terabytes are still missing.
The details of the incident were revealed by the district attorney earlier this week.
The mayor, however, said he did not have any idea of the incident.
According to reports, the quantity of data that is still unaccounted for is huge. However, according to District Attorney John Creuzot, it is still unclear how many cases would be affected by the missing data.
Irked due to the incident and the still missing data, Mayor Johnson wants a joint investigation following the revelation of the data loss by the Dallas County DA.
Earlier this Wednesday, the district attorney revealed 22 terabytes of Dallas PD data were deleted during a migration of the department’s network. While authorities have been able to recover 14 terabytes of the deleted data, the rest of the eight terabytes are still missing – possibly permanently.
One terabyte can accommodate 250,000 photos and 6 million documents.
“You’re surprised, you’re concerned, you want to know what the impact of that is going to be,” Councilman Adam McGough said.
There have been no official comments made on the incident by Dallas police.
However, reports quoted some police officials saying that only one employee of the IT department was to be blamed for the incident and for not following proper procedures.
“No one person should be able to influence that amount of data, so we’re going to dig in,” McGough said, adding: “We’re going to find out where this originated from, and I think we have some of that information already coming out.”
Authorities have also not said anything about the employment status of the IT worker.
