Metro will begin purging expired work card records

Keith Paul

Monday, Sept. 24, 2001 | 10:49 a.m.

Metro Police will immediately start removing about 1 million expired work card records from a computer data base, local officials said this morning.

This action will also make unusable related police records on work card holders such as fingerprint and photo files.

Metro's fiscal affairs committee gave its approval this morning to start purging out-of-date records from SCOPE, the statewide law enforcement data base. Metro is still working on a plan to purge current files that are no longer required, Deputy Chief Richard McKee told the panel.

"This is going to take some time to work through the system," said Las Vegas Councilwoman Lynette Boggs McDonald, a member of the committee, which consists of two City Council members, two Clark County commissioners and a resident. "This is the first step to get the purging begun."

The million or more expired work card records will be isolated, probably by the end of the week, and held until Metro gets state approval to destroy them. McKee said he is working on the request, and he doesn't expect any problems.

The County Commission and the Las Vegas City Council voted recently to no longer require thousands of workers to obtain police work cards. The job categories removed from the requirement include gaming service workers, such as maids and bellhops.

The Las Vegas City Council went a step further, eliminating the need for work cards for all casino workers within the city limits, which includes downtown.

The city still requires work cards for 19 job categories, from carnival workers to acupressure practitioners, and the county for 36, from advertising specialists to vacation certificate salespeople.

Metro Police originally objected to purging only the computer listing and leaving the fingerprint cards, photographs and microfilm records in the files. But McKee said the expired work cards, some dating to 1965, are impossible to locate without the computer record.

"Once the SCOPE record is gone, the number that identifies the fingerprint card and photograph is gone," McKee said. "The work cards stacked up are about a quarter-mile high, and finding a particular card would be nearly impossible without the identification number.

"It would be like looking for a quarter of a needle in a haystack," he said.

Since the county eliminated the work card requirement for several jobs, McKee said, the number of work cards issued a day has dropped from an average of about 400 to about 180. He said he expects that to drop again when the city's ordinance goes into effect.

What is left for Metro is the purging of recently issued work card files that are no longer required and their associated fingerprint cards and photographs.

McKee said instead of finding the work card records that are to be purged, it may be easier to just find the ones that need to be kept and delete the rest.

For the protection of Las Vegas tourists and consumers, work cards have been required for decades of people who fill numerous job categories. As people left those jobs, the individual records remained on microfilm, fingerprint cards and photo files, creating a privacy issue.

By state law Metro is required to keep a record of work cards issued for at least 10 years. There is no requirement for removing old files after 10 years has passed, but Metro must get approval from the state before any records can be destroyed.