City IT department working to recover missing Lubbock police videos

Citizens Tower is located on 14th Street and Avenue K
Matt Dotray/A-J Media

Lubbock Avalanche-Journal
Gabriel Monte
January 30, 2023

The City of Lubbock's information technology staff is working to recover police video files that disappeared as a result of a problem with the city's servers was discovered in December.

City officials said a misconfiguration of the city's server storage and retention was discovered in December and resulted in the disappearance of an unknown number of videos from police body and dashboard cameras that patrol officers were uploading to the city servers.

"The City of Lubbock staff corrected the misconfiguration and is working diligently, utilizing City resources and an outside professional service to recover files," according to a statement from the city. "We are actively recovering video files and working directly with the (Lubbock County) District Attorney’s office to prioritize the recovery efforts."

It was undetermined how long the servers were misconfigured before the issue was discovered, city officials said.

“This is a challenging process but is working as expected," James Brown, Chief Information Officer, said in a statement. "It is our belief that there is more recoverable data and we are committed to recovering as much as is possible.”

City officials met on Jan. 6 with representatives of the Lubbock legal community including the Lubbock County District Attorney's Office, a Lubbock District Judge and the Lubbock Defense Bar to inform them of the problem.

Officials at the district attorney's office said no cases have been dismissed or rejected because of the issue as it is still unclear which cases, if any, are affected. They also do not expect any trials to be delayed.

However, Jennifer Irlbeck, an assistant district attorney in the civil division, said the DA's office gave the city a list of cases that are set for trial see if any of those were affected by the city's server issues.