Dallas City Council grills city manager over Dallas PD data loss

DALLAS - Dallas City Council members grilled the city manager about why he did not inform them about a massive data loss in the Dallas Police Department until the district attorney made the data loss public.

Councilmembers are furious that four months went by without the city manager notifying them about the massive loss of data. In the end, many of them learned of the problem through the news.

Dallas City Manager T.C. Broadnax faced tough questions about why he did not notify the mayor or city council immediately after he was briefed on the data loss.

In all, 22 terabytes of data were deleted during a migration of the department's network. About 14 terabytes were recovered soon after in April. But the remaining eight terabytes, which is equivalent to one million photos or 48 million documents, have now been missing for four months. 

MORE: Dallas Police Department lost terabytes of data that could impact some ongoing cases

"You knew that the only council member briefed was Chairman Gates. And you know she left the council in June. So did you not find that at any point in there, the mayor or somebody else in council need to be notified?" asked Councilwoman Cara Mendelsohn.

"There are a multitude of issues and challenges that I deal with," Broadnax said. "And I did not stop to think about a conversation unfortunately that I had in April."

The city manager explained he initially did not recognize the seriousness of the situation and did not get that sense of alarm from his staff.

"And then my expectation is that they will follow up when in fact there is something new to share and or there's something actionable," he said. 

RELATED: Dallas mayor calls for investigation into data lost by Dallas Police Department

Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia also explained why he did not notify District Attorney John Cruezot sooner. 

"We just didn't know what we didn't know," Garcia said. "And we didn't really want to fire without knowing the extent of what's going on."

DPD is still investigating the employee responsible for the deletion. The chief says there are new protocols to prevent it from happening again. 

Garcia said the hope was that all the files could be recovered.

"Obviously in retrospect, probably should have spoken to Judge Cruezot and just let him know that we're looking into something and that I would update him as I could," he said.

Earlier, a murder suspect was released on bond after it was believed data was missing for his case as a result of the loss. But it turns out no data was actually missing for that case. 

Chief Garcia said there are no cases believed to be impacted from the data loss at this time.