Orange County Grand Jury
• 2003-2004
• Agency Response
Response to:
Identity Theft 04/19/04, 94K
City of Huntington Beach*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 2 findings
F4
"Orange County city police departments and the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department work cooperatively to develop standardized public information materials, possibly modeled after excellent pamphlets that now exist, for use by all departments. (Finding 4)". RESPONSE The Huntington Beach Police Department has two informative identity theft pamphlets available to the public. We are currently in the process of installing an identity theft information page on our website. Judge Horn June 22, 2004 We would prefer to distribute our own pamphlets because it allows us to quickly and easily modify them when we see a need to do so.
No recommendations for this finding
F5
"Orange County city police departments and the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department adopt a standardized identity-theft crime-reporting form, possibly modeled after forms now in use by several police departments. (Finding 5)". RESPONSE The Huntington Beach Police Department does not have a report form dedicated solely to identity theft. All of our identity theft reports are taken on our standardized crime report form. The form is filled out by our trained personnel and we prefer to continue doing so to insure we obtain all the information we need to complete our investigation. Respectfully submitted, Kenneth W. Small CHIEF OF POLICE KWS/IPF/go Attachments c: Cathy Green, Mayor, Huntington Beach Penny Culbreth-Graft, City Administrator, Huntington Beach City Council, Huntington Beach
No recommendations for this finding
Comments 1
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CO1"The Orange County District Attorney, the Orange County Sheriff-Coroner Department and the city police departments in Orange County take steps to form and actively participate in a countywide Regional Identity Theft Task Force comprised of representatives of each of these agencies. The task force should seek the cooperation and participation of the United States Postal Inspector, the United States Secret Service, the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service and the United States Federal Trade Commission. (Finding 3)" RESPONSE The Huntington Beach Police Department has four investigators trained and assigned to investigate identity theft crimes. Once a determination has been made that an identity theft crime has been committed, we have a wealth of resources to utilize, including the federal government, state government, as well as county and local law enforcement. We also utilize a wide variety of private resources. DRUG USE . Judge Horn June 22, 2004 Page 2 Our investigators attend monthly meetings with the Orange County Financial Crimes Investigators Association, and with the International Association of Financial Crimes Investigators. These meetings are attended by local and federal law enforcement agencies, as well as many representatives from various private entities. The Huntington Beach Police Department does see some merit in the formation of a regional task force to investigate identity theft crimes; however, we do not see this as an overwhelming need. Much of what the task force would accomplish already exists in a less formal manner. Also realize the Huntington Beach Police Department is facing critical personnel shortages, as well as challenging fiscal concerns. Assigning a full time investigator to the task force would place a hardship upon our organization; therefore, we do not see an identity theft regional task force as an immediate need for the Huntington Beach Police Department. It has been brought to our attention the Grand Jury is contemplating quarterly identity theft meetings with local law enforcement agencies. We concur this is a beneficial proposal and we would be willing to participate.
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.