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

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson wants the Dallas City Council to investigate a massive data loss involving the city’s police department.

Dallas police said, in April, an employee performing a migration made a mistake resulting in the loss of a massive amount of data.

Much of the data was recovered, but about eight terabytes weren’t.

The district attorney revealed what happened this week.

On Thursday, the mayor revealed he had no idea.

The amount of data that’s still missing is massive, but District Attorney John Creuzot said it’s unclear how many cases this might affect.

The mayor now wants answers

Mayor Johnson is calling for a joint investigation after the Dallas County DA revealed Dallas police lost a massive amount of data.

Wednesday, the district attorney revealed 22 terabytes of Dallas PD data were deleted during a migration of the department’s network.

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

There were 14 terabytes that were recovered, but the other eight are said to be permanently missing. 

To put things in perspective, one terabyte can hold 250,000 photos and 6 million documents. 

"You're surprised, you're concerned, you want to know what the impact of that are going to be," Councilman Adam McGough said.

This apparently happened in April, but the DA just found out about it last week after looking into why pending cases were missing files.

Dallas police would not talk to FOX 4 on camera, but provided some details in a written statement.

Police said the fault lies on just one IT employee who failed to follow proper procedures.

"No one person should be able to influence that amount of data, so we're going to dig in," McGough said. "We're going to find out where this originated from, and I think we have some of that information already coming out."

The DA said the city became aware of the issue on April 5, and police said the city’s been conducting a full audit of what disappeared.

But Mayor Johnson said he was blindsided by the news, saying in a statement: "This is a very serious matter. Public safety is the bedrock of our city government. Missing evidence could have major consequences for pending criminal cases."

The mayor wants the public safety and finance committees to have a specially called meeting to investigate. 

Councilman McGough is the chair of public safety. 

"Between the two communities that we have on this, and the mayor's leadership on this, we will address it and we will figure out what happened, and we'll figure out how to make sure it doesn't happen again, at least as best as best we can," he said.

A date has not been set for the joint meeting. 

The employment status of the IT worker has also not been released.