So what are they to do? Put a huge stack of records in the evidence locker with no crime actually attached to them (just vicinity to another crime)? Could suck if somehow someone else could identify them and want them that was also a victim of theft, but it really would just be stashing them and hoping by rare chance someone stumbles into the lost and found.
Personally I'd rather the stack of stuff sitting in the guarded, expensive to maintain evidence locker is stuff actually tagged to a crime and relevant to solving it
But otherwise it just looks like they don't even want to try. In a normal small community police or you would try to find out who it belongs to, not just give up. :)
LA is one of these places.
If you place them in custody, you might as well provide them with some basic housing that costs less than jail. They have literally nothing to lose from fines, court dates, tickets, probation. They don't have a toilet, what else are you going to take away from them.
The police are correctly judging that the need to defecate is not a criminal problem.
Find a public toilet or use a restaurant/shopping mall toilet.
By definition, if there is a public toilet accessible to you, or you are welcome in a restaurant toilet without paying, you have somewhere to go to the toilet.
but then i re-read the article and see "and then they grab a few of the thief’s personal items from the car as evidence.". so it's not like the cops were following some policy that all the stuff in the car should be returned to the car's owner. just the stuff they don't want to deal with