You're on to something.
Just lived a while. We had something like that around here.
Confiscated weapons (The nicer ones) were sold by a couple of LEO's.
They are now enjoying the prospect of a brutal and short life in the slammer.
The real point is that these were fairly nice well-liked cops. So in a place like NOLA, I just cannot imagine anything worth $600++ being "Locked in a trailer" for long.
even if we write it off as human weakness to temptation, and not even corruption, these things happen. We had a local chief a few years ago who played "Electrolux" in the evidence room so much that many drug cases had to be thrown out for lack of evidence.