Powderhouse incident redux

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

The Somerville Journal posted an article this afternoon with a sketch of the suspect.

"Have you seen this man? Police said he attacked female jogger"
http://www.wickedlocal.com/somerville/news/x1713654403/Have-you-seen-this-man-Police-said-he-attacked-female-jogger

I also spotted a news van about half an hour ago in Powderhouse, so there might be (or was) a piece on this tonight.

Comments

[pearlythebunny.livejournal.com]

I think neighborhood watches are a good thing. Now that the sketch has been released, I think that if all 77, 000 people in the city of Somerville are vigilant and look out for this guy and report anything suspicious to the police, that is also a good thing. I think if Somerville got a reputation for being a place where people look out for one another and don’t let criminals get away with anything, that would be a very good thing.

I guess I thought you were suggesting that people put themselves on the case BEFORE the police release information. And to me this doesn’t seem so feasible because it is easy to speculate, and it is easy to hit the send button before thinking through your thoughts well. What happened on LJ the other day seemed like a community brainstorming session, where people said the first thing that came to their minds and then hit the send button (I plead guilty to this myself). That can lead to interesting discussion perhaps, but I’m not sure that it is helpful for resolving a serious crime. I would hope that the police were more methodical in their investigation, and that when they released information, it was accurate and thorough. LJ and blogs and listservs are fast ways to dispense information, but the information is not necessarily thorough or accurate.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

No, I definitely don't want people from the forums to start their own investigation. That's the police's job.

But as far as getting the word out ASAP that somebody had reported a crime, there's two benefits.

One is that people see things over the course of the day that might be useful to police, someone or something out of the ordinary, and they might report it if they heard there'd been trouble in the neighborhood that night.

The other is to deal with risk, kind of like raising the terror alert to orange. Most people don't take the maximum precautions possible, but if they hear that there's an uptick in, say, burglaries, they might use that extra deadbolt, as well as keep an eye out for future events.

The eyewitness reports, and pulling together blog and media reports, that's fine. This forum has been pretty good over the past year or two for breaking crime news, and that's the sort of thing I want to hear about now, not next Thursday. Even speculation about motives and techniques I don't have a problem with.

On the other hand, we should never speculate on the identity of a suspect, or victim for that matter, for obvious reasons.

[pearlythebunny.livejournal.com]

I think that’s a good idea. Although there is a weekly crime roundup in the Journal, it can only give you a general sense of overall crime. Firsthand reports on LJ or other places help you know what the thieves looked like, what equipment they used to steal the bike, or how they broke into the house. And that is useful information to know so you can talk to your neighbors about the incident and have everyone be alerted and, in general, just stay abreast of developments in your neighborhood.

I like the idea of raising the alert level when more serious things are happening. For the most part, I don’t know how that can be done, but I can think of a couple of times when I wish it could have been done. About four years ago, I was taking a class at night at the Harvard Extension School. Twice a week, at night, I walked from Ball Square to Harvard U. One day I started receiving emails from the Harvard U. police telling people to be vigilant because of sexual assaults around the campus. I didn’t have class for several more days, and as more and more emails were sent, it became apparent that the crime was some guy on a bicycle riding up behind women, groping them, and then riding off as fast as he could. So, in the end, I didn’t really change my routine that much except to be more alert and to try to walk where a bicycle could not sneak up behind me.

But then about a year ago, I started hearing similar vague reports about sexual assaults near Tufts. And at first, I didn’t take the reports too seriously, and I continued wandering around the Tufts area alone at night. It was only later, when I began to realize that there was a weapon involved and that the crimes were violent assaults, that I changed my routine and stopped walking around that area at night.

So even though police may not want to give away too many details of a crime, I wish there was a way to indicate how serious a crime is. There’s a big difference, I think, between a bicycle groper and a rapist, but if the reports are so vague that both incidents are described with almost identical language, it’s hard to know how to react.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

Well I also read the weekly reports, and you can get an idea of what the trend is and if there's any hot spots. However I have noticed that things that happen on the weekend don't always make it, presumably because they're at the end of the news cycle and aren't ready for press time.

As far as the bicycle groper, a report characterizing him as such would be useful for crime prevention. Not only so that women could decide to walk where a bicycle couldn't approach, but the close-knit cycling community would have an idea what to keep an eye out for.

I don't buy the idea that releasing details hinders an investigation. This isn't like the Enigma code from World War II, where we dont want to tip our hand. The bicycle groper knows the police are looking for a bicycle groper. Once in a while there's a spectacular case, where disturbed people come in and give false confessions to the police, and it helps the police sort them out to not release all the details, but this isn't one of them.

I think the assaults in the Hillside area were reported from the beginning, but some of the reports were in the Medford papers, some were in the Tufts media, and so forth. That's one situation where raising an "alert level" to red, for women walking alone outside business hours in those neighborhoods, would have been useful. And something like that did happen; TUPD was driving a lot of coeds home in their cruisers.