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

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

280 lbs?

I'm sorry, that sketch is of Michael Jackson.

[maelithil.livejournal.com]

I hope it either a) ends up being an isolated incident or b) they find the guy. From the testimony in the craigslist post he sounded quite seriously deranged.

[livingadream.livejournal.com]

There was just a story about it on Fox news.

The sketch looked kind of like Brian Peppers

[progressnerd.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the info.

Correction: that's the Somerville Journal, not the News. The News is the free propaganda rag, and the Journal would probably be upset to be mistaken for them!

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Edited.

[ellf.livejournal.com]

I was wrong!

[livingadream.livejournal.com]

My worst nightmare come true!

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

So, it was on WBZ radio this morning.

WCVB-5 has a story about it on their website now, and they mention the Craigslist post.:
http://www.thebostonchannel.com/asseenon5/16778162/detail.html

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

Now an open-ended question for the group: Is there anything that we can do to speed up media coverage of incidents like this? I know we've had some good scoops with our eyewitness reports, but this didn't appear in the mainstream media until after _four_ days went by.

I know the Journal reads this blog sometimes, but should we be more proactive in the future? Should we start calling the Journal, or Channel 5, or whoever suggesting they check out and do a story on our neighborhood?

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

Well, with people saying that they disbelieved the original post, I'm unsurprised that the media waited until there was confirmation. I'd say the best thing we could do to help get the word out fast is to not mock postings like that earlier one.

[pearlythebunny.livejournal.com]

I understand your point, but I don't know because the police do things behind the scenes that we don't know about, and if you start taking things into your own hands, you might mess up a police investigation. I think I'd be more likely to suggest reporting everything to the police and letting them consolidate all of the pieces of information.

I think a lot of publicity can negatively affect a police investigation, and that is not good for the community in the long run. I can understand why we want to know about something like this the minute it happens to protect ourselves, but I'm thinking it's better to let the police do their job.

I think the papers report the information as soon as the police release the information to them.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Is there anything that we can do to speed up media coverage of incidents like this?

They have to wait until there's police confirmation, so no.

Except maybe "pay more taxes to relieve police understaffing."

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

So you're saying that people should automatically believe every report of an attempted crime?

[koshmom.livejournal.com]

No, I'm saying that people should NOT state that a report is definitely FALSE until proven true. People on this list claimed that the report was untrue, without any reason other than they wanted to stroke their ego and see their livejournal name making fun of the original craigslist post. So the word that "got out" was that there was some person making false claims anonymously, as opposed to getting the word out that a possible assault/battery had been attempted.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

No, I think that the word that got out was that someone had made this, as yet unverified, claim.

Then the claim was verified.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

There was also some discussion of why it wasn't necessarily a good idea to repost unverified claims without further information.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

The issue was, the event had been reported to the police but when Tom first checked it out for us, it wasn't widely enough known within the department for an informal yes or no.

But I'm sure if multiple newspapers called to ask about it, someone would have chased up the logs from that night.

Actually, no, the papers don't need police confirmation either (though it helps); they could have sought out and interviewed the victim themselves.

My take is the police are busy enough being police; it's the job of the press to get the word out about things like this.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's a proper way to handle unconfirmed reports, which is you don't read too much into them and you put them in the proper context.

While I might doubt the provenance of an anonymous post from Craigslist, I'd also like to point out that the initial post mocking the report came from a user with a history of snarking crime reports.

[zmgmeister.livejournal.com]

Well actually, no. For instance, there's a semi-active neighborhood watch group in Davis, and the police encourage folks to e-mail each other about goings-on in the area. The only thing they ask is that people call 911 or 311 first, in _addition_ to talking amongst themselves.

Personally, I'd like this neighborhood to get a reputation as a place where people look out for each other and news travels quickly.

[icecreamempress.livejournal.com]

Actually, no, the papers don't need police confirmation either

In my newspaper days, we weren't allowed to print crime reports without confirmation from the police or from the District Attorney's office. I think this is pretty standard practice at most, if not all, US newspapers.

[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.

[djdreilinger.livejournal.com]

Hey--I'm the (fairly new) Somerville stringer for the Globe's City Weekly section. I can't necessarily jump on news since the section runs, aha, weekly, but please let me know if you guys think something should be covered/looked into. I follow the DS group but sometimes events slip by me. djdreilinger / at / comcast / dot / net.