Mike
I live near Syracuse. I don't know where Hancock is and the Catskills are a few hours away but still too close for comfort. Is there a NY or PA ping list of some kind?
WTF?
This is the town where I went to school (Grades K-12 in 2 buildings). My home town is just down the river on the PA side.
Hancock NY is where the East Branch and West Branch meet to form the Delaware River. I have family members living there.
This town is on Highway 17 which runs from NYC to Binghamton NY and beyond. This is along the NY drug route. The town cops are mainly locals with "not too extensive" training.
Several years ago, we had our first murder. A local woman stumbled on individuals breaking into a home. They shot her in the back. Everyone knew who did it and where they lived but the local cops and state police wouldn't go up the mountain after them. A few years later they left the mountain and police in some southern state picked them up.
This past fall, my nephew and friend were checking out an area (and I thinks its by this compound) for turkey hunting. They were walking along a road when someone unloaded a shotgun on them from a spot in the woods. (Like the Cheney accident but this was no accident.) They have suspects but the local police are scared. My nephew got the most of the blast but was better when I saw him at Christmas. (He's got a lot of pellets to work their way out.)
Bottom line, if you want to do bad things and get ignored by law enforcement, this is the perfect remote area to do it. And there have been just enough "bad things" that have happened to the locals that they don't want to become targets. If there was ever a nest of rats that needed to be cleaned out. This is it.