Posted on 10/26/2002 7:14:35 AM PDT by Grampa Dave
``We were looking for a white van with white people, and we ended up with a blue car with black people,'' said Washington, D.C., Police Chief Charles Ramsey, whose department ran the Caprice's license Oct. 3, just hours before a fatal shooting in Washington that has been tied to the sniper suspects, John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17.
(Excerpt) Read more at bayarea.com ...
I think that is the point, that the PC practice of selective-profiling IS the problem. The problem is systemic and pervasive. The LE leadership, media, and many politicians demand practices (e.g. don't profile blacks or ME types, because this will lead to charges of racial prejudice -- but it is okay profile whites) that cloud open and effective evaluation, and delay the eventual solution.
I believe that even some cops on the beat have similar practices; and I agree with you that we shouldn't automatically fault the cop for following the leads as they are given. In fact, that is how organizations are SUPPOSED to operate efficiently. The BOLO description has to be correct, or the dragnet based on it will fail.
I kept thinking this the whole time. I imagine the cars at the very least have dash mounted terminals. Even if the input is just dumped into a nice strong Oracle or SQL box you're probably only dealing with several thousands of unique records. Any pattern should have been extremely easy to discern with just basic queries.
If you didn't want this data getting out that went against your PC agenda, you just make sure that it doesn't get dumped into a database.
Then you posted:
You'd think this would be SOP in a case like this. Oh well, maybe they learned.
This will never happen in a Politically Correct Controlled Police Department.
On the contrary. You are right on the money.
1. I think that is the point, that the PC practice of selective-profiling IS the problem. The problem is systemic and pervasive. The LE leadership, media, and many politicians demand practices (e.g. don't profile blacks or ME types, because this will lead to charges of racial prejudice -- but it is okay profile whites) that cloud open and effective evaluation, and delay the eventual solution.
2. I believe that even some cops on the beat have similar practices; and I agree with you that we shouldn't automatically fault the cop for following the leads as they are given. In fact, that is how organizations are SUPPOSED to operate efficiently. The BOLO description has to be correct, or the dragnet based on it will fail.
The political correct environment creates an invalid BOLO description. Then the poor cops on the street are hand cuffed when it comes to trying to find the bad guys.
Correct.
This brings up a very interesting fact I read in another article during the past two days.
The major break in the case came when that telephone call was made by the killers to, I believe, the priest. In order to establish that they were the actual bad guys instead of crank callers, the killers left the message to "check out the murder in Montgomery, Alabama".
The Feds go down to Alabama and, sure enough, there was a murder down there.
It turns out that the local Police in Montgomery, Alabama had a fingerprint of Malvo that they had recovered at the murder scene. However, the print was "unidentifiable".
Why was it "unidentifiable"?
Because Malvo's prints were locked away in the files of the Washington State juvenile justice system. According to the article, the local Police in Alabama did not have access to the Washington State juvenile justice system fingerprints. However, the Feds did.
The Political Correctness of hiding Malvo's "juvenile" fingerprints from Police agencies outside of the State of Washington, prevented the Alabama Police from cracking the the Montgomery, Alabama murder cae. That, in turn, allowed the killers to continue their murder spree in the Maryland/Virginia area.
Without the Feds, the local Maryland Police, the local Virginia Police and the Alabama Police would probably have no idea who the killers were to this day.
The local Police in Alabama, Maryland and Virginia would have the actual fingerprints of one of the killers but, without the Feds, have no way to identify them. As a result, people would still be dying in Maryland and Virginia because the "privacy rights" of a "juvenile" crimminal had to be protected in Washington State.
On the other hand, when someone is not caught your an "idiot" and anybody else would have solved the crime in a half a heartbeat.
We have to play by the rules, criminals don't. The rules get more restrictive all the time. Think about a federal lawsuit if you pull over a vehicle with the wrong people in it. Makes you wonder if the job's worth doing at all when you might get indicted for a civil rights violation for doing your job.
War of Two Worlds
Value Creators versus Value Destroyers
The first thing civilization must have is business, science and art. It's what the individual and family needs so that its members can live creative, prosperous, happy lives. Business, science and art can survive, even thrive without government and its bureaucracy.
Government and its bureaucracy cannot survive without business and science. In general, business, science and the individual and family is the host and government and bureaucracy are parasites.
Keep valid government services that protect individual rights and private property rights while upholding the sanctity of private contracts -- military defense, FBI, CIA, police and courts. With the rest of government striped away those few valid services would be several fold more efficient and effective than they are today.
Again: Value Creators versus Value Destroyers
Political Correctness creates zero value and is a huge 24/7 Value Destroyer!
"Assumption.": Templar
Sounds more like genuine, good, old, deductive reasoning to me, as opposed to an assumption, Templar.
Try adding a couple of Sherlock Holmes crime mysteries to that impressive list of books you've read. That might better illustrate the difference between deduction and assumption for you.
For example:
The victims have several things in common.
1) They're all American.
2) They're all non-Arab.
3) They're all non-Muslim.
4) They're all regular, innocent folks just going about their average everyday business.
5) I believe it's been confirmed they were all killed at times-of-the-day other than Muslim prayer times for the Beltway area.
Another bit of pertinent information are the Al Qaida training tapes that were discovered by our soldiers in Afghanistan prior to May/2002.
New Al-Qaida training tape shows another side of terror
This tape contains detailed information on the use of a variety of vehicles as shooting platforms for snipers.
The point is the authorities had plenty of reason to believe that the snipers were Muslim terrorists. Especially, in light of the 9/11 tragedy and all of the threats Muslim terrorists have made against American citizens and American interests, since.
Sherlock Holmes would have called all of these pertinent details clues.
It's obvious that a lot of LE working on this case didn't have one, or had personal motivations or orders from higher authority to ignore them.
I hope the surviving family members sue the INS and everyone else on down that was involved in this fiasco.
I get your point loud and clear, but how can the PC'ers argue that a license plate was "profiling" I can see if they collected pictures/personal data but, and forgive me if this sounds totally naive, would folks actually react with that degree of paranoia simply because the cops were trying to narrow down numbers to possibly look more carefully at a car in a subsequent stop if it kept showing up with regularity? I guess I'm underestimating the liberal mindset there.
Think they could have handled this, start at top of output list and work your way down.
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