In times of trouble, when things are bleak, when tragedy strikes, when the editor chops your column in an arbitrary and capricious fashion, even the most blundering bureaucracy is trained to act caring and compassionate.
The sincerity of the gesture or token or rhetoric (“employees are our most important asset; especially the ones in India”) may be open to question, but at the least, the intention is designed to be constructive.
But sometimes, you really have to wonder. Even in cases draped with compassion and remorse, what appears to be helpful may, in fact, be harmful and wrongheaded.
Consider the police, when they happen upon a murder scene on a big, bad city street. Chances are, the victim knew the killer. Chances are, the killer does not have a genius-level I.Q. Chances are that somewhere in the mess of a dysfunctional family and creepy friends and nervous onlookers, the identity of the killer is well known.
And yet, what do the cops do? There it was, in late June, in Hartford. The police are investigating the killing of two teenagers on Wethersfield Avenue. The city police chief remarks that the dead kids knew the killer; that the killings were not random. So, of course, the cops immediately release the names of the dead teens, because that will open the floodgates and prompt the unwashed masses to offer up the names of several miserable curs who could of done the deed. Right?
Well, no. The police decline to identify the dead young men, until their families are notified. That’s the excuse the newspapers and television stations almost always give for their lazy journalism in these cases. “Until the families are notified.”
You can sort of understand the theoretical concern — don’t want mom and dad to read about the corpses in the morning paper, or on the evening news. But, in the real world, the whole thing is ridiculous. In this case, the victims weren’t infants, weren’t elementary school students. They were both 17 years old. And many people obviously knew who they were. And as a matter of law enforcement strategy, it would be better to release the names immediately, so that tips and networking can begin the magic of pointing the finger at the guilty party.
The Hartford police chief said his detectives were pursuing several leads. Again, he said this before the names of the victims were released. The message seems to be: we’re so smart, we don’t need any help from the outside world.
In an age of “community policing,” in an age in which law enforcement makes more and more use of the media to locate bad guys who have already been identified (whether or not their moms have been informed), the old-fashioned don’t-identify-the-victim stuff is destined for the Death Row of outdated policy.
An increasing share of chronic, violent offenders are under 18, and they live in close proximity to each other, and they know each other — and many other people know them all as well. The law enforcement instinct should be to unleash the town criers about five minutes after the corpse is found, because the community has a pretty good ides who pulled the trigger, once the identify of the victim is known. For an hour or a day or several days to go by, while the police look for “family” to console, is bad policy, even if it is nice street theater.
And if the police won’t budge, the journalists should take the five minutes needed to find out the names and publish them. It’s “news.” And it would be a public service.
Laurence D. Cohen is a freelance writer.
