You may have noticed a drastic change in our law enforcement report over the past several weeks. What used to be a succinct yet thorough breakdown of the goings-on around town has been replaced by a rundown that includes the bare-bones minimal amount of information pertaining to each case.
We’ve received some comments of late expressing displeasure with this new format, and we couldn’t agree more. Unfortunately, this situation is out of our control.
Beginning with the June 6 edition of The Times, the content of the law enforcement report has been a result of a change in practices by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. In short, MCSO has altered the way it releases information related to criminal activity, and we feel it is a big step in the wrong direction.
For many years, reporter Bob Burns has made a daily habit of dropping by the local MCSO office to peruse reports and pull information he felt would be important for the community to be made aware of. It was a good system, and we’re thankful to all of the men and women at the local MCSO branch who have made that relationship possible over the years.
I feel it is important to note that our local MCSO team has nothing to do with this new direction concerning the release of information. Over the past few weeks, they’ve been very open to discussing the possibility of getting better, more timely information, but their hands are simply tied in the matter.
In short, law enforcement reports are now handled through a website that offers a snapshot of MCSO activity in a given area. What you see in the weekly crime log is the extent of information we have readily available to us.
What we’ve discovered, though, is that getting further information is a tedious process. We can request additional details on a case by case basis, but that must be retrieved either in Phoenix or through the mail. The real issue, however, is that we’ve been informed that those additional details can take up to eight weeks to procure.
In my own conversations with members of law enforcement over the years, one of the biggest concerns I’ve heard is that there is simply too much misinformation out there, frequently spread like wildfire through social media. That’s something we’ve always done our best to combat, offering updates through our website and in the weekly publication to make sure community members have a legitimate source of information.
This new system actively works against that process. Not only are we unable to offer additional, pertinent details in a timely fashion, we’re not able to provide our readers with the facts that are frequently lacking from the version of these stories spread by word of mouth.
It is my understanding that this new direction should be considered the norm moving forward, though we plan to keep asking questions and doing our best to get as many details as possible.
For law enforcement, making sure information is thorough and timely is of the utmost importance. We regret that MCSO’s new procedures will make reporting the news with either of those qualities much more difficult.
