Dear Abby

Everybody seems to be off on a tangent, arguing over whether this guy’s rights were violated. But the question in the OP was (to paraphrase) should Abby have informed the police about this man’s fantasy. I think the answer is an unequivocal YES. Protect the children first.

Huh? What? It doesn’t matter if it’s a letter sent to Dear Abby or not. The fact of the matter is that I could write such a letter (to Abby, the FBI, whatever) saying, “My name is Minty Green and I’m having bad thoughts about little kids. Here’s my address.”

Next thing you know, the cops are at your house. As long as the letter is mailed to Abby/FBI from a Post Office that serves your area…there is no “reason to conclude that it’s fake or inaccurate.” And, really, you can fault the guy’s intelligence for allowing the cops to search. But, really, most people when a cop shows at their door will allow them to do whatever they want. They’re intimidated and (with rare exceptions) they’ve been conditioned to cooperate with authority.

Yeah? So what? Cops are allowed to come to your house and ask you questions, whether their interest is based on an anonymous tip, a notarized confession, or the daily horoscope. If you don’t like it, tell 'em to shove off. If you voluntarily answer their questions and consent to their search of your home, it’s your problem when they find the hydroponic farm you’ve been running in your spare bedroom.

I mean, what do you want to do here? Prohibit cops from talking to anyone unless they have a warrant? Prohibit cops from looking at anything even though the owner has said it was okay with him? Sorry, but the Fourth Amendment is not designed to protect people from their own stupidity. It is designed to limit police in their authority to act, not to relieve citizens of their own free will.

minty - I know the cops can investigate anything brought to their attention. My question is ‘given limited resources, should the police spend time questioning/searching based on an anonymous letter?’

and my suggestion is no.

I suggest you contact your local police stations and ask the question “are there any outstanding warrants not served”? betchya the answer is ‘holy smokes, is there ever!’. I know every now and then our local forces have a 'round ‘em up day’ sort of thing where they make it a point to process outstanding warrants.

and, of course, these are arrest warrants - where there is actually a reported crime committed and an identified suspect. So, I suggest that taking time to investigate anonymous ‘suspicious’ letters where there’s no claim that a crime has happened, is not a generally good use of finite police resources.

(by the way, Desert we all kinda said 'yea, Abby had the ‘right’ to turn it over to the cops, quite a while ago)

As for ‘so, the cops come to your door and ask, so what?’

In the first place, as was mentioned, now my neighbors are wondering what the heck is going on.

Now, here’s the LEO at my door, asking me “Did you write this letter?” If I say no, do they go away w/o further ado? Or do they question my neighbors, my kids, the school etc. ask if they can come in and look around anyhow? (I’d bet they’d at least do that). Do they now, since I’ve denied it, start really getting suspicious and put me under survelience etc?

Now, let’s take the part about coming in and looking around. I can either say yes or say no. If I say no, they can take that as being suspicious, and either try and get a search warrant anyhow, or start watching me, ‘investigating’ further by questioning my neighbors, employers etc, neither of which is going to do me any good, even if I’'m ultimately cleared.

If I say yes, and they come in, ‘looking around’, as you pointed out, what are they ‘looking’ for? And what if they notice ‘other’ stuff then go get that warrant? I"ve consented to the search, right?

The questioning the kids - I remember my ex (who was a recovering alcoholic) telling me that our son said “mommy drinks a lot of beer” when he asked Ben. What had happened is ex saw a bunch of beer cans in our driveway (from our neighbor and his family sitting out back), assumed I was a-sittin on the porch and drinking a case or two, asked Ben “does mommy drink a lot of beer” The truth was I’d buy a six pack once in a great while and it’d last a week or so, but to my 4 year old son, who wanted to please his dad, he said “yep”.

I see too much potential for abuse in this. ANYONE can initiate a police investigation on anyone else, simply by typing out a letter claiming to be a molester. The beauty of that is, for that type of crime, damn near anything can be searched as a result. Not to mention, if they have that much time to go knocking on doors and asking questions, then why are there any unserved warrants around?

(minty as you know, IANAL, however, help me understand that a letter where the recipient has no way of authenticating it, can be considered anything other than ‘anonymous’? )

As far as ‘what would I want them to do’ - investigate where you have a known source (a letter w/o authentication isn’t a known source to me), a suggestion that a crime has occured, they could also check to see if there’s any other reports of abuse or problems w/that person or at that location, and if not, then file it away as ‘crank letter’.

I guess this just comes down to a value judgment, wring, but I’m not at all offended by these cops coming by to check out this guy on the basis of a letter that he sent to Dear Abby. Sure, anybody can get set up by a prankster or an anonymous tip. But when the evidence indicates that a serious crime is being contemplate or has taken place, I want the police to take ten minutes out of their day to see if there’s anything to it. Yes, there is the potential for this inquiry to turn embarrassing, although it’s far from inevitable that would happen.

Instead of this pedophile, let’s imagine that it was one of the September 11 hijackers who wrote such a letter. Dear Abby, all my friends say Allah wants me to help them hijack an airliner wo we can kill a bunch of infidels, but I’m not so sure that’s the right thing to do. Love your column. Sign me “Confused Jihadi” (Waleed Alsheri). Abby promptly hands it over to the FBI, and the FBI is supposed to do nothing because it might be a fake?

Heck no. Despite the potential embarrassment it might cause the suspect, they investigate the letter. That’s what we pay them to do, and if the potential crime is serious enough, then they need to investigate it even if they only have questionable evidence. I would sumbit that the potential molestation of two children is serious enough for the police to investigate based on nothing more than a letter to Dear Abby.

I understand your position, minty, I’m thinking of the other end (ie, not this particular case where some one ended up arrested for the sort of thing the letter talked about).

I’m thinking of all those folks who have PPO’s (Personal Protection Orders) out on some one, and have to wait for an officer to serve it. Or those folks, like I mentioned, where they’ve already been charged w/a crime and failed to appear in court.

Hell, I couldn’t even get the police to come over and check out a suspicious car sitting in the parking lot next to mine when it was actually happening (and I identified myself, was a legitimate business operator in the neighborhood etc.) . And apparently in some place they’ve got enough time to knock on doors and ask questions based on a letter to Dear Abby? Sheesh.

I don’t think that enough credit is being given here to Dear Abby. Yes, it’s true that neither Jeanne Phillips nor her mother is a licensed therapist. However, as the linked article points out, Jeanne has spent almost her entire life in the advice business. It’s not as if she reports every offbeat letter to the police. She has published numerous letters that deal with criminal activity, presumably without turning in the authors. It was this particular letter, which seemed to her a) to be genuine and b) to contain a credible threat to two young girls that she brought to the attention of the authorities. Under those circumstances I believe that the police acted reasonably in carrying out an investigation.

Confidential to sailor :wink:

The Ann/Abby story has been told in numerous books and articles, not to mention a really fun, campy T.V. movie staring Wendy Malick. Basically Esther Pauline took over the “Ann Landers” advice column of a Chicago paper when the man then writing it retired. As Esther gained in fame and fortune, her identical twin sister, Pauline Esther got jealous, so she asked the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle if she could write her own advice column. She made up the name Abigail Van Buren, and a great sibling rivalry was born. During some periods, Abby and Ann stopped speaking to each other, although they’ve apparently reconciled now.

both columns routinely get ‘whooshed’ by students from Harvard and also have been the ‘source’ of quite a few urban legends as well, if my Jan Harold recollections hold true.

And I re-iterate. Police routinely don’t have the time to investigate actual crimes that have happened. When my business got broken into (twice), they wrote up incident reports. In one, a fax machine was stolen - they didn’t bother to ask what kind it was, since they weren’t even going to go so far as put it on a list of stolen merchandise for the pawn shops.

While working at the correction center, from time to time, some one would fail to return. 95% of the time, I could have (and would have) told them where to look for the person. THey never did.

Once, when packing up the property of one of the residents, I came across a stack of law books stolen from the local law library. (about 25 of em, all marked clearly “may not be removed from such and such law school library”). Here was a pile of stolen property, a known and identifiable victim and a known and identifiable person to hold culpable. The person involved was already in custody - all they had to do was come over and write up a report, confiscate the books. Nope, they weren’t interested, in an actual crime, with a verifiable victim plus a suspect already in custody. I arranged to get the books back to the library myself.

And, frankly , as long as I know strings of stories like that, yes, I will suggest that the police don’t really have the time to check out unsubstantiated anonymous ‘weird’ letters sent in to a columnist.

I’m surprised none of you have suggested the absoulte perfect solution in this particular situation - turn the letter over, not to the police, but to Child Protective Services, who are professionals in the area of child abuse. They have investigatory procedures and powers (without the search issues), could have done some cursory investigation, and should something substantitve have turned up then contacted the police.

I’ll skip the whole “Should the cops do that?” issue and hit on what I think Abby should have done.

I have dealt with similar type situations in RL. I worked for a major ISP and dealt with suicide threats, death threats and, thankfully only one, case of possible child molestation. I gathered all the info and talked to OpSec and the lawyers and let them run with it. Having said that, after a little bit you could pretty much tell what was credible from someone joking-playing for sympathy.

Now, from what I have read, the letter the guy sent sounded to be something along the lines of “I have these fantasies and I need help, what do I do?” If that is the case I think the best coarse for Abby to take would be to contact the guy and tell him that if he didn’t get help from a shrink and have the shrink contact her she would have to turn him in. The guy wanted help so give him a chance. If he didn’t follow through call the cops. If, on the other hand, the letter read “I am having these fantasies and am about to do it.” then call the cops right away.

As far as the 40 pictures go, well as someone else meantioned, it depends on where they were located, browser cache vs it’s own folder. There is also an issue about who had access to the computer. I once talked to a guy who had his account with the ISP canceled for emailing kiddie porn. This guy was really upset about it because he didn’t do it. He claimed, and I believed him, that he had a new roommate and let the new roommate use his computer. He claimed that the new roomie did the bad deed. The reason I believed the guy was that after his account was canceled he looked at the hard drive and found some sick pictures. When I talked to him he wasn’t told the reason his account was canceled. He told me what he found and was really concerned about it. There were other reasons I believed the guy but they don’t matter. The poor guy probably talked to the cops at least, maybe the FBI.

Anyway, two points. #1. If you let someone use your computer either watch or check what they did. #2. Kill your cache if you accidently see something you shouldn’t.

Also, 40 pic’s seems like a really small number. The really big busts I have read about had the perverts with thousands of pics.

BTW, the one case of possible child molestation still bothers me to this day. Due to legal reasons I never found out what happened. I hope it wasn’t true. If it was true I hope they tossed the guy in jail. I also hope he got shanked in jail.

Slee

Sounds to me like the guy was seriously asking for help. Why else would he write such a letter with his return address on it? Hope he gets it. Hope the girlfriend doesn’t let the guy within 100 yards of her daughter.

Geesh.

You are allowed one picture. Possessing more than one is considered an illegal collection.