[QUOTE=Czarcasm]
So you destroyed evidence that could be followed up on, and decided that what the police don’t know can’t hurt them. I’m curious about what the police would think about your idea of saving them so much trouble, though. You think that, because none of the perps had any distinguishing characteristics, the police could do nothing, but what if in the case of the three that ran together the police could use the description of the group to bring them in? Now, they don’t even have suspicion of a previous crime to work with.
[/QUOTE]
Is this becoming a hijack? Well, I’m not a mod. So…
I don’t entirely disagree with you. I might not take the same course of action today. In hindsight I should indeed have turned over the gun. While worthless from the perspective of my little crime, lands-and-grooves on a fired slug might have matched it to some previous crime. My bad.
I did not offer my detailed comments as a defense, but as an explanation, since you asked. But as further explanation of my thoughts I’ll offer that the “group” (if it continued to ‘run together’ and if it could have been identified separately from any other three individuals randomly associated in the neighborhood, and if indeed it could have been approached by police for an interview-- all of which I still find to be highly doubtful) might well have chosen to accuse *me * of attacking them. Now it’s three words against one. This wouldn’t have flown, for reasons below, but it wouldn’t have “brought them in” either.
As for working from the suspicion of a previous crime-- this was an area (downtown Cocoanut Grove, Miami, circa 1990) where after dark the police traveled only in pairs or squads, never alone. The public at large could be broken down visually with pretty high certainty into three groups:
- tourists,
- locals who worked there, and
- everybody else.
I was a 2. I worked in a bar and had an ongoing and quite positive relationship with the local cops. They were in my place literally every night, sometimes repeatedly. (It was a pretty nasty dive; fights, even brawls, were common.) I saw several of them socially outside of our work-time relationship. A couple of them were fishing buddies. We had lots of personal interaction including discussions about the whichness of what and the problems of the world. I can tell you with considerable authority that, to their mind and based upon their professional experience, they held a “suspicion of a previous crime” for *everybody * in group 3.
As the cops saw things, tourists were bait. Tourists carried money, credit cards, cameras, and other valuables. They could be legitimately separated from these possessions by those of us in group 2-- they spent their money, maxed their credit cards, even pawned their chattels. That was business. But they were sometimes preyed upon in illegitimate ways by group 3. That was a no-no. It bummed the party and was bad for repeat business. So the cops were already well primed to be suspicious of everybody who wasn’t either a 1 or a 2. If a person wasn’t there to “enjoy the night life” (group 1) and wasn’t in the business of providing night life related services (group 2) then they had only nefarious reason to be present. No crime reporting on my part would have reinforced that judgement one iota.
As regards the OP, I offered my original comments as a demonstration of the failure of statistics to resolve the question posed. I demonstrated that statistics can be skewed by many circumstances-- my personal crime statistics showing a 50% variance between “real” crime and “reported” crime. And having the added lagniappe of being directly related to the carrying of a gun by a citizen.
Perhaps I should have found a different way to say that, without the distraction of running off at the mouth— er, keyboard. Sorry.
