Holy fucking shit!
Dear god what the fuck does it take?!
Wait, there was more!?
What, you don’t even keep fucking records now??
Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with the Cleveland PD? Years of horror could have been cut short.
Naked. On dog leashes. In the backyard. On all fours!? :eek: And more than one call was made to the police reporting this? My brain has a hard time wrapping itself around this. Geez, in my lobotomized subdivision, I wince at the sound of my electric garage door opener after say 9 p.m., in fear of my nosey neighbors complaining about the racket to the police. And in the 'burbs, the cops always come.
Wrong jurisdiction. Should have called the ASPCA.
This is sad, but, unfortunately, not surprising.
After Anthony Sowell, (11 confirmed murders based on bodies in yard and home), was finally caught and people started examining his actions over the previous few years, there was at least one report of a woman who had escaped from him after an attempted rape and strangulation, (a repeat of a crime for which he had already served time in prison), whose story the police dismissed because she had been a prostitute along with multiple missing persons reports that family members claimed the police had not taken seriously. (He was finally apprehended after a second woman also escaped a similar situation. I am not sure why they bothered to believe the second woman, although it took them over a month to follow up on her complaint.)
After it became clear that the police had dropped the ball on numerous occasions with regard to Sowell, the mayor formed a task force in late 2009 to look at ways to improve police performance in the area of violence against women. They reported in April, 2012, (about the time that several of the neighbors of the Castros were reporting naked women on leashes and women pounding on windows), that most of their recommendations had been implemented. It would appear that whatever was proposed was not sufficient or that they were only implemented on paper.
Just a glance at the other side of the ledger: how much has the budget of Cleveland PD been cut to economize in the past 10 years*? Non-essentials, perhaps, like record keeping, or coordination of police reports, cold case investigations, and so on.
The people of Cleveland probably have precisely the police force that they are willing to pay for. Fallout from the Sowell case notwithstanding.
*I could be wrong, I have made zero attempt to find out the answer to the question above. It’s just that this is something that the public seems to forget about, until something ugly like this comes to the surface.
Roddy
I am NOT defending the police in Cleveland, or anywhere for that matter, but it has been my experience as an informed observer that the public is not aware of the volume of information a police department deals with at any given moment and how woefully inadequate most are in handling it.
Right now I am personally involved in having witnessed 5 separate significant criminal acts in the last month, and I am not sure anything will be done about any of them.
Add in the awful challenge of trying to find criminals and criminal behavior while still respecting the rights of individuals and their privacy - I cannot fathom how the job can be done on a regular basis successfully. Of course I speak from a position of my own ignorance when saying that, because no doubt it can be done, it is just I am unaware as to how one could succeed.
So carry on with the pitting - I agree with the sentiment. I just dropped in to relay the notion that when you look at what law enforcement is up against it ultimately does not surprise me when awful stories like this happen, sadly.
After something like this, everyone’s a wiseass because in life things that are obvious in retrospect are not at all obvious without retrospect. A large percentage of what any neighbour is saying now will be bullshit or exaggeration. It’s always the way.
Things that fall into place now (like overly large amounts of takeout being taken into the house) just wouldn’t mean “they must have a bunch of kidnapped girls in the house” without hindsight.
Even the “naked women on all fours in the backyard on leashes” thing. If I was a cop and and heard that, then unless the witness said the women seemed to be held against their will (and none of the witnesses are saying that now) I’d assume there was something kinky going on, but not a mass kidnapping.
The young girls naked and being walked around on all fours thing is more suspicious, but “young” can mean a lot of things. I find it hard to believe the cops would not have come if the witness had said “there are naked underage girls being paraded around on all fours in my neighbours yard”. I guess it’s conceivable. I think it is more likely the neighbour is now exaggerating or bullshitting.
I’m not saying the cops definitely made no mistakes, but I’m at least if not more inclined to think that this is a combination of 20/20 hindsight and horseshit.
For the record, the story I read on these reports said that the Cleveland PD was denying that they ever received any such reports.
At this point what else are they gonna say?
There are reports they also failed to appropriately follow up on calls of regular old domestic violence sounds as well as a neighbor seeing a woman holding a baby and pounding and screaming in an upstairs window. Apparently you can get away with that if you act like no one’s home, as the cops will just leave with no followup.
I would agree with you if it had only been one neighbor, but if you re-examine the OP, you’ll find that three different neighbors called, some of them multiple times.
I’m not convinced they called. I’m not calling them liars, but a lot of folks want to be a part of a huge story like this.
“Hey Mr. Reporter! You know I once saw them naked in the backyard, being led around on a leash! What? Did I call the police? Um…yes. Yes I did.”
Of course, you also have three separate people claiming to have reported the same sort of actions. And, reading the quotes, I did not see any “I called that in, too” comments. They all appear to have been separately declared to reporters.
This does not prove that the calls were made, but it certainly lends weight to the claims.
I am also sympathetic to the notion that the police get an awful lot of calls that would require enormous amounts of manpower to track down and that may not be readily available in current databases.
The problem is that the Cleveland cops are racking up a fairly impressive count of incidents involving kidnapped women on which they did not quite follow through. (In contrast to the incident, last fall, in which dozens of cops tried to get in on a Wild West car chase–in violation of departmental procedures and, in some cases, in violation of direct orders–only to wind up firing over a hundred shots to kill a man and a woman who were unarmed.)
I do not believe that every Cleveland cop is incompetent, or even that the department is necessarily corrupt. However, like the Los Angeles PD, they have a large number of incompetent or abusive cops that are earning the department a bad reputation.
Where is Teddy Roosevelt when we need him?
Hey, the police probably figured it was a Spinal Tap album cover shoot. That sort of thing happens every day in Cleveland, right?
Chief Wiggum and Officer Barbrady were just really busy all those times, okay?
Perhaps you’ve hit on something. Maybe if they said it was white women on leashes on all fours and the guys were Hispanic… then maybe ;).
Honestly, if you saw your neighbor leading a woman around on a leash, would your first thought be, “My god! A kidnapper!” or, “Jesus, close your drapes, you pervs.” I can’t really blame the cops for blowing off those calls. The domestic violence reports not being acted on is more disturbing, but I don’t know how overworked the cops in that city are.
And probably again recently before that, too, because I was in Cleveland to visit family a couple years ago when we were wondering what to do when my uncle jokingly suggested we could visit the site of the [so-and-so] shooting. I think it was a separate incident because I think it was only a man that died.
I jokingly said “yeah, mom, I like that! If we have time, I hear Kent State’s not too far away, either!”
tv news reported interviews with the victims said the leash and backyard thing never happened
I can easily imagine the outraged Pit thread about a jackbooted cop whose close-minded attitude to consensual D&S/power-exchange relationship caused him to insist on investigating what was none of his business.