Cleveland doesn’t have any money or anywhere near a sufficient tax base to pay for proper policing, IMHO. Saying you get what you pay for is fine for those in the wealthy suburbs (which around Cleveland are named Westlake, Rocky River, Bay Village, Brecksville, etc, etc.) but just hangs the poor people actually living in the city of Cleveland proper out to dry. Saying that you get what you pay for when you don’t have any money is government by tired cliche and doesn’t solve anything for anyone.
That’s the hole truth.
Doesn’t mean they won’t try. Virtually everyone guilty of wrongdoing doesn’t admit it until evidence overwhelmingly indicates otherwise, if ever, right?
That’s argumentum ignoratium – the argument from ignorance: “We don’t know they AREN’T doing it!”
What you say is true, but it doesn’t apply here. Most people guilty of wrongdoing don’t 'fess up until the evidence against them is clear, yes. But most people don’t undertake wrongdoing when it’s clear that they’ll be exposed, either. And that’s the more accurate picture of what’s going on here: we could assume the police falsified the claim that there were no calls reporting the supposed backyard excursions, because there own records are the only thing that could definitively prove them wrong --unless someone recorded the call, a pretty remote possibility.
But we can’t assume the police chose to falsify the victim’s current statements, because they can see that this would shortly collapse in front of them as other people interviewed the victims.
An old urban legend: Response Time | Snopes.com
Unless they’re desperate enough to attempt covering their collective ass after mishandling Sowell.
Cleveland Chief of Police Michael McGrath told the Today Show that the women were indeed let out into the backyard once in a while. Those statements, present in this cached article, is curiously missing from the current NBC News article.
And the imprisoned women hadn’t been voting down any police budgets, either…
The women said they were allowed into the yard occasionally while fully dressed and wearing sunglasses and wigs. They denied ever having been in the yard naked and on leashes, which is what the neighbors reported seeing.
Now, who know why the neighbors said that. Maybe there were women on leashes, and they were just different women somehow. It seems nuts, but hey, the whole story is nuts. Maybe they made it up for attention. Maybe they are misremembering or something. I dunno. But the 3 kidnapped women deny ever having been in the backyard on leashes, and the Cleveland PD denies ever having gotten any calls about it. So I’m most inclined to say it never happened, but as the case continues, we’ll see.
No. Did you read the article?
They go on to point out it’s not sloth that creates the slower response, but triage:
And this case, with a kidnap victim who’d been held in captivity for ten years and feared the imminent return of her captor, should have be triaged as urgent.
Yes. And yes, I did. The original story, attributed to a Mississippi paper, is an urban legend. There have been similar cases, as you see.
Ariel Castro is not a nice man at all, but I’m looking up Anthony Sowell and holy shit. That guy makes Castro seem like Strawberry Shortcake.
Man, how bad are things if you can’t spare an officer to check out a report like that? Cleveland’s finest can’t really be that short on personnel, right? Of course, it gets even better. Apparently the police didn’t actually catch on to Sowell’s misdoings until a routine sex-offender address check revealed a house full of decaying corpses.
If absolutely nothing else, it seems like the police in Cleveland could really use some more ears on the ground. I mean, how the hell do you miss something like that?
In case anyone was wondering, yes, the survivors whose allegations were apparently put on the back-burner by police investigators were both black, as were all eleven of Sowell’s confirmed victims. Some of them had been reporting missing for years before their fates were finally uncovered… Seems that the Cleveland PO didn’t even really consider the disappearances particularly suspicious.
This guy could well have hired a prostitute to fulfil his fantasy of parading a woman naked like a horse in his backyard. There’s no reason to assume kidnapping and locking up young women is his only kink
I’m not sure anyone can appreciate how nutty people are until they work in public safety. For every true emergency, there are dozens non-emergencies called in by crazy people.
My uncle worked as an EMT in the 70s and 80s. He has tons of stories about nutty patients. They had to deal with everything from the dude who’d complain of “chest pains,” then refuse admittance every time he wanted a ride up to his girlfriend’s house, which was a block from the hospital (after hundreds of rides, city council had to actually pass a new law to deal with him), to battered and bloodied women who refused assistance because they didn’t want to get their abusive boyfriend into trouble.
Then you have the crazies who call in for fairly routine requests, when it’s another but. For instance, one time the police dispatched him because a man had cut himself badly. As my uncle was bandaging him up, the police searched the house. As it turns out, the patient had cut himself while decapitating his friend. His body and head were in the bathtub.
If all people were rational and honest and sane, it’d make filtering and triaging these calls a lot easier. But they’re not. People are freaking nuts.
I wasn’t referring to any “original case.” I was referring to the use of a tactic to ensure quicker police response. And that fact is that using that tactic works.
Correct?
No. I didn’t write about an “original case,” either. I wrote, in first posting the Snopes link, “An old urban legend.” You wrote “No.” The 2001 urban legend predates the 2003 and 2009 similar real stories.
So what you intended to convey was: “That was once considered an urban legend, but subsequent events actually paralleled the urban legend fact set and now it’s fair to say the tactic works?”
You know they would have dropped every-freaking-thing, and enlisted a photographer!
If by “the tactic works” you mean “you can get arrested if you try this,” and if I wrote such a lengthy intro to every link I provided, then yeah, sure, I guess so.
Here’s my original comment:
Do you agree that what I said is true? Or is what I said an urban legend?