Yeah, I got that much. But, like Helen, “I don’t know how this works.”
When and under what circumstances are police details about a suicide shared with the press?
To what extent does it depend on what a close family member wants?
Does it matter if the suicide was of a famous person?
What happens if a news reporter becomes aware of police/coroner activity and follows up on it?
I get it – Blanc’s statement is just one of those things you’re supposed to accept at face value because the writer put the words in the mouth of a credible character, and they move along the story without having to get into the specific details. Still, I’m asking for clarification.
I imagine that varies from department to department, be it due to differences in policy or differences in personnel. Just as a quick, not quite the same, example, if we have any type of police incident at my business, we’ll often ask them to keep it off the their Blotter/Daily Reports. That is to say, anyone requesting it from the PD would still be able to get a copy of the report, but they won’t include it in the daily/weekly lists they put in the newspaper and, now, social media.
With that said, I don’t really have to suspend my disbelief to assume Blanc knows the police chief, or knows someone that knows the police chief and ask, or convince, them to wait until next week to sign off on the official report, which would than be available to the public.
I think that’s a big part of it. But to me they weren’t simply placed in his mouth to move the plot forward, they were used to create some mystery around him. Wondering how he can delay the press finding out about the suicide forces me to create a mental backstory explaining it. It enhances his character without making the movie longer.
So, if Blanc is asking someone to wait a week to sign off on the official report, any guess about when the report would have been signed off without Blanc’s intervention? Is two days too short a time frame? I’m asking because Helen meets Blanc two days after she received a call about Andi’s suicide.
…when I was still working in hotels, I was very nearly the personal butler for the President of a country that I won’t name during APEC in 1999. But at the very last minute (as in the flight had arrived and were at the airport) the delegation decided our hotel wasn’t good enough and made emergency arrangements to stay somewhere else. So my one and only chance to play butler for an international head-of-state was taken away from me
Sadly, I know a bit about this from personal experience, although not the “famous person” aspect. IME, police can keep all the info about a suicide very close to their vests for at least several days if they are investigating other possible (non-suicide) explanations. The preferences of close family members about prolonged investigation or lack thereof come in a very distant second, although next of kin do get immediate notification about the finding of the dead person.
Perhaps Blanc’s string-pulling was basically just getting his cop friends to start a (slow) investigation prompted by claims of suspicion of a crime in the case of Andi’s “suicide”. Which, ironically, would turn out to be justified by the facts!
By law all police records are public records. A fully staffed daily newspaper will have someone reading every single police report filed in a small city and at least going through them to find major incidents in larger cities. In very large cities there might be so many police reports that reporters count on outside information to know which ones to ask for.
Under these circumstances, I assume that Blanc knows people who can temporarily hide or misdirect the press and delay them from finding out about this. It might work for a few days until someone tips off the press and they start demanding the records.
It would only really work in a situation that for whatever reason didn’t result in immediate public interest in and knowledge of what happened.
It’s clear that Andi did not live in major city and, from the Alpha/Klear contract that she was going to sign, her zip code is for New Rochelle, NY and the area code of her cell number is consistent with this. (At 1:21:51 of the movie.)
BTW, why did Andi not answer her phone when the other four called her as soon when they received her email? Did she actually get a new number? Also, we know that Claire is a politician and that’s why she didn’t respond to the email but why did the other three not respond, especially after failing to connect by phone? And, Andi didn’t end her email with “Please respond as soon as possible” but with “You know where to find me”, which suggests a phone call or personal visit.
So if the town is small enough that it’s feasible for the police reporter to read every report filed every day, then Blame’s inside contact would have to do something like “temporarily misfile” or misplace the document for a few days.
I don’t know what the practice is now in the age of digital filing—perhaps “forget” to enter the data into the system for a few days?
The other issue would be the emergency services response. That’s also a public record—date and time and address of response and the reason for the call.
I think Andi was dead for at least a chunk of the time when people were calling her.
Lionel ratted her out to Miles straight away (by fax). Miles was in NY so quite close by and acted on hasty impulse, speeding over there to kill her with no or little delay (he’s a do-er, not a thinker).
If the rest did try to call her before Miles arrived at the house, we can only assume she let it ring out. That could have been a strategy to make them nervous, or it could have been her nerves, or she could have said “you know where to find me” because she wanted to confront them in person, not over the phone.
If it’s a one-police-reporter town, could Blanc (or a contact of Blanc’s) simply reach out to that reporter and say, incidentally, the world’s greatest detective is on the case — as he has been in other banner-headline cases that made international news, you remember — and if you don’t bother to report this now, you can break that story then; how does that sound? Or would you rather someone else gets the big story, which may or may not be that Blanc had a harder time catching the murderer because of this small-time police-beat reporter?
Well, what keeps the death of Joe Schmo off the front page? These records are public, but nobody’s reporting on them unless there’s a reason to.
So Adi dies and the records are available, but nobody is reporting on it because why would they? Who’s looking at the records? Who’s checking ME reports from bumfuck nowhere to see if this particular person has died?
Maybe there’s one reporter at the local paper who’s responsible for keeping tabs on whether any local notables have passed, and maybe they and the paper’s editor suddenly have greased palms and don’t think it’s newsworthy.
No reason to assume any corruption or bribery at the governmental level.
If someone famous has died, no way is the reporter or editor going to keep it out of the news. You would have to pay a lot more money than would be worth it to do that.
On the other hand, if you have friends in the police department, then it would be much more easy to call in a favor there.
I guess it boils down to how famous she is. Certainly she got a lot of media attention during her humiliating trial with Miles, but that doesn’t necessarily mean she’s “once in a lifetime exclusive breaking story” famous.
Duke learns about it after the story finally hits, but the movie makes a point of telling us that Duke has waaaay too many alerts on his phone. We don’t know that Adi’s death is big news beyond “person formerly associated with splashy billionaire commits suicide.”
It doesn’t have to be any bigger than that. In the news business you start every day with nothing. When you get something, you’re going to publish it, unless there’s a compelling reason not to. And Blanc isn’t going to be paying bribes at a high enough level to be compelling.
Blanc said he had connections with the police. And that’s a far more plausible—and far more common—circumstance than bribing a journalist.
I don’t think we’re supposed to get the impression that Blanc is going to pay anything to anyone. He’ll ask somebody powerful to do it for him, and they will because they owe him a favor. Who knows what kind of shenanigans he’s gotten people out of during his storied career? Enough that he plays Among Us in the bathtub with a bunch of famous people, at least.
And he’s not talking about “illegally cover up this public information”. He’s talking about “delay the release for maybe a week”. That seems like a perfectly plausible favor to ask of the police. Either he knows someone on the force, or he knows someone who does.
