>Previous to that I had been robbed and the burglars broke windows and such,
>and left clear fingerprints on the remaining windows and walls. I
>immediately called the police, touching nothing, so they could gather
>evidence. It took them almost two hours to arrive at my home, and when they
>finally got there, they said it was not customary for them to dust for
>fingerprints. They wrote a report, which nothing ever came of, and gathered
>no type of evidence. I was given some crappy story, and I was quite pissed
>with the men in blue when they left. If I hadn't been a law-abiding kind of
>gal, I would have hit them over the head on their way out. They seemed
>useless.
>
>Incidentally, I lived in the Central neighborhood in a nice house on the
>corner of 34th and Park Avenue, I am a woman, and African-American. Hmm...
>Could that have had anything to do with it?
>
>Pamela Taylor (Clearwater)
No, that didn't have anything to do with it. The same thing
happened to me, a white male living in a nice house in the conservative
12th ward (Denny Schulstad territory, at the time).
The police told me that there were so many house break-ins
throughout the city that there was no way the city police had the staffing
to do all the investigating that you see in TV shows. And that
fingerprinting would not be much use, since no lab worker would ever have
the time to compare the fingerprints to their huge master file of
fingerprints. (Also, they pointed out that the filing and trail of
paperwork required to make sure the fingerprints were presentable in court
greatly added to the costs. I hadn't thought about that.)
I guess I can accept these responses as realistically accurate,
though I'm not happy about them. But they do raise a couple of questions.
1) The problem of comparing sample fingerprints against the huge
master file may have been real at that time (about 15 years ago), but now
we have automated computer matching systems which can do this
checking. You see news stories about decades-old murder or rape cases that
are being solved using this technology. So given this modern technology,
would it not make sense for the Minneapolis Police policy to be
reconsidered? If they took fingerprint samples from all house break-ins,
they might be able to identify the people responsible. They wouldn't have
to do much investigating beyond the computer search. But once they caught
one, they might be able to use the fingerprint evidence to connect him to
other break-ins, and so maybe put a career criminal away for a longer
time. Since I've heard that a small number of criminals are responsible
for many of the break-ins in the city, this might greatly reduce the
incidence of break-ins.
2) If they aren't going to do any investigative work, then the
Minneapolis police response to house break-ins amounts to little more than
filing a case number for use in insurance reports. So why do we have to
spend the money to send a squad car and 2 sworn officers to take this
report?
We could assign all these house break-ins to a civilian clerical
worker, who could file the appropriate reports & case numbers for the
householders insurance company. That would certainly save a lot of
taxpayer money, and be just as effective (on as ineffective).
Tim Bonham, Ward 12, Standish-Ericsson
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