Having been outwitted by a pair of itinerant snipers who killed
six of a dozen victims in their county of Montgomery, Maryland,
police of said county are trying to salvage something. They have
formed a task force. Not to discover what made it so easy to kill
at random in their jurisdiction, a status that still obtains, but
to try to find out if any of those 70,000 tips they received during
the October shooting rampage might lead to criminality.
Captain Nancy Demme, spokeswoman for the Montgomery County
Police, says many of the tips were set aside during the shootings
because they were irrelevant to the problem at hand. But now a task
force of three officers has been assigned the task of winnowing
through the tips with the aid of Maryland-National Capital Park
Police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. “There’s a
lot of information,” says Captain Demme. “We would be negligent if
we threw it to the wayside.”
(Not thrown to the wayside was the erroneous tip that led police
to search for a non-existent white box truck as the murder spree
progressed, and the accused killers drove about unimpeded in a dark
sedan.)
Jim Purtilo, a gun-rights advocate in the area, smells a rat. He
believes many neighbors of law-abiding gun owners reported them as
suspects merely because they owned firearms. “A witch hunt,” warns
Purtilo of the coming investigation. “A terrible allocation of
resources.” Purtilo figures if any real criminals were identified
during the sniper investigation, surely they were arrested.
The recent holidays saw police in some communities introducing a
new form of crime prevention. Bar owners in Reston and Herndon,
Virginia, report police entered their establishments to question,
test, and arrest patrons who imbibed too much — no matter that
they were peaceable and had no intention of driving. Some police
claim this is not a new procedure, but bartenders say cops bellying
up to non-offending customers is a new wrinkle and the bar trade
organization calls it an “anti-alcohol jihad.” They have until St.
Patrick’s Day to get this ironed out.
But there is another form of crime reporting that police are
letting go by the wayside insofar as possible. Burglary — more
exactly, burglar alarms. They are the bane of police departments
from one end of the country to the other. Why? Because, like those
70,000 tips piled up in the drawer of Montgomery County
Headquarters, they so frequently lead nowhere. They are false
alarms.
Los Angeles Police are embarked on a new program. They estimate
92 percent of the alarms are false. (At least there is no
perpetrator around after the alarm sounds.) And they simply will
ignore burglar alarms from here on unless they are “Verified
Burglar Alarm Cases.” What form of substantiation is required isn’t
spelled out. Perhaps the burglar must pick up the phone and say,
“Yes. It’s me.” (They never say “I” as they should.) Or perhaps the
home owner must race downstairs through a hail of gunfire and make
the verification call himself. Los Angeles police will make one
exception: alarms from gun stores will be treated as verified from
the get-go.
The disdain for burglar alarms is felt by authorities in
Montgomery County, Maryland, which now taxes them and is increasing
the fine for a second-offense false alarm to $100. During a public
meeting to discuss the alarm business, a veteran police officer
offered a unique reason why they should be banished. They are
dangerous, he said, because police responding figure the alarm is
false — it so often is— and approach the premises casually. But
one of these times, he cautioned, the alarm will be real, and the
policemen stand to get hurt!
So let the alarm ring, unless of course, the old man in that
house happens to have a firearm, in which case we’ll be right out.
With ‘cuffs. For him.
