Those pesky island police logs
Downtown Block Island from the New London ferry.
Block Island Police Chief Vincent Carlone doesn’t want the island’s weekly newspaper, the Block Island Times, to publish police logs identifying people arrested for such offenses as drunken driving because, he says, it’s unfair to shame them in this way. Or is it because he thinks that publishing such logs would be bad for business on the resort island, which is almost entirely dependent on tourists (many of whom are not averse to getting drunk) and rich summer residents? (B.I. has turned into something of an extension of the Hamptons in recent years.)
In a Sept. 4 story, headlined “Chief lobbied paper not to run crime stories,’’ the chief told The Providence Journal:
“This is a nice community, and I’ve made that representation to them {a request that the paper not publish on paper or online police logs}.’’ And he said that the paper has “apparently agreed at some level.’’ Indeed, the paper has not published the arrest log for quite some time, although it had been a tradition for years.
Well, I think that people on such a small place as Block Island deserve to know what’s going on and to be able to decide for themselves what constitutes a serious offense. Drunk driving, for one, would seem to fall under that heading, since it can get people killed. John Pantalone, who’s chairman of the University of Rhode Island’s journalism program, told The Journal how he sees the problem:
“If the Police Department has chosen to withhold this information so as not to embarrass people in a small community, that seems like a bad policy. Communities need to know about misbehavior both for their own protection and to discourage further, perhaps more serious, misbehavior.”
The biggest problem in publishing such police logs is that sometimes a charge doesn't hold up and/or anarrest is found invalid. News media are morally obligated to inform the public when that happens but they often don’t, or they publish the update so inconspicuously that virtually no one sees it. Very unfair!
In any event, these logs are public records. It’s up to the Block Island Times what to do with them.
Of course, most people love to read the dirt on local bad behavior. Most of us have a voyeuristic streak and a touch ofschadenfreude – pleasure at seeing someone else’s misfortune. No matter how bad we think things are for us, someone near us has it worse. How comforting!
Not running police logs cuts readership. The Providence police reports once were among the most read things in The Providence Journal and the very droll “Crime and Punishment’’ section of The Boston Guardian (on whose board I sit) may be the most read part of that paper, Boston’s biggest weekly. (More exciting might be a story there about an apartment at 39 Beacon St. being rented for $50,000 a month – another sign of just how fancy downtown Boston has become because ofmoney from financial services, health services, tech and flight capital flowing in from around the world. If only Providence could siphon off more of that moolah. So near and yet so far.)
It’s unclear if the police logs policy has anything to do with the paper’s sale last year to Michael Schroeder, who owns several Connecticut newspapers, and has links with casino mogul (and Trump pal) Sheldon Adelson.
Hit this link to read the Block Island story:
http://www.providencejournal.com/news/20170903/block-island-police-chief-says-hes-lobbied-to-keep-crime-stories-out-of-print.