For local blog, suspect's privacy trumps community safety
In their coverage of a vicious mugging at 17th & Harrison on Tuesday, local blog Capitol Hill Seattle reprinted the account of a community member who witnessed the incident firsthand. While the entire letter is worth reading for the vivid scenario it eloquently recreates (which explains the bottle of wine, pictured at right), that's not what this post is about.Instead, take a look at the first paragraph:
I heard a commotion behind me at the west corner of NE 17th and Harrison right under the street light. A young couple walking to their car from On 15th Video, were being mugged by 5 teenage african american youths maybe 13 - 15 years old. There were 3 girls and 2 boys, most wearing hoodies, some in denim jackets, one girl with [CHS has snipped this part to remove personal description]Something's nagging me about this. Why would you remove the "personal description" of somebody potentially linked to violent crime in the same neighborhood you strive to keep informed through your blog? By the way that sentence opens up ("one girl with...") it seems unlikely that this personal information would be anything as detailed as the girl's name or home address...which means there's no excuse for editing this section out.
I e-mailed the author of CHS asking why this information was removed, and he responded with the following:
because i could not personally verify the account and i felt the details were specific enough to identify somebodyI might be missing something here: but why would you not want to provide details that could allow police and neighbors to identify a suspected criminal? And why would such details be fair game if they had come directly from an eyewitness, but not directly from a letter written by that eyewitness? This line of reasoning makes no sense.
if i had talked to police and received the description or even heard the description directly from the eyewitness, i would have printed it.
make sense?
Maybe I'm old-fashioned, and I have nothing against CHS or its authors. But if you have a blog that is meant to serve as an outlet for the community, it would make sense that you put all your efforts towards helping to remove criminals from that community. Deleting the personal description of a street thug, for whatever reason, goes completely against that logic.
