How 'intricacies' of local knowledge could help find Nicola Bulley, as police struggle with 'toxic' public interest
Martyn Underhilll says police "need" armchair detectives to help solve cases like Nicola Bulley's but "toxic" knock-on effects of huge public interest can also hinder searches. He says 1,000 people a day turned up to look for Sarah Payne in 2000 and dealing with helpers is a balancing act.
Toxic - it's another overused word which in this case seems to mean 'unhelpful'. When I weighed out potassium cyanide in the lab, I knew those white, salt-like crystals were toxic and 'toxic' meant rather more than 'unhelpful'.
7 comments:
Not sure about this one. I assume that a police investigation like this has a certain viability. After a certain length of time and contamination of the site, the investigation is in effect dead. Having amateur sleuths traipsing over a potential crime scene, or even suggesting different scenarios to listening police, kills off the possibility of solving the mystery as emphatically as the white crystals. The Yorkshire Ripper investigation got bogged down in its early stages because the detectives were simply swamped by vast amounts of information from the public.
Sam - to my mind 'toxic' doesn't work as well as other possibilities such as 'unhelpful', 'obstructive' or maybe 'troublesome' or 'misleading'. 'Toxic' now has too many weird modern connotations which aren't specific enough.
We do not have local police for local people any more. H/T League of Gentlemen.
We have strangers who come in from the big head office. Did they even have a dog?
From what I understand, they did not seal off the locus. Thus letting the public wander on public land.
Yet when they can cause maximum disruption, they will close of a motorway at the drop of a hat. For hours.
Didn't Basil Fawlty call someone a 'toxic midget' once?
The media, bless their hearts, struggle to find ways of getting people to view the adverts (because that is where the media get their money).
So we get puffed up human interest stories, details of horrific injuries (if it bleeds it leads), plus all language is boosted to be more alarming that it actually is. Everything is a 'battle' or a 'war against...'. People's characteristic behaviour is grossly exaggerated, celebrities are example of perfect humanity (until they fall from grace). Climate change...
So really 'toxic' rather than unhelpful is just business as usual for the media.
I watched a documentary about an unsolved murder in Scotland and it can also be found on YT. At the end the investigative office had stated they would welcome information from any source to help and left an e-mail address for contact.
I had what I thought was a possible line of enquiry which might lead to the murderer, and sent them a message detailing how it could be done, and apologising if the line had already been thought of.
An acknowledgment would have been nice.
Doonhamer - I'm surprised they didn't seal it off to a greater extent if they are now saying the site has been disturbed. It implies they knew where they should be looking but didn't seal all of it off immediately for some reason.
Scrobs - he's bound to have done.
DJ - it is business as usual, as if even language is fair game in their world. It works against them to some degree as the language becomes tired, but then we're all stuck with tired language.
Tammly - even an automatic acknowledgment would have told you the email arrived in the right place.
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