It appears the Post used the misleading headline to protect the soft-on-crime Montgomery County Council, who have proven impotent to stop the surge of violent crime in the County. While murders spiked in Montgomery, Fairfax had no increase, D.C. had fewer, and Prince William County's homicide rate plunged from 22 to 4. Increasing crime has so embarrassed Montgomery County elected officials, they have resorted to violating the County's open data law, by sabotaging the crime datasets.
A month-long crime data outage last summer only ended after I publicized the illegal blackout. Then block numbers were removed, making the data nearly useless for lengthy roads. Next, they restored block numbers, but disabled the sorting function of the date columns, so that you can only access random crimes from 2016 no matter which option you select for starting or ending date. Finally, as of this morning, I can no longer use the mouse to slide the columns right or left, only the keypad on my keyboard.
Ironically, the jurisdictions whose homicide rates declined last year provide more and more-accessible crime data to their residents than Montgomery County. We need new elected leadership that can stop the trend of rising homicides, not one that resorts to childish tactics like blocking crime data from the public. Sad!
What a disappointing mess Mr. Dyer has made of this story; a huge missed opportunity. There is legitimate, thoughtful discussion to be had about the fact that the number of murders in the county increased last year. But instead, Mr. Dyer has decided to frame the issue from the perspective of his own grievances with the so-called "cartel" and false cries of "FAKE NEWS."
ReplyDeleteThe headline states that killings fell in DC area in 2017. This is a fact! The numbers are the numbers! Therefore it is the very opposite of "FAKE NEWS." "FAKE NEWS" doesn't mean "I don't care for the way this was phrased" or "I'm disappointed the paper didn't take a swipe at the person who beat me in an election."
Meanwhile Mr. Dyer makes the claim that "the Post used the misleading headline to protect the soft-on-crime Montgomery County Council." There is no evidence for this claim whatsoever -- so in fact, it is Mr. Dyer's reporting that is FAKE NEWS!!
What an excellent opportunity this would have been to discuss the worthy issue of crime in the county. Instead Mr. Dyer chose to focus on his own personal paranoia and conspiracy theories. This blog could do a great service to the residents of the county, if only the author would focus on the issues in place of hysterics.
Here is a quote from Montgomery County Police Chief Manger from 2 weeks ago to WTOP:
ReplyDelete"When you’ve got victims who have had their limbs cut off and just mutilated in a way that we’re finding these bodies, it really does act as an indication that the violence is ramping up,” he told WTOP.
Wow,is Chief Manger talking about finding these horribly mutilated bodies in some third world Country?El Salvador maybe? Nope! he's talking about these killings taking place right in the heart of Montgomery County!
100% agreement with the above comment. Bravo !!
ReplyDeleteWhat used to be disagreements are more frequently escalating to violence that requires police response, Manger told WTOP.
ReplyDelete“If somebody disagrees with you, you can’t have a civil conversation — you have to shout them down and ridicule them. This has manifested itself in hate crimes, and that has an impact on our community,” he said.