I’m going to be an iconoclast today and upset a few folks. I’ll have my say and welcome dissenting views, but I won’t respond and argue.
I was the sergeant over the #CrimePrevention and Community Relations unit for Plano Police Department in 1985-86. I oversaw 1,500 Crime Watch groups, managed the #CrimeStoppers program, coordinated all of the public talks that were requested, and supervised the #SchoolLiasonOfficers.
At one monthly meeting with PD staff, Captain Lyndon Payne asked me how the #CrimeWatch neighborhood groups were doing.
“People are like ants,” I replied. “A 6 year old boy can be holding a stick above an ant bed and the ants go about their business as usual. Then the boy takes the stick and stirs the ant bed. Now the ants are mad as hell. They swarm on the stick, stinging it. The boy steps back and watches for a few minutes. Then he gets bored and goes back into the house. Meanwhile, the angry ants continue to swarm and sting the stick for another half hour. People are like that. They ignore the threat, but they swarm after the incident and the threat is gone.”
Captain Payne dropped his head on his folded arms. That was not the expected response.
Another time, at the 1985 annual conference of the International Society of Crime Prevention Practitioners, I stood up to address the business meeting during a discussion of how to expand programs to fingerprint children.
“This whole program is a fraud,” I announced. “We set up booths and fingerprint babies and toddlers on the premise that it offers some degree of protection for the children. It does not. The fingerprints are not kept in any national database. There is no way to use them to find a missing kid. If a live kid is found, we just need to ask his name. If the kid is dead, we search the missing and abducted database. If we believe we know who the parents are, we ask them to identify the body. The fingerprint card we take at a public event is worthless, either to protect or find a kid.
“There may have been a few cases in which a kid’s fingerprints helped identify an adult years after the kid’s disappearance, or helped identify a body when the whole family was wiped out in the same disaster. But even then it only works if somebody kept the fingerprints and they can be located.
“Baby fingerprints are little more than a nice souvenir. We need to tell parents that. I feel like a total fraud when a parent tells says they want this protection for their child. There is no PROTECTION associated with having a set of your kid’s fingerprints. They do not protect your baby from anything and they cannot help us find your kid!”
Like I said, this week I am being an iconoclast. Those programs may be great public relations tools and I expect some of my readers will respond with anecdotal cases of a success here or there, but when I was in the role of supervisor, I honestly felt that very little we did made the community any safer. It only gave them a false sense of security.