According to the AP Inspector John Conaty stated,
“We have substantial reason to believe that the victim and his wife were involved in the possession and, potentially, the distribution of illegal narcotics,”
The narcotics in question was actually medical marijuana stored at the home by Rex’s son Sterling Farrance who is a patient and has a prescription. Sterling was quoted as saying:
This one officer I remember at the house, he had this predisposition to think it was all illegal.
Inspector Conaty and the Pittsburg Police Department chose to see what they wanted to see. They are the hammer; every problem looks to them like a nail.
Even if one were to argue that the reason the four masked men were there in the first place was to steal drugs it does not excuse such a knee jerk reaction from the police. What ever happened to keep your mouth shut until you know all the facts? The Pittsburg Police Department further assaulted Rex Farrance and his family Wednesday night by offhandedly reffering to them as narcotics distributors.
jje
A similar situation is bubbling in Springfield; our new police commissioner has taken to pointing out that the vast majority of crime in Springfield is taking place between people who have not-so-clean records.
<
p>
Recently, there was a “shootout” in a late-night restaurant. Someone spilled a soda, words were spoken, and, as described in the newspaper, several people pulled out guns and shot at each other. One was killed.
<
p>
The police commissioner characterized that as a shootout between criminals; it turns out that the people in question had been arrested “over 150 times” (which seems a little unbelievable to me). The mother of the victim came out and complained that her dead son was being portrayed as a criminal, but in fact he had been arrested many, many times, and was apparently carrying an illegal gun at the time of his death, and was one of the shooters.
<
p>
Our most recent homicide involved a woman in an apartment building. Scary, right? Could happen to any woman in any apartment building, right? Turns out the woman was a known drug user, and drugs were found in her apartment along with her body. The context gives people a different perspective — not that her life was worth less, but that her illegal activities contributed greatly to her death.
<
p>
I support giving contexts of crimes. The newspapers do a really good job of getting people riled up over such incidents, but the truth is that if our country is not going to support programs that get kids off drugs, or programs that prevent kids from joining gangs, no amount of policing is going to prevent incidents such as these. These are social problems reading their ugly heads.
<
p>
If no context would be given about such incidents, people would view themselves as the next victims, and would move from Springfield, property values would drop, and the city would continue a downward spiral.
<
p>
Sure, the cops shouldn’t jump the gun; last summer they described a victim as “homeless”, but it turned out that the guy was living in transitional housing, had a job, and was actually an innocent victim. And I guess you could portray this as “blame the victim, as in ‘she shouldn’t have been wearing those clothes'”, but we’re talking about people engaging in risky, criminal behavior here. Most law-abiding people don’t do that, and therefore aren’t at risk; they need to be reassured of that.