But the Lake Worth Sun is not happy. We're ticked at the unwillingness of the Sheriff's office to provide basic, public information about crimes happening here in Lake Worth.
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| Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric Bradshaw |
At District 14, the Lake Worth substation of the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office, they have a media book. It's a binder, and in it are a spattering of write-ups of incidents -- mostly car thefts. A couple burglaries.
"Where's everything else?" I ask.
You have to get that from headquarters, the woman tells me.
I call headquarters on Gun Club Road. The media relations person, Teri Barbera, puts me on the media list. She indicates that she's very busy and constantly working and sending things out. So I'm thinking I'm going to get a large file every day of everything going on in Palm Beach County, which I can search to find out what's happening here in Lake Worth.
But over the course of the next four days, all I get are press releases saying what good things deputies are doing -- donating school supplies for the kiddos, and so forth. I get one press release each day. At the bottom of the e-mails are links to 175 videos promoting the sheriff's office. I'm not kidding. The one I just opened shows a deputy competing in a motorcycle event where he's maneuvering around orange cones.
I e-mail Teri, asking where the crime log is. She says go to District 14. I tell her I did, and there are only on average three incidents for each day in the media log. There must be over 100 calls for service every day in Lake Worth, I tell her in the e-mail. Where is this information??
I wait, and wait. Many hours later I get a response, with text copied from a query she sent along to District 14, saying YES, we have about 150 calls for service every day.
So that doesn't answer the question at all!
Meanwhile, I've met with Captain Silva, who is the equivalent of Lake Worth's police chief. Except he reports to Bradshaw, and can't really talk about anything that's going on in Lake Worth.
At our meeting, Lieutenant David Moss, who works under Silva, came in and showed me how to access the crime mapping program, which is linked from the Palm Beach County Sheriff's web site, www.pbso.org. There's a map of America, you can put in Lake Worth and see about where crimes are happening here. But not exactly. It says there was a robbery on the 400 block of North "E" Street on Aug. 6, for instance. But where, exactly? And who was robbed? An old lady? Was the robber armed? Is he on the loose? I would call Captain Silva, but he told me when I met with him that he doesn't have time to talk to a reporter about what's happening here.
So it's all extremely unsatisfactory from the point of view of the public's right to know what's happening in their community.
There seems to be a complete lack of understanding, perhaps because the air is thin behind those very thick walls of Bradshaw's, that all of this is public information. The basics -- who, what, where, when (and maybe why) -- of crime in this city is not presumed to be privileged. It is public information, with some exceptions (names of minors, names of victims SOMETIMES but not always) And people want to know. So next week, The Lake Worth Sun will submit lots of public information requests, and letters with lots of CCs. I think Lake Worth Sun readers would be interested to know what kind of information is being kept from them and why. I'll find out.
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| Capt. Rolando Silva, head of the Palm Beach Sheriff's Office "District 14" -- Lake Worth |
