Although nearly all our clients run Microsoft Windows based systems, we choose to do all our development - and nearly everything else - on Mac Powerbooks. I started on Macs back in the very early 90s, moved to Windows for six years when the business got going, and came home, so to speak, in the fall of 2003 when a mail virus nearly wiped me out and stole a week of my time before I was able to completely eradicate it. We still have two Windows computers, and the HP in particular is reliable as hell, but since I do this stuff eight to ten hours a day, I'm gonna do it where I'm comfortable, and that's on the Macs.

My main development computer, a 15" Powerbook, just passed three years old, and has been used maybe six to eight hours most days over that whole time! Been across the country eight times, left outside on a snowy runway in Alaska for an hour and a half while the ground crew fooled around with the Piper plane (and an inch of snow piled up on the laptop case - see picture before snow started), worked in 114 degree Arizona summer heat - oops, make that ten trips across the country - and has never so much as coughed once, much less puked up a hard drive or something similar. Scheduled for replacement next year with a new 15" MacBook Pro when Leopard (the next Apple operating system) comes out, but I tell you I love this thing. I may have it bronzed. What a workhorse!

Granville is a small upstate NY town along the Vermont border not far from here. The PD recently had to deal with yet another gruesome, tragic and possibly preventable domestic murder/suicide case - preventable not by the police department per se, but perhaps if the victim had not wavered on following through on an Order of Protection. Maybe, maybe not, but the end result is three orphans, families torn apart, and the PD about to come under the gun for alleged inaction in the face of a paper trail of building incidents at the residence of the victim and her killer.

You can clearly see the trend coming that is going to eventually require police to proactively intervene when these patterns start to emerge. Then you'll have the inevitable gray area surrounding at what point that occurs, and all the Monday morning quarterbacking emanating from the attorneys jumping aboard after the smoke clears. In at least one county in New York State, police are now required to proactively go out and contact sex offenders in their jurisdictions at regular intervals; at what point will they be required to start supervising troubled families? After all, in a climate where everything is the fault of some arm of government, where better to place the blame than the police department?

Here's the first shot fired in this particular story, from the Albany Times Union.

If you're a police administrator, you have got to keep ahead of this stuff, like you didn't have enough to do already. Given that it actually involves real tragedy and loss of this magnitude, its somewhat hard to argue with, unfortunately. In the meantime, document, document, document, and make sure that someone in the department is keeping on top of these things as they emerge. PolicePro can actually be a big aid in doing this. We make spotting and watching trends like this extremely easy.

Does this make us sleazy opportunists? Maybe to some cynics, but again, I've got the street creds to back up these opinions. I well recall the one we had where the girlfriend - after taking out an Order of Protection against her boyfriend who had assaulted her - two or three days later allowed him back in to spend the night and ended up with a couple of bullets in her. The idiot boyfriend told us later he'd saved a bullet for himself after shooting her, but chickened out when the cops started rolling up. If we had known about the issues there, maybe we would have been a little more forceful in our dealings with them before the night of the shooting. Instead, she ended up shot and the PD had another lawsuit on the pile, accused of failing to protect her.

Or if you do, you might as well send the PD a postcard about it... apparently 911 ain't all it's cracked up to be there. Amazing.

http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=52559

Not a moment too soon, it's off tomorrow for the annual Fall Fish & Puke trip, a weekend of guys tent camping at Fish Creek Ponds off Upper Saranac Lake. The Spring and Fall F&P trips are eagerly anticipated all year by all members of our hardcore Saranac Lake gang. Two generations are represented: the 50s age grumpy old bastards such as myself, and the mid 30s group of sons, sons in law, and friends. Days are spent out on Upper Saranac in various bass boats, evenings sitting around a big fire talking, joking and loudly and uproariously quoting entire scenes from old movies. Nothing out of line, just a great weekend in the woods with like minded friends.

In a world where even innocent Amish 6 year olds in a bucolic one-room schoolhouse are not safe from the savages, you gotta get away once in awhile. On that subject, you can hardly believe what happened and what almost happened in that town this week. Watching the news and seeing the amazing capacity for forgiveness on the part of the Amish families suffering these losses, I hardly know what to think. On the one hand I want to admire their forgiveness, but I just can't. Sometimes fury is necessary. Not everything is forgivable, nor should it be. It seems that no matter what you do anymore, you can stand up in court or before a camera and call it a "mistake", and credence automatically attaches.

But despite our best efforts to destroy it sometimes, we still have a beautiful world here, and a great way to touch that is with a group of good friends off on a quiet mountain lake on a sunny Fall weekend. Good for the soul.

The march continues. The latest cause celebre in the social engineering world appears to be sex offenders, now that the bloom is off the rose on domestic violence... every time a cop is called to a domestic dispute nowadays pretty much anywhere, he or she spends more time filling out meaningless forms than actually intervening in whatever is going on. We have every kind of civilian oversight group in the world meeting regularly to second guess the decisions that the cops made at any given DV call; money has been thrown at the problem and stolen, misspent or just wasted creating all kinds of new beaurocracies of people who have never seen the inside of a working cop's car; marches and crusades and finger pointing go on all the time, and the root problem hasn't changed one iota. If anything, it appears to be worse than ever in most places.

So now we have Sex Offenders in the community. Heaven forbid these people go to jail and actually stay there... we now live in a world where it is perfectly normal to release people who have committed incredible, horrific acts against helpless children and adolescents. But of course they have rights, and the rest of us basically get to sit around and wait until one of them attacks someone we know, and then we can join a victims' advocacy group, or go to candlelight vigils, or find other new and interesting ways to spend our time.

Okay, so once it became public knowledge that these people were out there, some scrambling had to be done by political types, and here came Sex Offender Registries. Now there's a great thought! Never mind that in New York State at least, for several years while I was still a working cop, we were not allowed to release any more than absolute bare bones information, and then only on Level 3 offenders... the lower level guys were just cited as being in a general jurisdiction, since their privacy rights were more important than the those of normal, law abiding citizens.

And isn't it a fine thing that we actually accept a world where we not only have known sexual predators walking around among us, but there are so many of them that we actually classify them! Does anyone else see the sickness in that? Is there some status or award that goes with being kidnapped by a Level 3 offender instead of a Level 1 or 2? Do we win a prize?

Moving right along, in my day these guys had to check in with the local police at set intervals. That'll make you feel safe, for sure. Of course half of them never did, and the various probation authorities never went out and apprehended anyone anyhow... and the ones that did check in were subjected to the most rigorous cross examination (again, what we were allowed to ask):

"So, you still living in the same place?"

"Yep."

"Working anywhere?"

"Nope."

"Okay, we'll see you in three months! Have a great day!"


Ah, but a problem exists! If they have to check in with the cops and whether they do or not, something unpleasant happens, there could be some liability for the County! I mean, heaven forbid the county authorities who are supposed to keep track of these people - having had them dumped in their laps from the State - actually have to do that... there must be an answer...

And of course the solution is simple, once you look for it: Let's take the cops, who are already well on their way to being social workers anyhow, and stick them with the responsibility. Perfect! If someone acts up now, either the cops are at fault for not going out and finding him every three months - they've got nothing else to do, after all - or the cop who DID go out showed poor judgement and is personally responsible along with the police department. It doesn't matter... it's all cash on the pile for the lawsuit. If another child is damaged for life or even killed, well, that's just the way it is.


When I read a story in a regional newspaper the other day and saw that the police in that county have now actually been mandated to go and seek out their sex offenders on a regular basis - and therefore become responsible for what they may do under the "special relationship" court precedents (check out Torrington, Ct and a domestic violence murder that happened several years ago) - I was once again relieved to be out of the active game, and paradoxically faced with an opportunity arising out of this crap. We went back to the Sex Offenders file we created a year ago and really wound it up tight, added a ton of function to it, and have started calling around on it. Hopefully we can actually help out some of these agencies without costing them an arm or a leg, and that's a great thing. Too bad we even have that opportunity to benefit from ridiculous circumstances like these, though.


***Don't for one minute mistake this as an attack on the probation or parole people, either... they're drowning under all these mandates as well, the people actually in the trenches. But stuff tends to flow downhill, and the PD always seems to be the last stop. In a few years, the cops and the probation people will probably be taking turns delivering the Meals On Wheels to the Elderly Sex Offender Society people anyhow.