When no news isn’t good news:
a question of fairness

Plenty of people will read my story about Riverhead Police crime reports and conclude — erroneously — that the cops are intentionally hiding things, that they’re covering up for certain people.

I don’t know that they never do that, but that’s not what I was reporting about.

What I was reporting about is a systemic dysfunction. It’s about inconsistencies in data entry and a computer program configuration that needs revision. The net result of those two things is very inconsistent and very incomplete reporting to the public, by Riverhead Police, of crimes and arrests in the Town of Riverhead.

The bottom line is fundamental unfairness — unfairness because one person accused of a certain crime is the subject of a public report of the accusation and another person accused of the same crime remains under the radar, at least until there’s a disposition of the charge in court.

By accepting at face value the information provided by police as a complete and full report of incidents and arrests — which, it turns out, it is not — I have been a party to that unfairness. For that I am truly sorry.

I am frequently asked to keep arrests out of the police report. I always refuse those requests, because that would be very unfair. “If the police provide the information, I report it,” I always say. I didn’t realize the breadth of that conditional clause.

If the police provide the information…

The flow of information — routine, very ordinary information — from the Riverhead Police Department is inconsistent at best. I’ve known that for some time. I didn’t realize just how inconsistent it was — and I should have. I mean, just about every year, a Riverhead police officer is the top DWI cop in the county. But you’d never know it to look at the blotter — the press report created for the media by the Riverhead Police Department. There are rarely any DWI arrests listed in it. Clue number one. The occasional DWI arrest, when it appears, is entered under an incident reported by the officer as something else — usually something called “incident auto.”

Yet when you look carefully at the local criminal court docket, you see there are lots of DWI arrests made by Riverhead cops. They just don’t get reported by police.

A few weeks ago, a couple of things happened that made me take a hard look at what’s being reported and inspired me to start thinking about how I can do a better job of crime reporting.

Two men I’ve known for 20 or more years were charged with aggravated DWI. One of those arrests was reported in the press report we obtained from police (as an “incident auto”); the other was nowhere to be found. I was tipped off to the second arrest by someone who happened to be in court when the defendant was arraigned. Otherwise, I would have never heard about it.

At about the same time, a “media arrest report” — a separate listing of arrests, containing no descriptive information regarding time, place or circumstances — disclosed the names of three juveniles charged with felonies. I knew this wasn’t right and called the detective in charge of public information to let him know of the error. The result of my call is that the “media arrest report” is no longer provided to the media. We are left with the daily “press report” log that contains inconsistent and incomplete information.

So I began to think about how I could find complete information on a consistent basis and realized that the town justice court docket was the place. Every person arrested in the town — by all law enforcement agencies — appears first in the town court. Felonies generally get kicked up to county criminal court, but they start out in justice court, where the defendant has his or her initial arraignment and bail is set.

I was astounded when I finished my compilation, from the court docket, of arrests made in October and found the arrests gleaned from police reports were only about a third of the total number of arrests actually made.

The justice court dockets don’t show arrests immediately, however. Arrests can take as much as two weeks to appear on the court docket — on the date of a defendant’s second or even third court appearance following arrest. So reporting arrests from the justice court docket, though more complete, will not be as timely. We will compile these reports and publish them by the end of the following month. See the Riverhead Police October arrest report here.

I’m sure some people will insist there’s some intentional cover-up going on. But look at the arrest report. The large number of arrests not reported by police and the wide diversity of unreported defendants tell a different story.

Riverhead Police Chief David Hegermiller told me he will work to fix these reporting problems. He should, because it doesn’t serve his department to under report their activities and their accomplishments.

Denise Civiletti is an owner of East End Local Media Corp., publishers of RiverheadLOCAL.com and SoutholdLOCAL.com. An award-winning reporter, she is an attorney and former Riverhead Town councilwoman (1988-1991); she lives in Riverhead with her husband and business partner, Peter Blasl and their two college-student daughters. The views expressed in her blog are hers alone.