To the Editor:
The police blotter entry for June 17 elided several key factors that need further elaboration ("Police Blotter," June 27). As those who read the entry will remember, it summarizes a case where a jogger returned to her "home" on a Sunday morning to find it being "burgled." Only it was not her "home" but my home, in which my girlfriend and I were quietly having breakfast. For some reason, the jogger was confused about where she lived, and her mistake led her to call the police who arrived in force swiftly afterwards. I was interested to read that the police "quickly determined that she was observing an adjacent apartment rather than the one she was supposed to be housesitting."
Readers are left wanting with regards to the methods the police used to "quickly determine" the jogger's error. I can herein illuminate this interstice.
The police did not determine her error through close and careful questioning of the jogger, which would have established that she was observing 4 Valley Road, whereas she lived farther down Valley Road at another number. The police did not determine her error by noticing the absence of evidence supporting the hypothesis that this was a burglary in progress -- there was no getaway car, no damage to windows or doors and no suspicious activity occurring within the house. The police did not determine her error through the application of inductive knowledge which would indicate the unlikelihood that a burglary would be in progress on a Sunday morning in a small, college town in rural New Hampshire. The police did not even establish her error by a combination of these factors. The police "quickly established" her error by laying an unannounced, intimidatory siege to our house, accompanied by screams telling me to come to the door with my hands up. They then proceeded to draw a gun on me that was menacingly pointed at my chest as I stood there in cargo shorts, t-shirt and bare feet! After further screaming and questioning, the police finally realized their mistake -- 10 minutes later the officer who pulled the gun came over and apologized.
The tone and content of the police blotter entry suggests the police acted professionally and appropriately in dealing with the "possible burglary." Given the full facts, readers may come to a different judgment. The aim of this letter is not to vilify the police, but simply to put the record straight. Readers should be aware that the police blotter represents a sanitized and selective account of proceedings that may bear a nebulous resemblance to the verisimilitude of the processes and events they are meant to be describing.
