East Carolinian

To the ranter who was burglarized - I'm assuming you live in College View/Tar River neighborhood where there was an onslaught of break-ins the past several weeks. I too was burglarized. Where is the media on this? Interesting that the Greenville Police stopped reporting crimes to The Daily Reflector when the neighborhoods adjacent to the university were being hit hard by burglars. Not good for city/university press I guess.

The police department does not report crimes to the newspaper. Every police report filed in America has copies made of it for public consumption, which are generally placed in a notebook for anyone who wishes to drop by the station to take a look at it. They also use scanners tuned to police bands to react to more substantial or dramatic incidences of police responses. This is how newspapers catch onto events taking place in the area.

If the Daily Reflector failed to notice a connection between a rash of burglaries in a particular area, that is just due to their lax police beat reporter who is not taking note of times, dates, and locations, looking for patterns within the reports.

Whatever blame GPD deserves for its many faults, it doesn't deserve that.

Thank you for clarifying how the newspaper obtains the police information, but regardless of how The Daily Reflector gets the information it is currently a records-access problem at GPD that is the issue. See the notice below.

The Daily Reflector

Thursday, June 25, 2009

Implementation of a new records management system at the Greenville Police Department has caused a disruption in access to public records. The Daily Reflector will continue to monitor the department's transition to the new system and will resume publication of incident reports and arrests when they become available.

I just spoke with the GPD records department and since June 9 there have been "computer quirks and mapping issues" that have prohibited police report information from being available. The system should be fixed within a "week or so" from today. That's five weeks, not a few hours. The incident reports that have been in the paper since then have either been shootings (that they couldn't keep under wraps) or reports that the GPD wanted the public to know about, like the drug busts, to make the public feel safe. The others are Pitt County Sheriff Department reports. I certainly have nothing against the Greenville Police Department, but something is amiss in this situation. The citizens of Greenville deserve to know when a multitude of crime is occurring on their block!!