I’ll never forget the time the nice police detective turned over his crime scene to me and and my gang of friends. Just ripped the yellow tape down, he did, and said, “There you go, boys. Do what you need to do and hey! Have fun in there, ya hear?”
Oh, the time we had, rifling through the killer’s personal papers; ripping photos off the walls; inspecting all the nooks and crannies the investigators hadn’t gotten to yet.
“Have you dusted for prints in here yet, Detective?”
“Don’t you worry about that, son. You just have a good time; that’s what counts.”
He brought us Popsicles and pretzels from the mall. He told us scary stories and we had a pillow fight. Gosh, we had fun at the scene of the crime that day.
Of course none of that ever happened, but I have hope now that it someday might. The world has turned surreal and the old rules no longer apply.
Last week, I watched agog as a stampeding gaggle of news reporters ran roughshod across one of the biggest crime scenes in recent history. It was, they told us, the home of a husband and wife terrorist team who had shot up an office party in San Bernardino, Calif., killing 14. The home was the site of a pipe-bomb-making workshop, investigators told the world. It was a place where they had discovered a dozen completed bombs and weaponry that indicated more attacks might have been in the works.
Federal investigators from a slew of agencies apparently went in, opened some drawers, grabbed a few things and then declared: “We’ve been here for hours and that’s just greedy. I don’t see any reason why we can’t let the media in.”
What’s so unbelievable about that?
The one thing I’ve learned about crime scenes — even small-time crime scenes that don’t draw reporters in crow-like armies — is that police are really stingy about them. Stingy and protective, to the point where if a reporter has so much as a big toe on the other side of that yellow line, a cop 30 feet away will sense it and he will come a-running.
In past years, there were police detectives I considered friends. These were guys you might share a beer with or the occasional dirty joke. And those friends would nonetheless bark at me like wild dogs if they got the idea that I was encroaching upon a scene that they had been tasked with securing.
“Back behind the tape!”
“Yo, Detective. Have you heard the one about the one-eyed hooker and the …”
“BACK BEHIND THE TAPE! I’M NOT GOING TO TELL YOU AGAIN!”
No cop is going to willingly let a reporter anywhere near an active crime scene and yet there they were on my TV, a squadron of reporters having their way with a house full of evidence. It was like Black Friday for journalists, who, instead of grabbing big-screen TVs and video consoles, went right for the passports and family photos.
In many ways, it really WAS like that orgy of shopping you see each November at the box stores. It was crass and disordered. It was ugly and perverse. It was downright bizarre to see those reporters traipsing so merrily over artifacts that should have been placed, with surgical care, into evidence bags for later inspection.
“I got a birth certificate!”
“I got a wedding photo!”
“I got a bank book with a bloody thumbprint!”
It was, safe to say, a zombie-like feast of news-gathering and if you listened real carefully, you could hear the rhythmic POP, POP, POP of veteran cop jaws dropping from one end of the nation to the other. Because even new recruits fresh out of the academy know that investigators need more than the few hours they got to inspect evidence in such a globally important case.
“This crime scene was spoiled by the media,” observed the philosopher and political pundit Stefan Molyneaux. “Nothing in it that was trampled on or pored over or pulled down or pawed through is admissible in court anymore.”
It’s hard to blame the reporters: If you throw meat into a room and then open the door wide, a pack of jackals is going to run in after it. It’s their nature. It’s what they’re expected to do.
It’s hard to blame the average gumshoe, too. Do you think Joe Inspector from the neighborhood cop shop wanted to let those voracious media hordes in to trash what could have been crucial evidence? These guys spend long hours being taught to preserve crime scenes as if they’re holy sites. I’m pretty sure they take advanced courses just to learn how to properly bark at reporters who try to cross that line.
One local veteran investigator got a weird sense of nostalgia at the site of the Crime Scene Open House in San Bernardino.
“Allowing that media frenzy,” he said, “kind of reminds me of the way the Dallas P.D paraded Oswald up and down the corridors of police headquarters (over a dozen times) in front and through the gathered media and even arranging for him to be interviewed by the media while he was in custody and while he was still being interrogated. Its almost like they’re more concerned about court of public opinion rather than a court of law.”
Yup. It’s just not done that way anymore. I’ve been scolded, threatened, growled at and chased away by cops guarding crime scenes just for trying to peer into mailboxes that just barely brushed up against the yellow tape. And these are just small-town crimes with no broader implications for humanity at large. The cop vs. reporter crime scene clash is as old as print itself. Cops secure their scene, reporters swarm its perimeter like predatory birds with a whiff of carrion.
Only apparently, the rules have changed. And with this in mind, the next time we have something big in Lewiston or Auburn, I’m going to march right down to the crime scene and demand access to all the goods. I want to open the killer’s nightstand drawer and see what he was reading before the atrocity. I want to thumb through his email and review his correspondence. I want to see the fiend’s stuff before you get it all filthy with dusting powder and I want to peer into his closets.
Don’t just stand there while I’m doing this, Detective, go out and get me a Popsicle.
Hint: I like the blue ones.
Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer and an alpha jackal. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.
Send questions/comments to the editors.
