Sunday, July 18, 2010

No crime in Woodstock?

Today's Northwest Herald carried Police Reports for Lake in the Hills, McHenry, Spring Grove and Woodstock; all took up only one column. There was one arrest reported for Woodstock, and that was on June 26 for a DUI and improper lane usage.

So there are three possibilities.

1. Crime has stopped in Woodstock.
2. The Woodstock Police Department didn't release information about crimes to the Northwest Herald.
3. The Northwest Herald didn't publish the information received from the Woodstock Police Department.

My vote is going to be for #3.

Every month the Woodstock Police Department prepares a boiler-plate report to the City Council, changing the numbers and sometimes adding a little new information. Several hundred traffic tickets are issued, plus a few DUIs and tickets after crashes. And there are "crimes".

But the Northwest Herald doesn't give much space to Woodstock for this. The Woodstock Independent usually devotes about half a page to its Police Blotter. But even the July 14th Independent carried "old news", listing only eight (8) arrests by Woodstock PD for June 17-June 20 and six (6) arrests by the McHenry County Sheriff's Office for May 27-June 11.

Each department almost certainly had many more arrests; there must have been many, and more recently.

1 comment:

FatParalegal said...

The crime reports in the NWH are incomplete. There was not one mention of the bag of cocaine I found on the sidewalk the other week.