In Sunday’s edition of the Springfield News-Leader a letter was printed from Melanie Hanson of Springfield concerning a hit-and-run accident involving a car belonging to Laura McClure. Chief Rowe has investigated what was in the letter and has sent a response to Ms. McClure which I’m posting below. It provides an explanation for the decisions of the police department in regards to this situation.
February 13, 2008
Ms. Laura McClure
(address removed by me)
Dear Ms. McClure:
I read the letter to the editor of the News Leader Newspaper in Springfield, written by a passenger in your vehicle when your car was struck by a hit and run driver on Kansas Expressway at about 1:25 A.M. on Sunday, December 30, 2007.
I followed up to determine the facts about your incident. Though, at the time of this letter I don’t have any final information, I did ask our Operations Division to follow up on the license plate information to see what we could learn about the hit and run vehicle.
A hit and run accident is a terrifying thing to experience and I’m sorry that it happened to you.
Unfortunately, unless an officer is right there to apprehend the hit and run driver, we must rely on victims or eye witnesses to be able to positively identify the driver of the run vehicle before we can successfully prosecute. Therefore, when your call came in to the Communications Center and you indicated that you could not identify the driver and there were no injuries, your call was not given a high priority for response.
At about the time your call came in, we normally are extremely busy. As the bars are closing on Saturday night and early Sunday morning, our call load typically peaks. The night of your accident was no exception. Our records have produced the following timeline:
0123 hours - Call received in 911 Center and a call for service is logged.
0131 hours - 911 broadcast hit and run vehicle description, direction of travel and license plate information. No officers available in the area
to send to the call. Call held for an available unit.
0151 hours - You called back from the parking lot of the South District Station
asking for estimated arrival time of officers.
0215 hours - You called back again and cancelled the response, indicating that
you would file a walk in report at Police Headquarters.
I apologize that we had no cars to send to your location in a reasonable time frame. We stack and prioritize pending calls, answering the highest priority first. That would be the time of night where there are robberies and assaults in progress, some with injuries, so your call, though important, would not have required emergency response.
If we develop any information that would be of value to you as you seek collection of damages, we’ll be sure to pass it on to you. At this point, any hope of criminal prosecution is lost.
I hope the above information will help you understand our slow response and I hope you don’t experience anything similar in the future.
Sincerely,
Lynn S. Rowe
Chief of Police
Wow, just hearing this makes me lose faith in the local police…and I just moved here.
It’s tough to fathom that since the police were too busy babysitting a bunch of drunks downtown, they had no one — not even one unit — to pry away and send to the scene. That’s bad for business and not good for PR from the police department’s perspective. And from a citizen’s perspective it gives me one less reason to trust the local cops.
May I add to my previous comment that I highly respect police and their work in general (I have a relative who is a policeman in CA), and my hope is that this is just an isolated incident. Still enough to get one wondering though.
Saying that the police “were too busy babysitting a bunch of drunks downtown” minimizes the situation way too much and is an unfair statement. Our officers have to make decisions based on the resources they have at hand.
I think that Chief Rowe’s explanation was perfectly fine. What were they to do? There weren’t any injuries. They seemd to have minimal information about the “run car” and no cars near enough to give chase. This really wasn’t a high priority call compared to what could have been going on at that time of night.
To follow your comments with a statement such as “I highly respect police and their work in general” seems empty to me.
Yes I do respect police and the work they do. Without them our towns would be overrun by lawless criminal types.
To me it just seems like no effort was even made to help calm the people down in this situation. If they were out somewhere else at the time, so be it, they weren’t able to get to the accident scene — but it perturbs me that there was no sort of follow-up with the owner of the vehicle that was the offender in the accident, like a door knock or anything.
Sorry, Secret Drinker, but according to the original letter, the victims provided the police with the plate number, make, model, and color of the vehicle, what street they were on and what direction they were headed. Aside from vigilante justice, what were the women to do?
If there were injuries, would the police follow-up on the case then, even if they didn’t see the driver? What if worse happened and the girls couldn’t tell the police the plate number, make, model and color of the offending vehicle?
If the police “can’t” do something in this situation, something needs to change in prosecuting policy.
Also, the line “That would be the time of night where there are robberies and assaults in progress, some with injuries, so your call, though important, would not have required emergency response.” seemed rather patronizing. Robberies and assaults happen at all times of the day.
The same thing happened to me. My car was hit only WE FOUND THE CAR parked up the street. IThe police came, took pictures of the car. It happened at night and I couldn’t ID the driver so the police refused to ticket the guy. My question is… if they can’t ticket a person WE can’t idenify, how can the city justify the red light camera tickets if those drivers aren’t identified?
The police agencies are not there to protect us, they exist to provide a paperwork stream which can be followed up at a later date. One issue missing from this whole conversation is the lack of fully staffed police officers in this city. The blame for this goes right back to city council and Chief Rowe, neither of these two are going to say a disparaging word about the other so the problem remains.
I’m sorry to say the police officers don’t have any council members that are willing to stand up and say enough funding of stupid projects lets get enough police officers on the streets so our crime rate will drop and criminals will think twice about committing a burglary.
Perhaps vigilante justice is what is needed in some context since the individual won’t take responsibility for themselves and their actions.
Spelling corrected, I sent the other w/o Spell check.
Dirge,
Change our prosecuting policy? Change it to what….prosecution based on hear say? Talk about being a little patronizing! Robberies and assaults do happen at any time…. But, they happen with a much greater frequency late in the evening. Criminals are not always the smartest folks but they are smart enough to know that it is better to rape and pillage when cops are busy rather than when they are eating doughnuts in their car during the day.
The K-man,
Run a red light and see if they can ID you….. Those handy dandy cams the city spent a fortune on can snap your smiling face as your plowing through the intersection. Again… The prosecutor does not prosecute based on hear say.
Chris,
Baby sitting a bunch of drunks? You’re exactly right! It’s amazing what grown adults will do when inebriated! But I assure you that those drunk babies can riot like nobodies business! I can see it now, Brian Williams on the NBC nightly news, ” A major riot destroys Springfield MO’s down town! Who’s to blame?” You got it! The Police of course, because they were chasing unidentified hit and run suspect that they can not prosecute because of that silly thing called the constitution!
Sorry for all the sinicism. It just feels like everyone that has to make a decision in this world is damned if you do and damned if you don’t. It’s so much easier sitting back and throwing stones! (hear they come) Whoosh