I think I’ve said about as much as I want to say about my own subjective, internal emotional or intellectual reasons for blogging about this subject. Like most of the other things I blog, I blogged it because I’m thinking about it. It interests me and disturbs me. So it belongs here.

Long conversations about whether this post is wonderful or not are utterly boring and banal. I don’t want to engage in them. If folks don’t dig it, move along to the next BB post, or if it’s so upsetting that you don’t want to tune in, by all means don’t. There are many other places to direct your attention.

BB is still a “personal blog” for each of us who contribute. I hope it always stays that way.

Some of the things that pass through my awareness throughout the day are pleasant diversions. Some are interesting intellectual puzzles.Some of them are creepy or scary. This is one of the latter. All of those types of topics end up on BB.

I won’t engage further in meta-analysis about this post, though, that’s boring and not where I want to spend my attention today.

If others want to engage in that sort of analysis here, I’m totally cool with that, so long as there’s no “WAAAAAH WAHHHH THIS ISN’T WONDERFUL” or “YOU SUCK FOR FINDING THIS INTERESTING.” Sorry, those are magic words that earn you a can of whupass and a lack of vowels around these parts.

Now… was my comment weird and/or wonderful? I need a flowchart to work out if it actually belongs here or not.

Why must my internets be so hard?

so here’s my contribution to the rodeo.

and Ian, you warm my heart.

We’ve heard other stories about kids not getting saved from horrible environments when social services or the police failed to follow up on a solid lead but I’ve not read about any of that happening here. So how were the police incompetent exactly? They are supposed to assume that everyone with a tent in the backyard is a rapist? If the freakin’ neighbors didn’t know this was going on while they lived 10 feet away from it for 18 years, how would you expect the police to know? If your answer is that there should be some program for investigating all convicted felons or rapists then fine, that’s an argument for your local legislator but still has nothing to do with the police who don’t write laws.

MetaFilter commenters “nailed it” on 8/27. Not sure what that proves, but you seemed to think it was important.

http://www.metafilter.com/84522/Lost-and-Found#2714910

But, in fact, they do. If you’re on parole, you’re actually a non-incarcerated prisoner. They’re even exempt from the 13th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

Convicted felons on parole generally can’t vote, serve on a jury, bear arms and various and sundry other civil rights guaranteed in the Constitution. They don’t have a ‘get out of search and seizure free’ card like the rest of us. I find this rather prudent. And I would expect that a reasonable society would put a convicted kidnapper and rapist on life parole.

As I read it (on BBC I think? Could have been CNN, I read too many news sources at lunch), the police went to his property not to check on the tents, but because a neighbor had reported seeing children on the property and was a wee bit suspicious as a result.

You know, seeing as he was a convicted rapist.

The police went out supposedly to check the property, didn’t check the backyard with all those tents and sheds, and left.

That’s where the “incompetency” claim comes into play.

That said, it doesn’t matter which way you “turn” the Googlemobile once you leave the street, the van doesn’t follow you, or at least not with the permutations of potential routes I followed.

As far as I know – having various tents in your back yard isn’t considered probable cause for an investigation, convicted felon or not.

This guy was a felon on parole, but he still has a decent amount of rights – and unfortunately those rights allowed him to commit these crimes. I think the blame here falls more on the judicial system that allowed this guy to be put back on the streets far more than law enforcement itself.

People, for some reason, love to think that the police just walk around tasing people to death – but the reality of it is that there are tens of thousands of them out there following the procedures, doing their jobs, and putting themselves at risk to protect some of the most ungrateful people on the planet.

Heh. No, sadly, comments like yours are, I”m afraid, distinctly unfun and most definitely not part of what I enjoy about bOING bOING.

I can’t be alone among the many old school fans ‘n pals that constantly wonder why the comment threads here so often go off the rails. Back in the ‘zine days we used to refer to nORMALs and other distinctly unhappy mutants.

And I’ll also bet that I’m not the only one who’s wondered if somehow the comment threads of bOING bOING and Reddit somehow got switched in the nursery. Since when I read Reddit comment threads I always think that they are exactly what I would imagine the comment threads here *ought* to be like. And yet often aren’t for some confounded reason.

[scratches noggin]

tried to explain it to my father, who then got the impression that it was some little spycar taking photos of his property and machinery (possibly to report to the local council or tax department…?) and went to talk to the ‘google man’, who got scared and hooned off before dad could get to him! So i presume that somewhere near our place the road abruptly does a U-turn and bolts!

(ps, i dont live in a tent, and he is my real father!)

I suspect that some (almost always men) deep down, almost wish, in ways they could never acknowledge even to themselves, that they too could have a compliant victim. A sex slave, if you will, but more than that, a human being who is entirely in their control.

Sick? Today, that’s how it’s viewed, but just look at all the historical cultures in which slavery — the total control of another human being — was an accepted norm.

Reading about others’ crimes might give such a person a little vicarious thrill, easily masked — even to themselves — by their righteous indignation at the heinous nature of the crime.

I’m not denigrating such people. This may even benefit society, in a way. I suspect that it helps to keep them disciplined, ensuring that they never really act on these vague, unsettling desires.

The sheriff actually apologized for this….if he apologized, there’s a reason (and good on him for doing so).

In my experience most police never apologize. They seem to live by what John Wayne once said: “Never apologize. It makes you seem weak”.

The apology, itself, made headlines in my neck of the great North woods. It is really quite rare for the police to publicly apologize: and when they do, they ought to at least be commended for it.

And therefore do I comment here: so to commend them therefor.

All good cops IMO are suspicious of others. As they should be.

I realize that would be a very boring project to undertake, at least the car counting end of it.

OTOH, many of the 60′s- and 70′s-era hippies seem profoundly concerned with their dooty to the planet. So, maybe your generation of irresponsible zine readers is the outlier.

We are talking about the 80′s, right? Might explain it. I was wildly pirating 8-bit computer games back then. I was about as responsible as Ebola.

I apologize for expressing my personal discomfort in such a muddled outpouring. Thank you (and Antinous, and several commenters) for patiently explaining the flowchart and giving me space to figure out what I wanted to say in a non-offensive way.

I regret the accusations of prurience/exploitation/etc and also that they may have undermined the deeper and simpler point that I was trying to get at, which was expressed much more clearly by Anon@36:

gawking is a natural reponse, which our better selves strive to resist… I think the authorities in Gloucester were wise to demolish the West’s house and turn the site into a garden… perhaps this will happen here too…

Even mutants can freak out and it is an enlightened countercultural community that gently sets them straight rather than tearing them to bits like piranhas — I’m glad the latter did not happen here — thanks BB commenters for your understanding

If you take the time to read how he was caught, I’d say the authorities should be COMMENDED.

go go UC Berkeley police! perhaps people will stop being so down on them now, for trying to haul that longhair student off campus in 1964.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHywdqH3F6Y

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/crime/2009/09/03/oppmann.google.suspect.cnn