Columnist goes through why it’s important for the community to
know arrestee information
Ben Anderson’s column of Feb. 12 castigating the editorial board took me by surprise. I have been attending editorial board meetings only sporadically since September because, alas, I am unable to teleport from south San Jose, where I spend Tuesday mornings teaching the intricacies of linear, exponential, and logarithmic functions.
I had barely skimmed the original articles, the editorial commenting on the topic, Mr. Anderson’s column criticizing the editorial, and the subsequent editorial. Thus I was amazed to read in Mr. Anderson’s column that the editorial board just did not “get” it, so he uses simpler language to explain “(j)ust because a person is arrested DOES NOT indicate they are guilty.” I wondered, is such ignorance possible?
So I logged on and carefully read all the prior articles and opinion pieces. To summarize: the Gilroy Police Department has long held a policy of providing to The Dispatch police blotter information: names, addresses, and alleged crimes of arrestees. Various jurisdictions have various policies of providing more or less data. Recently, the GPD’s policy changed to comply with a new state law. Address information was withheld briefly, but was provided if the inquiring individual would sign a waiver stating that the information was to be used for journalistic, political, governmental, or scholarly purposes.
The Dispatch believes that address information of arrestees should be available to the public. Mr. Anderson thinks it should not, because being arrested might be damaging to a person’s reputation. Then Mr. Anderson makes his giant leap: he assumes that the editorial board and readers of the police blotter are ignoramuses, that they just don’t “get” the fact that just because a person is arrested DOES NOT indicate he is guilty. The editor responded very politely that the editorial board is capable of distinguishing between an arrest and a conviction, but that information about public safety, including the public’s right to information about arrestees, outweighs the right to privacy of those arrested.
In keeping with Mr. Anderson’s penchant for simple language, let me respond more simply: Duh! There is no indication in any editorial or news article that anyone is confusing an arrest with guilt. But there is ample evidence in the rest of Mr. Anderson’s column that he is misconstruing a failure to convict with innocence.
Mr. Anderson runs through the numbers and figures that each county has, on average, 517 arrests per year that do not proceed to prosecution, that are thrown out for various reasons. Then he makes his second giant leap: he calls these bum arrests. Let me point out that these may be perfectly legitimate arrests. The arrestee may be in fact guilty. But for a myriad of reasons, the arrest gets thrown out before the arrestee goes to court.
For example: The kids did set the fire, but they were released to their parents’ custody with no charges filed. The burglar did smash the car window and snatch the purse, but the victim was unable to identify him in the line up. The child molester was repeatedly attempting to pick up little girls for sex, but the judge allowed him to plea bargain down to annoying a child. The man killed his wife and her lover, but a jury of his peers found him not guilty. Is he guilty? It depends on what context the word guilty is being used.
In law, the accused is innocent until proven guilty. But in fact, they are arsonists; he is a thief, a pervert, a murderer. So, while I can fully understand that arrested does not mean guilty, it is equally true that not convicted does not mean innocent … except in the eyes of the law. The principle of innocent until proven guilty is critically important to a free society, and I am not trying to minimize it. But the world is not perfect. Not every guilty person is arrested. Some innocent people are arrested. Some guilty arrestees are never prosecuted. Some innocent people are convicted. Worse, some laws are bad. Some evils are legal. It is an imperfect system. But the solution is not to conceal the fact of an arrest on the assumption that our fellow citizens are so stupid that they will assume the arrestee is guilty.
Cynthia Anne Walker is a homeschooling mother of three and former engineer. She is a published, independent author. Her column appears each Friday.
