Quote:
Originally Posted by highjumper86
This is not entirely true, but I can only speak on personal experience. I am friends with the Chief of Police of my small suburban community. He loves to talk about his job, especially after a few cocktails. His department has interaction with many different federal, state and local agencies. It's the times we live in has changed the way policing is performed.
It varies wildly from area to area, which is just part of having such a decentralized LE system. Some agencies are very willing to share, others are very territorial. I'd say most are generally willing to share info in theory, but with no centralized database of unsolved homicides, it's often a question of not even knowing who to share with. Big media cases make it more obvious that jurisdictions A and B might have connected unsolved crimes, but often it's just a question of not even knowing Smallville 45 minutes and two counties away has a file with a similar signature to your case in Tinytown. At any rate, this type of thing would improve with better mandated reporting but that's a legal issue more than anything else.
It also assumes that the cases have enough evidence in common that they can be connected. Sometimes something that seems critcal, like cause of death, will be different, say manual strangulation vs. stabbing. Different MO. But if the underlying impetus is a sadistic desire for a "hands on" killing and to watch the victim die at close range, it's the same signature with different methods. Some of your more sophisticated killers will change MO to try to make their victims look unconnected.
Believe it or not, even with obvious similarities, sometimes an agency will disregard them. For instance, the Manson murders included two consecutive nights with separate killings, the Tate homicides and the LaBianca homicides and were in different jurisdictions. At both scenes, words were written on surfaces in the victims blood (this was true of another, less commonly known Manson family murder as well, of Donald "Shorty" Shea). This is a very distinct and unusual fact that is almost unheard of at murder scenes. Despite this incredibly obvious similarity, the separate agencies involved publicly and internally disavowed any link between the cases for a significant period of time, partially because everyone "knew" the Tate homicides were drug related and there was no evidence of drug involvement in the LaBianca case. This seems incredible in hindsight, but sometimes once a team or agency has their blinders on, it takes a lot to shake that off. It's possible some others Family related crimes/killings wouldn't have happened had the cases been linked right from the get go.
Edit: I should have said that there are often inherent difficulties in the sometimes numerous agencies potentially involved in a case sharing info - I think that agencies being very reluctant to get involved with other agencies is probably fairly rare, though it does occur. There are just a ton of systemic issues that make efficient communication between various agencies something they have to work act, rather than something that occurs easily and automatically, which can be a significant disadvantage to LE.
Last edited by SGT RJ; 08-24-2017 at 11:01 PM.
