An incident where a one-month-old girl in the care of a 44-year-old man died of an apparently “non-accidental” skull fracture is listed in the Juneau Police Department’s public log as simply “JPD assisted another agency” at a location on Trout Street.
The entry is part of a JPD “Daily Bulletin” for a 24-hour period ending at noon April 16, commonly referred to in newsspeak as the police blotter. It’s a standard item for police departments and newspapers everywhere — and some such as Skagway’s have become famous for their narratives — but in recent years JPD’s daily reports have gotten noticeably thinner and vaguer.
The first bulletin in JPD’s online database — dated Dec. 28, 2009 — has 21 incidents. There were an average of 10.06 in September of 2014, 9.35 in September of 2022, 7.56 in September of 2023 and 5.93 in September of 2024. That dropped to 5.12 in October of this year and 3.14 for the seven-day period ending at noon Wednesday.
The drop isn’t related to the crime rate, since the number of incidents in Juneau increased notably after 2014 and remained above that level since, according to FBI statistics.
Details of incidents in the daily bulletins are also fewer. The bulletin for April 16, 2014 — exactly one decade before the one containing the four-word entry for the infant who died — contains the following as the longest narrative of 11 incidents:
“At about 2300 hours, a motorist reported a drunken male wearing blue jeans and a black jacket staggering in the roadway on Glacier Highway about 7 mile. An officer contacted 34 year old Sonny Willard in that area matching the description. During the contact, Willard told the officer he was in possession of a loaded revolver in his backpack. A loaded .44 caliber Ruger Super Blackhawk was located in the backpack. Willard was cited for Misconduct Weapons 4 and released at his residence. The revolver was secured as evidence.”
Most other narratives that day are much shorter — and one incident involving a report of suspicious activity has no narrative at all, presumably because none was found. But bulletins from that time, and up until a year or so ago, typically included details not seen now such as descriptions and values of stolen items, blood-alcohol levels of arrested drivers, and notable interactions between subjects and officers.
Many current bulletin items — in addition to omitting such descriptors — also often lack routine information such as a street location (aside from the standard omission for matters such as sex crimes) and whether arrested suspects were incarcerated.
JPD officials are quick to point out two key considerations with the frequency and detail of current reports:
• A daily bulletin that lists only two incidents doesn’t mean a police force with roughly 60 officers only responded to two incidents. Erann Kalwara, a JPD spokesperson, noted the department received 1,883 incident reports from the community in September, 289 of which resulted in officer-involved cases. Not all of those met the qualifications requiring documenting as a bulletin item, 178 of which were published that month.
• A new database system implemented by JPD in the fall of 2022 has a 128-character limit for descriptions of incidents. Kalwara said the new system was adopted to fulfill certain federal data reporting requirements and because some officers had previously included narrative details in bulletins not considered appropriate.
However, there are flaws in JPD’s reporting of incidents using the system, Deputy Chief Krag Campbell said in an interview Monday when asked why the report of the infant’s death in April didn’t disclose that fact or any other details even though it was almost immediately deemed suspicious in nature. There was also no public release of information when an autopsy two days later classified the death as a homicide.
“I think some of it is how our system pulls information and I think we were still struggling with a system that doesn’t pull information that we want in the way we want it — and I don’t know if it ever will, is the worry,” he said.
A press release about the arrest of a Juneau man in a hotel room with the infant — along with three of her siblings — was issued by JPD last Friday night, one day after he was arrested. Such releases are how JPD now details incidents requiring longer narratives, which over the past several months have included numerous drug busts.
Some police agencies have multiple employees specifically designated to compile data and produce public incident reports daily, “but since we don’t have staff to do that we try to automate that process,” Campbell said.
“But in doing so it creates like limits on things,” he said. That includes the block numbers of streets, “so we can give a specific address, but then it specifically identifies victims, homes and things like that. That’s probably not the best option.”
What’s the point of publishing a police blotter?
One group of people who almost certainly wouldn’t mind less police report information being published publicly is those who are named when arrested or cited.
The Empire gets inquiries from people about the value of reporting somebody’s DUI arrest (assuming they’re not a high-profile public figure), for instance, and received requests from people to have blotters altered if the original charges are reduced or dropped in the court process.
They’re questions a lot of newspapers have gotten for a lot of years.
Some police departments also have questioned or halted the publishing of blotters, requiring instead a records request for material that by law is available to the public. The Haines Borough Police Department stopped publishing its blotters in 2016 (that policy was reversed and they are now again available), prompting Tom Morphet, then-owner of the Chilkat Valley News to publish a column defending their publication by the newspaper.
”The things that people report to police are sometimes silly. (A person calls to report their neighbor is snoring.),” he wrote. “They’re sometimes mundane. (A car was reported speeding on Small Tracts Road.) And they’re sometimes grave. (A man was found dead at Third and Union streets.)”
“But those items are a measure of what people are concerned about in a community. They’re also a public account of what police are doing, and an important notice to the public of crime, safety and other issues.”
The “right to be forgotten” — essentially people wanting things such as arrests erased from online searches if they’re not convicted of the listed charges — has emerged as a global issue. It has existed as a legal right under certain circumstances in the European Union since 2014, but doesn’t exist in U.S. law.
The Empire, as with most U.S. newspapers, does not alter previously published blotters for several reasons, including maintaining consistency with the official bulletins posted online by JPD. Practical considerations also come into play in terms of a precedent where every reported arrest past and present is subject to modification based on current court status (which would have to be independently verified). Also, many older stories can no longer be accessed and edited by the Empire’s current content system, making an equal standard impossible to implement.
One U.S. newspaper notable for a “right to be forgotten” policy is The Boston Globe, which uses a process involving a 10-member committee to consider requests on a case-by-case basis. Among the concerns expressed by U.S. skeptics of such a policy being enacted into law is it would create a situation where media organizations without sufficient resources to do proper reviews and revisions would have to cease publishing any content that could be subject to such review.
Why JPD now describes police incidents in 128 characters or less
Between Sept. 1 and 19 of 2022 there was an average of 9.63 incidents in the JPD daily bulletins. That is followed by an 18-day gap, with the subsequent bulletins between Oct. 8 and 31 containing an average of 6.5 incidents a day. The average for November of 2023 was 6.8 incidents a day.
What changed during those 18 days is the reporting system used by JPD for the incident reports, with the newer one having the 128-character limit to describe incidents.
“It’s very different from our prior system,” Kalwara said. “Our prior system we had unlimited access to narratives and we could handpick which narratives appeared on activity bulletin. This system, we cannot handpick which narrative.”
Under the old system “it would actually put information in there that the police officers were typing in their action taken or their arrest reports, which is not appropriate to share with the public,” she said. “So we’re taking the extra time for someone to go in review the information, synopsize it, and just put a little tidbit in there.”
While the newer system might seem like a huge downgrade in terms of narrative length, Kalwara said one of the things the older system couldn’t do was meet the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System standards took effect in January of 2021 in an attempt to improve collection of uniform crime data nationally.
“The new system has, I’m going to say, a good 60 extra fields that we have to capture, evaluate, classify and report on,” she said.
Campbell, while acknowledging the system’s imperfections, said there also weren’t many available to choose from that met the federal guidelines.
“That’s what we needed to do and unfortunately it just doesn’t meet this other need,” he said, referring to the narrative content. “So we’ve been trying to work use the system to create a version of that that still works, but it definitely has some shortcomings.”
Kalwara also noted JPD’s policy manual that includes reporting of incidents was modified in 2021, which is a factor in the number of incidents included in the daily bulletins, and is due for further revision. So while “dispatch might take anywhere from 50 to 300 calls that are incidents a day,” only some are responded to by officers and incidents not meeting the reporting standards — such as a drivers being issued a warning — aren’t included in the bulletins.
“A case would be if someone is arrested, if a crime is committed, if there’s something involving property,” she said. “So motor vehicle crashes aren’t always a case. Contact with people who are camping are not always a case. There are a lot of things that do not kind of grow up, if you will, to become a case…So that’s why there’s breaks between the numbers when we do have cases and daily bulletins.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
