Direction of Anger
Many of you have probably heard about the young girl Tori from Woodstock, Ontario who has recently been kidnapped. I feel so sorry for the parents and family of this child. She has been missing more than a week and I am sure none of you reading this, nor I writing it, can imagine the state of affairs around this town and the involved parties.
But this entry is not about her or her family. This blog is about the knowledge-less, Monday-morning-quarterbacks who are directing their anger at a senseless crime towards the Woodstock and Provincial Police.
I am tired of reading “An Amber Alert should have been issued within hours of her being away”, “She was always abducted, never missing” etc. The lead investigator of this case even had to take time away from investigating to tell everyone that this was just terminology! As he stated: The process of finding a child, whether decalred missing or abducted is the same! “A rose by any other name…” if you will. Media obsession and factless opinions has caused people to focus not on the important part here “A little girl is missing”, but on who to blame for her not being found (yet). I refuse to quote the commentary I have read over the past week. Needless to say it focused on lazy cops and scrutiny of a not-fully-publicized case.
So I did some research so I could speak to these people directly:
First off, Tori does not meet the criteria for an Amber alert. Taken directly from the Amber Alert website as criteria for issuing an Amber Alert: “There is sufficient descriptive information of child, captor, or captor’s vehicle to issue an alert”. In this case we have a blurry photo of a person in a white jacket, who by all accounts is walking beside the girl, not necessarily “with her”. Whether this is right or wrong, I am not making a statement.
Secondly, and this is the painful part, of all abductions by a non-family member in 2007 only 17% were recovered. This is a very sad statistic, but what I mean to indicate here is that an Amber Alert is not a golden ticket, so stop praising it like it’s the miracle panacea we’ve been striving for!
The senselessness of blaming the police for not solving a crime in the time of a CSI episode is beyond me. Place the anger where it belongs: On the deranged men and women who perform these acts. Fight for tougher sentencing, a loop-hole free legal system etc.
Fact: The man who admitted to murdering my Uncle got less than 1 year in jail. This is not due to lazy cops, it is due to the fact that a criminal who is caught gets time taken off any sentence if he is “forced” to stay in jail during the trail. We award criminals for having to wait to be tried and sentenced!
Fact: The person who killed my 2 cousins is still at large 15 years later. I do not blame police, I blame our justice system for not allowing police to charge the man they know did it without further evidence. The case remains open.
Don’t fight the battles you think you can win (ie. taking fighters of your safety to court à la the BC taser inquiry), fight the battles worth fighting. That is the only way change will be made.
Tori, I wish you well and hope for a safe reunion for you and your family.