This are illiteracy

You don’t get much more oxymoronic than “creative policing”, yet without fail law enforcers worldwide keep finding new ways to utterly fuck things up in new and increasingly obscure ways.

One such example I stumbled upon recently was Tampa Bay’s most recent preventative measure. You can find it at mugshots.tampabay.com, where as you might have guessed you get to view images of the last 200 or so fellons to get picked up, including their full name and what they were arrested for.

The logic flaws in this concept are almost painfully obvious. While it may provide some passive interest to the casual browser,  I doubt the more hardened mugshots on there know anyone who owns a computer, let alone someone who would spend their spare time on the Tampa Bay Police’s website.

Though without doubt the biggest flaw with this idia that i’ve spotted is that it creates what is effectively a craigslist for felons. Need a dealer? Or maybe just some muscle to rough up your boss?All it takes is someone’s full name and a facebook profile. At least a third of the arrests are drug related, so if you’re looking to score some yayo its just a case of finding a friendly looking felon and adding said felon on facebook/myspace/whatever.

Surely someone must have thought this through.. Maybe I should be teaching drug marketing 101 – to all you dealers in the Tampa area consider that little gem a taster, cut me in for 20% and you’ll be rolling like Tony Montana before you can say hello to your ‘little friend’.

As an added bonus the department manage to provide just about every statistic you could want about their inmates, though mysteriously instead of listing inmates by race they chose to go with the more ambiguous “eye colour”. Call me old fashioned but by any standard this is surely far worse? Instead of keeping races hidden it actually just lumps Hispanics, Asians and Blacks into the same the “brown” category.

I’d like to know who makes these brilliant decisions, and take his no doubt highly paid job.