Do You Know Who I Am?
Via the Boston Herald:
Sen. John Kerry hopes to export the successful Boston police Text-A-Tip Crime Stoppers hotline to other big cities by creating a $5 million federal grant for police departments to replicate the program, the Herald has learned.
In a bill Kerry filed yesterday in Washington dubbed “Text A Tip Act of 2007,” the Bay State senator called on fellow lawmakers to create a pilot program that would be run by the federal Department of Justice and would be appropriated by the attorney general.
Kerry said the bill is based on the program created by BPD Commissioner Edward Davis and Mayor Thomas M. Menino in June.
“Boston’s program has been an overwhelming success,” Kerry said in a statement yesterday. “The need for a national program is clear by the facts that tips are now coming into the BPD from around the country.”
I, for one, could not agree more. Anything that works at the local level is bound to work at the national level. I propose the creation of a new bureaucracy to manage a program that, apparently, local police and sheriffs are unable (or too stupid) to create for themselves.
While I’m on it, here in Hawaii, we have those cool wheelie bins that one rolls out to have picked up by a mechanical arm and emptied into the garbage truck. I think there should definitely be federal attention paid to that. When I was last on the mainland, they were still using trash bins without wheels. That’s crazy! I think some sort of task force needs to look into this.
The Corcoran Brothers 
I haven’t read the text of the bill or anything, but setting up an anonymous text service to act as a police tip line seems to have been a non-trivial task (http://www.verisign.com/press_releases/pr/page_042220.html). Why would it make sense for every police force in the country to do it separately?
I am suspicious of the success rate. In a prior article McPhee mentions that it has been used to bust 2 murder suspects and has provided hot leads for police in several other cases. What happens when it gets to court? Is this police procedure in it’s infant stage going to hold up? It seems we’re a long way off from calling this a real success story.
Jenn, the way BPD does it might not be the way Topeka, KS would want to do it. They have conferences of police chiefs, professional workshops, and other things that BPD tech geeks could go to and explain how they do it, but to have it handed down from on high is a cookie cutter solution that makes people feel good and imposes more bureaucracy.