Officers may have been put on administrative leave
A Wesleyan student who would like to remain anonymous writes:
I have received information from a reliable source saying that four of the Middletown officers involved in Thursday night's incident have been on administrative leave since Friday morning, pending an internal investigation of the incident.Edit (Mad, 5/19): Several commenters have suggested that this information is NOT true. I'd recommend not trusting it.
20 comments:
good riddance
What's the "reliable source" on this info?
Is there any likelihood we'll be able to get confirmation? Or any more info, like which officers, or why they were put on leave?
8:30, I don't know. I'm just passing along the information.
As the title of my post makes clear, I've by no means made any effort to independently confirm this report.
Does anyone know what CT state law says or legal precedent in CT for "excessive force" in a case like this - intoxicated citizens refusing to disperse, some bottles and apparently a smoke bomb thrown - with the partier to cop ratio somewhere between 10:1 and 20:1? Just curious if anyone knows at similar cases at UConn or Yale etc and how judges, inquiry commissions responded (i.e will they actually think that the situation legally warranted use of pepper spray and tasers?).
We checked into this, and as of Friday night, this was just a rumor. (Although the situation could have changed sometime yesterday or today.)
-Hilary Moss
was not true. bad information. sorry
If it's not true you should take the post down.
u guys are stuck up fags who deserved what u got so go fuck yourselfs
"Several commenters have suggested that this information is NOT true. I'd recommend not trusting it."
Well I'd recommend not posting it.
9:09 and 4:21:
Deleting information from the public record when it's found to be false is no way to run a news source. If something we report turns out to be false, we correct it. This ensures accountability on our part, which—I truly hope—is not something you find offensive.
The post will remain, with Mad's disclaimer, because good reporting requires acknowledging one's mistakes, not erasing them and pretending they were never reported.
Besides, we never passed this information off as verifiably true, even before the disclaimer was added. I simply posted it because it came from a student I know... a student who risked his own anonymity to pass along information that he thought the Wesleyan community would find relevant.
i kind of disagree ... i think you should take it down. a lot of people don't read a whole post, they just read the headline. i don't think there's anything wrong with deleting false information--like the compost post. it's better to delete instead of accidently misleading people who don't read to the end.
5:02, we're working out an internal policy for this kind of situation at the moment.
Anyway, I still disagree.
First, it's not our fault if someone only reads the title and comes away with a false impression. We do our reporting in the articles, not the titles. Readers who only read headlines are deliberately giving themselves less than the complete story... and in this case, the "may have been" in the headline indicates that it was never a verified fact.
Second, what would you think if the NYT deleted an incorrect article? Wouldn't most people scream that they're manipulating the public record and deliberately covering up their mistakes? I hope that most people would think that way. Making sure that mistakes are acknowledged and not erased is one of the ways that readers and reporters ensure the accuracy of the media.
Third... Seriously. This post was three sentences long. If someone can read two sentences but can't find the energy to read the third... well, I don't think I'm looking to cater to those people with my contributions to this blog.
That said, I already mentioned that we're working on a policy for this. We'll have it settled shortly.
The NYT would never report hearsay in the first place.
If you posted something you actually thought had some factual basis and it turned out to be false, you should correct yourself and leave the post up. I'm all for accountability in that regard.
If you posted little more than a rumor, and it turned out to have no basis in fact, you should take it down (or not post it in the first place). 'A student you know who heard it from a reliable source that they won't tell you or you won't tell us' will not, in general, turn out to give very reliable info.
Why not just make stuff up, and then wait until it's confirmed false before you put up a disclaimer? That's what you're uncomfortably close to right now, except that you've outsourced the "make stuff up" part.
-4:21
4:21, you've got a good point. Yet, I still think it was justified to post it, since it came from a verifiable member of the community who, I like to think, wasn't just inventing a rumor for shits 'n' giggles. And I still think it's right to leave it up, since it's now a part of the public record.
Anyway, we'll be taking your comments into consideration as we work out our policy on things like this.
take this fucking shit down.
you arent the nyt, and this is just makes you look stupid.
now i'm wondering what this deleted compost post (com-post?) was about...
lol. 8:11, the "com-post" about compost-able plastics at Usdan was never taken down, just corrected. It's still online here.
Ok we're fully aware this isn't the NYT. Don't tell us how to run the blog 8:11 & co, your grammar just is makes you self-defeating.
You make us students look bad when you spread false information like this. The article should be ammended or removed. It is very easy to verify if an officer is suspended or not. One phone call is all it would take. You are now part of the problem, not the solution we are striving for.
I do actually think the point about skimming headlines is a good one -- it might be worth editing the headline too in a case like this when there's a correction, though I don't exactly how to do it concisely.
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