Granville is a small upstate NY town along the Vermont border not far from here. The PD recently had to deal with yet another gruesome, tragic and possibly preventable domestic murder/suicide case - preventable not by the police department per se, but perhaps if the victim had not wavered on following through on an Order of Protection. Maybe, maybe not, but the end result is three orphans, families torn apart, and the PD about to come under the gun for alleged inaction in the face of a paper trail of building incidents at the residence of the victim and her killer.

You can clearly see the trend coming that is going to eventually require police to proactively intervene when these patterns start to emerge. Then you'll have the inevitable gray area surrounding at what point that occurs, and all the Monday morning quarterbacking emanating from the attorneys jumping aboard after the smoke clears. In at least one county in New York State, police are now required to proactively go out and contact sex offenders in their jurisdictions at regular intervals; at what point will they be required to start supervising troubled families? After all, in a climate where everything is the fault of some arm of government, where better to place the blame than the police department?

Here's the first shot fired in this particular story, from the Albany Times Union.

If you're a police administrator, you have got to keep ahead of this stuff, like you didn't have enough to do already. Given that it actually involves real tragedy and loss of this magnitude, its somewhat hard to argue with, unfortunately. In the meantime, document, document, document, and make sure that someone in the department is keeping on top of these things as they emerge. PolicePro can actually be a big aid in doing this. We make spotting and watching trends like this extremely easy.

Does this make us sleazy opportunists? Maybe to some cynics, but again, I've got the street creds to back up these opinions. I well recall the one we had where the girlfriend - after taking out an Order of Protection against her boyfriend who had assaulted her - two or three days later allowed him back in to spend the night and ended up with a couple of bullets in her. The idiot boyfriend told us later he'd saved a bullet for himself after shooting her, but chickened out when the cops started rolling up. If we had known about the issues there, maybe we would have been a little more forceful in our dealings with them before the night of the shooting. Instead, she ended up shot and the PD had another lawsuit on the pile, accused of failing to protect her.