Major props to St. Pete Times reporters Michael Van Sickler and Jamal Thalji for (finally) reporting on the reaction of some crime experts around the country over St. Petersburg Mayor Bill Foster's decision last Monday to raze the house of Christine and Hydra Lacy Jr., after the shooting outbreak by Lacy that killed two St. Pete Police officers and later Lacy Jr. himself, though we still at this time do not know how Lacy Jr. died.
From the get-go, there has been criticism about how the scene unfolded from crime experts. But though St. Pete officials have dismissed that as a form of Monday morning quarterbacking, the Mayor's decision to tear down the scene of the crime, and therefore all the evidence inside it, was shocking to many observers at the time.
And according to the Times article, many criminologists flat out disagree with the decision to do so. Here's an excerpt from the story, which quotes David Klinger, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Missouri-St. Louis:
Clues at the scene could indicate a number of things: Did officers run out of ammunition, and if so, when and where? When an officer moved somewhere in the house, did he expose himself to danger? Or did he improve the tactical situation? During the rescue attempts, did officers have the right equipment to extricate the wounded officers?
"All sorts of fine-grained things that become very important about a half-inch one way or a half-inch the other way and that mean life or death," Klinger said.
Bullet trajectories into the remaining sides of the house and shell casings could show where the police shot in relation to Lacy's location.
"Did they find all the weapons?" Klinger said. "Fingerprints, fiber, DNA that show who has been in the house recently? Now it's all in a swamp somewhere, and I can't vouch for its integrity."
A crime scene of "this magnitude" being destroyed by a mayor is unheard of and the police chief should have stopped him, said Jon Shane, a former SWAT commander in Newark, N.J., and an assistant professor in law and police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
"These kinds of after-action investigations have to take place," he said. "When you deprive yourself of cool, calm deliberation, you lose the ability to step back and determine what happened in the right sense and the wrong sense. And then you're no better off than you were 30 seconds before the shooting started."
Last week we wrote a post quoting several members of the community who were writing in comments to the Times website, reacting in shock and anger at Foster's decision to tear down the home on 28th Avenue South in St. Pete. It looks like they weren't the only ones questioning that decision.
This article appears in Jan 27 – Feb 2, 2011.