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The Sedition Report(Click Here to Return to Main List)
Incident Detail ReportDate of Offense: September 26, 2006
Location: MD - Silver Spring
Police fail to follow up on reports of vandalism, suggests disinterested attitude.
Late last night Doctor Raoul discovered the report on DC IndyMedia posted by a leftist revolutionary wannabe, that he and others had succeeded in breaking windows and destroying door locks at the Silver Spring, MD Armed Forces Recruiting Center.
Doctor Raoul called the Montgomery County Police 3rd District Station to alert the officers to the attack, and the woman working the desk dismissed his report with, (para) "We haven't heard anything about it." Doctor Raoul was on the telephone with the Montgomery County Police Department employee (he did not get her name, so it is not clear if she was an officer or not) for approximately three and-a-half minutes, describing the damage that the leftists reported having done to the recruiting center, and he gave her the address of the center. She told him she knew where it was, on Georgia Avenue, and she suggested that Doctor Raoul call the recruiting center in the morning and check with them about the crime. A report by a concerned citizen of a possible crime in Montgomery County Maryland was blown off by the gal working the police station desk last night. Doctor Raoul and Kristinn both made phone calls this morning to the recruiting center (as instructed by the disinterested police department employee last night), and they confirmed that, yes, in fact, there had been a crime committed last night at that location. Windows had been broken and the door locks had been destroyed by perpetrators unknown. Upon learning of this, I made a phone call to the Montgomery County Police Department 3rd District Station to get more information on this attack. When I asked to speak with someone in the Command staff at the station, I was told by an Officer Wilson-Jackson that the Station Commander (Betsy L. Davis) was in a meeting in Gaithersburg. I asked to speak with the next-in-command. Officer Wilson-Jackson said that Lieutenant McCullagh was also out of the station in a meeting at an undisclosed location. Next-in-command? Lieutenant Carter - out of station: training. Next? Lieutenant Jones - She's on the evening shift. I then asked who was in charge when all the command staff is away from the station, and she told me that the shift sergeants are in charge - but none of them were available either. This would be funny if it wasn't so serious. Giving up on getting any answers from the District Station involved, I thanked Officer Wilson-Jackson for the information and called the office of the Montgomery County Police Chief (no, it's no longer Chief Moose anymore). The gal there transferred me to Lieutenant Eric Burnett in their Media Services Division. I left a message on Lt. Burnett's vioce mail, and eight-hours later have yet to hear from him. Not ready to give up my fact-finding mission, I made another phone call to the main Media Services number, and I spoke to Ms. Lucille Baur in that office. She said that she had nothing on the attack at the recruiting center, but that she would look into it and get back to me. In the meantime, Kristinn and I took a ride down to the recruiting center to check out the damage and to take a few photos... The lock was replaced by the time that we arrived to take these photos. Roughly four hours later Ms. Baur called back to inform me that nobody had reported the attack, and that is why the Montgomery County Police were unaware of it; and that now that they were aware of it, a sergeant was on his way to the recruiting center to take a report. I informed Ms. Baur that indeed Montgomery County Police had been notified of the crime last night. I told her that a concerned citizen (Doctor Raoul) had in fact phoned the 3rd District station last night at around midnight to report it, and the woman working the desk had blown the citizen's concerns off, telling him to call the recruiting center himself in the morning. Ms. Baur was momentarily speechless. She asked for more information about the call that Doctor Raoul made last night (who, where, when, etc.) and asked about the conversation. I recounted what Doctor Raoul had reported and the reaction of the woman at the other end of the Montgomery County PD telephone. I also read her the paragraph from the recently outed and declassified NIE report: Anti-US and anti-globalization sentiment is on the rise and fueling other radical ideologies. This could prompt some leftist, nationalist, or separatist groups to adopt terrorist methods to attack US interests. The radicalization process is occurring more quickly, more widely, and more anonymously in the Internet age, raising the likelihood of surprise attacks by unknown groups whose members and supporters may be difficult to pinpoint. I commented that, with the NIE report being front and center in the news the past few days, a report by a concerned citizen about an attack on a government office in the county should have been investigated right then, and not dismissed with the police representative telling the citizen to investigate it himself in the morning. She agreed and promised to investigate my facts further, saying that there are always two side to every story; and she said that she would get back to me. Ms. Baur called me back shortly before 5pm this evening to tell me that she had not been able to speak with the officer working the telephones last night when Doctor Raoul called them, and she said that in fairness sake she needed to get her side of the story before commenting on the Montgomery County Police Department's response to Doctor Raoul's phone report of the crime last night. Ms. Baur also updated me on what the police officer found when he (she?) arrived at the scene this afternoon. The officer spoke with people working in the recruiting center who told him that a lock was vandalized (paperclips and SuperGlue) and a window was chipped. Apparently the police officer did not look up at the broken window that I photographed at 11am today. I told Ms. Baur that I had photographed a visibly broken window and broken glass on the ground. She responded that she had not been informed of a broken window, and she asked me to email her a link to my story when I posted it. I told her that I would do so. http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1709556/posts |