The good driver is not necessarily the one who responds best in an emergency. The good driver is the one who avoids emergencies-by successfully making the 1,001 judgments any drive requires, including constant course corrections, keeping back from the car in front and carefully monitoring speed.
Law enforcement in the Thief River Falls area made their own "course correction" recently. Maybe they were helped by a nudge from the press; maybe not.
In any event, it's a sign of good government when officials survey the road ahead and steer straight down the center of the lane. That's the way to avoid emergencies in motoring-and that's the way to avoid emergencies in governing, too.
In July, Thief River Falls endured a terrible tragedy when a 14-year-old boy who was riding his bike was struck by a vehicle and killed. During the investigation, a sheriff's deputy claimed he was told to omit from his report the fact that the young man had "Pokemon Go," a popular video game phone app, open on his phone the time of the crash.
This claim was made public because it came to light through an open-records request from the Herald. A news story resulted, and many people wondered whether the deputy had been told to lie.
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To their credit, the sheriff's department, Thief River Falls Police Department and Pennington County Attorney's office looked into rather than stonewalled the situation. Clearly, they recognized its seriousness and understood how damaging it would be if one officer truly had been told by another to withhold evidence.
Now, that investigation is complete, and the authorities have offered a plausible explanation. Yes, officers were told to withhold some information-but only from public reports, and only because a criminal investigation was underway, the sheriff, police chief and county attorney said.
That's legal. It's also accepted by the public, in part because the information eventually must be released once the criminal investigation is closed.
What happened in this case, the authorities say, is that the deputy (who was new on the force) misunderstood. He thought he was being told to withhold info from his official police reports-the ones that can stay confidential during an investigation.
That was never the case, the authorities said. And their claim is made more credible by the fact that the Pokemon Go app is mentioned in several other reports that became part of the official record.
As Police Chief Dick Wittenberg said at the time of the original story, "What you are suggesting or what that suggests would be hindering a criminal investigation. ... You don't just withhold evidence. ... I don't know what I would gain by (telling him to not include facts about the app)."
It's good that the chief and others understood right away the gravity of the talk of a lie. And it's good that the leadership acted fast to reassure the public-and remind their own officers-that police work demands scrupulous honesty in fulfillment of the public trust.
-- Tom Dennis for the Herald
