The Daily Camera reports today about the Lafayette Police Department's decision to remove people's names from an online Police Blotter, as at least one person charged - but not convicted - complained about the practice.
As a writer I'm grateful for the amount of info I can find online with some concentrated search techniques. However, this decision to remove names is the right thing to do. On those TV shows with people being arrested, the reason some of their faces are fuzzed out is because they end up not being convicted, so you can't show their face. Online information should be the same way.
Lafayette police Cmdr. Rick Bashor is quoted: "We try to work with the press to try to get information to the community. ... But we kind of overlooked one small portion, and that's the ripple effect of that information being on the Web and some of it never seems to go away."
Save the online spotlight for the convicts, not the accused.
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