In a plugged-in, well-informed community, is it politically palatable for a police department to sit on its hands and say absolutely nothing for … two … full … days … after a vicious assault in one of Bellingham’s prime public gathering spots?
We’re about to find out.
Last Saturday’s unsettling attack by a lone assailant on a female runner on the trails around Lake Padden sent shockwaves through the community. The victim sustained injuries that required treatment at a hospital. The perp remains at large.
And during those critical first hours, when leads are fresh — and countless park users are still out there, unaware — the Bellingham Police Department did … what?
Knowing some frontline cops on our force, I suspect the answer is: literally everything possible. But that’s just a guess. We didn’t know, and neither did you. Because in Bellingham, a valve has long been stuck in the “closed” position in what should be a pipeline of timely, accurate information flowing from police administrators to the public.
For much of last Sunday and Monday morning, CDN, responding to multiple reader tips, repeatedly asked city cops for more information about a shocking crime with an assailant on the loose. We got nothing. Not even a let-me-get-back-to-you response.
We’d like to think the police were too busy searching for a perp and warning the public. Probably the former, but clearly not the latter. We couldn’t report anything to the public because we didn’t know much, and we don’t report rumors. City park users were left in the dark.
Their outrage is valid.
CDN works on weekends, when crimes often occur. Is it too much to ask someone in BPD administration to do the same?
The tone-deafness from the city here was deafening. It was made worse when police administrators finally responded: BPD’s first assault communique, 48 hours after the fact, asked for “the public’s help” in finding an assailant who had already been given sufficient time to be somewhere half a world away.
It’s not new to us
We’d be grimacing about a one-time mistake, and moving on, except this is not new. For journalists, benign neglect in public disclosure of police matters is business as usual in the City of Bellingham.
Since our launch 2.5 years ago, CDN reporters accustomed to collegial relationships with police and other first responders elsewhere have noted what seems a persistent stone wall here. This extends beyond simple daily fact-checking into records requests, which often take weeks for a response, even for stories with immediate public interest.
When we cover important crime stories, acting on behalf of the public, we expect city officials to be forthcoming. So should local residents they serve.
This helps meet the letter of state law. It also helps stem the rampant misinformation that often flows, via social media, into the vacuum left by police silence over an incident. That’s part of the job these days — theirs and ours.
An aside: To some degree, the same has been true through two administrations of the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office, which has long tended to take its own sweet time announcing significant events. Witness the 16 hours needed for public notification of a Lake Whatcom wildfire last year — or more recently, slow notification of a derailment of a train carrying hazardous substances in Custer.
So maybe it’s something in the water. Lead from target practice at Plantation Rifle Range?
Seriously: In Bellingham, it’s not clear whether this info-flow blockage is systemic, at the behest of Police Chief Rebecca Mertzig — or perhaps even higher-ups at City Hall, current leadership of which seems every bit as enamored with Insta-posting as policing.
Trust me when I say this problem has been well-communicated in Lottie Street’s posher offices — both in the Seth Fleetwood and now, Kim Lund administrations, which have acknowledged, but somehow not solved it.
Moving backwards
It was frequently suggested to CDN and other news orgs that things would improve with the hiring of a new police chief. Mertzig has held that role for more than a year. The final step in fixing the comms was to be the arrival, at long last, of a full-time, skilled, professional Public Information Officer, whose sole duty would be to keep the public apprised, both directly and through the public’s de facto stand-ins, local news reporters.
That person, Megan Peters, arrived last October with grand expectations. All of which, from my perspective, her office has spectacularly failed to meet.
Remarkably, timely facts about public-safety issues such as the Lake Padden incident have gotten even more scarce since the arrival of Peters, who is shown on LinkedIn to have Master Public Information Officer Training, part of a FEMA program.
It’s not like Peters hasn’t been busy; her office spends a significant amount of time posting feel-good, quippy missives about department doings on BPD’s social media channels, many adorned with emojis and other visual flotsam exuding junior-high-level gravitas.
Nothing wrong with that, per se; it’s apparently been quite popular among some social media followers safely ensconced in their Simplisafe homes. But it’s off-kilter if that becomes a primary use of time for a person tasked with a critical, time-sensitive public safety job.
Look: This editor is keenly aware that public officials don’t exist solely to serve news media. And that the popular trend among civic leaders is to avoid messy media scrutiny altogether by going straight to the “public” (at least the small portion of the community that will find it there) via social media (see last week’s Lund/Mertzig video after the downtown hate crime).
But CDN is not alone among local media folks in questioning BPD’s approach. And this column exists, after many months of forbearance, only because the BPD news blackout has now shown itself to affect not just media and the public’s right to know — but possibly public safety.
On Tuesday, amid spreading outrage about the lack of information surrounding the assault, the police department took to social media (where else?) to apologize.
“We are reviewing our internal communications process to address missed opportunities for community engagement and public notifications,” the department posted. “We are committed to doing better.”
Fantastic. Recommitment is better than the recent zero commitment.
We’re here to help
As a newsroom housing many decades of collective experience dealing with police and other agencies, please consider a few pro tips in helping get the word out:
- At least act like a responsive public agency. Religiously post a more complete, timely, log of police activity, with additional info forwarded to media about significant matters. The entire “detailed” entry for last Saturday’s incident, for record, was this: “Officers responded to an assault that occurred on the Lake Padden Trail.” Hint: These notices might even take the form of a news release, posted for all to see. BPD hasn’t managed to do this since November 2023. (If current PIO staff is unaware of this concept, MS Office has a template.)
- In conjunction with above, have a PIO on-call for media questions, 24/7. Failure to do so is not only misguided, it’s irresponsible (see: misinformation vacuum, above).
- In the event of a major crime or public threat, there’s this long-held American accountability tradition called a news conference, wherein public officials appear, in person, to answer questions from media, who then report back to the public. Try it sometime! (Sorry, posting a slick video statement of heartfelt concern on NextDoor, where facts go to die, doesn’t cut it.)
Not a single one of those things is extraordinary. They are, in fact, the norm in other jurisdictions. The lack of them here prompts grave concerns of how the public would be kept informed in a truly large-scale public safety incident.
We — and now, the public — await a … ahem, timely follow up from City Hall, where the mayor’s staff this week has reached out to discuss issues such as this — yet again. We remain all ears.
Ron Judd's column appears weekly; ronjudd@cascadiadaily.com; @roncjudd.
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