Inept Police Dept

[jackydee]

Mar 29, 2018 19:15:38 GMT roberson said:

Inept? Not sure that's the word I would use. Overworked? Inundated? Overwhelmed? Perhaps. Apathetic on occasion? 

I was sitting in the tub reading Canter's Mapping Murder, thinking that Sacramento LE didn't seem try that hard to solve the dozens of EAR rapes in their jurisdictions after he left, and when the suspect apparently departed not long after the Maggiore murders, they sort of went "whew" and let the issue go. Now, forty years later, after it's been discovered he transformed into a serial killer, they want to dig this guy up the dark recesses of time. But if he had never killed anyone, do you really believe they'd at all today even think of trying to solve cases outside the SoL, like the Sacramento EAR rapes and burglaries? 

Like I said, he left, and I think they saw EAR in the rear view mirror. They had the rape kits, and if a suspect was ever caught they could test his biological profile against the EAR evidence, but no one in Sacramento LE was trying to find this guy. They were relieved he was some other city's problem, and that was pretty much that. 

What a horrible time to live in such a beautiful city. Massive crime and a LE that was so overworked, all they could do was hope offenders would leave the city or else, trip themselves up somehow. 

Interestingly enough I vaguely remember reading a book about a famous SK case here in the UK of a murderous couple Fred & Rose West. The lead detective was very critical of one of the UK's foremost profilers. The Det said the profiler promised much and delivered very little. The Det had to continually harangue the profiler to return files and his promised profiles. I think that profiler was David Canter.

[Trollin]

Mar 29, 2018 19:26:08 GMT roberson said:

I love this anecdote from Shelby:




It was early in the evening as the sun was just setting when Sgt. Irwin and I were parked less than a block from Dawes Street. We were right in the middle of the area where there had been five sexual assaults associated with the EAR. After following up on some leads, we decided to remain in the area for a while to see if anything caught our attention. A couple of things did. Sgt. Irwin’s vibrating in place behind the steering wheel caught my attention. A speeding bicyclist caught his.
 
The speeding bicyclist was a man dressed all in black, heading south on Dawes Street towards Folsom Boulevard. As he sped through the intersection behind us, Sgt. Irwin commented, “That’s him. There he goes.” I asked how he knew, and he replied, “I just know.”
 
A few minutes later the same bicyclist returned only now he was speeding north on Dawes Street towards Dolcetto Drive and Los Palos Drive. He was quickly out of sight.
 
Within minutes of losing sight of the bicyclist, there was that brief burst of escaping electrons from the radio, followed by the announcement that someone had just attempted entry into an occupied home.
 
Inside of one minute we were at Dawes Street and the drainage ditch. The attempted entry had been made on the second house from the corner of Dawes and Los Palos. With that ditch behind the house a quick escape was all but guaranteed. Even if we had gone after the bicyclist, we would not have been able to catch him in the act, and quite possibly we couldn’t have even have caught up with him.

This is awesome. "there he goes"  then same bicycle returns (cops didn't move) cool escaping electrons...


"Even if we had gone after the bicyclist, we would not have been able to catch him in the act, and quite possibly we couldn’t have even have caught up with him."

Right because not being able to catch him in the process of the rape would have made it impossible to arrest him (chuckle) and "quite possibly" couldn't have caught up with him. Because they weren't Carl Lewis, why give it a shot? It's only a serial rapist on the loose, im sure you will get him next time when you don't have to expend any energy.

[roberson]

Mar 29, 2018 19:28:10 GMT jackydee said:

Mar 29, 2018 19:15:38 GMT roberson said:

Inept? Not sure that's the word I would use. Overworked? Inundated? Overwhelmed? Perhaps. Apathetic on occasion? 

I was sitting in the tub reading Canter's Mapping Murder, thinking that Sacramento LE didn't seem try that hard to solve the dozens of EAR rapes in their jurisdictions after he left, and when the suspect apparently departed not long after the Maggiore murders, they sort of went "whew" and let the issue go. Now, forty years later, after it's been discovered he transformed into a serial killer, they want to dig this guy up the dark recesses of time. But if he had never killed anyone, do you really believe they'd at all today even think of trying to solve cases outside the SoL, like the Sacramento EAR rapes and burglaries? 

Like I said, he left, and I think they saw EAR in the rear view mirror. They had the rape kits, and if a suspect was ever caught they could test his biological profile against the EAR evidence, but no one in Sacramento LE was trying to find this guy. They were relieved he was some other city's problem, and that was pretty much that. 

What a horrible time to live in such a beautiful city. Massive crime and a LE that was so overworked, all they could do was hope offenders would leave the city or else, trip themselves up somehow. 

Interestingly enough I vaguely remember reading a book about a famous SK case here in the UK of a murderous couple Fred & Rose West. The lead detective was very critical of one of the UK's foremost profilers. The Det said the profiler promised much and delivered very little. The Det had to continually harangue the profiler to return files and his promised profiles. I think that profiler was David Canter.

Wouldn't surprise me. He and Rossmo are both often full of hot air and pretensions. I tried reading Kim Rossmo's Geographic Profiling, but he wrote the book strictly for academics, not even cops who might use his techniques the most. It's readable, I guess, but damned if it doesn't put you into a coma. So someone bought me Canter's book. Thought it might be a more enjoyable alternative. Instead, so far it's been ten pages of him babbling about the celebrity status of some British journalist who was murdered outside her home, how dumb the cops were in not finding her killer quicker, and how easy it was to profile the case geographically (killer lived within several hundred yards IIRC). 

The book promised me much, but has delivered very little. 

[roberson]

Mar 29, 2018 19:36:07 GMT Trollin said:

Mar 29, 2018 19:26:08 GMT roberson said:

I love this anecdote from Shelby:




It was early in the evening as the sun was just setting when Sgt. Irwin and I were parked less than a block from Dawes Street. We were right in the middle of the area where there had been five sexual assaults associated with the EAR. After following up on some leads, we decided to remain in the area for a while to see if anything caught our attention. A couple of things did. Sgt. Irwin’s vibrating in place behind the steering wheel caught my attention. A speeding bicyclist caught his.
 
The speeding bicyclist was a man dressed all in black, heading south on Dawes Street towards Folsom Boulevard. As he sped through the intersection behind us, Sgt. Irwin commented, “That’s him. There he goes.” I asked how he knew, and he replied, “I just know.”
 
A few minutes later the same bicyclist returned only now he was speeding north on Dawes Street towards Dolcetto Drive and Los Palos Drive. He was quickly out of sight.
 
Within minutes of losing sight of the bicyclist, there was that brief burst of escaping electrons from the radio, followed by the announcement that someone had just attempted entry into an occupied home.
 
Inside of one minute we were at Dawes Street and the drainage ditch. The attempted entry had been made on the second house from the corner of Dawes and Los Palos. With that ditch behind the house a quick escape was all but guaranteed. Even if we had gone after the bicyclist, we would not have been able to catch him in the act, and quite possibly we couldn’t have even have caught up with him.

This is awesome. "there he goes"  then same bicycle returns (cops didn't move) cool escaping electrons...


"Even if we had gone after the bicyclist, we would not have been able to catch him in the act, and quite possibly we couldn’t have even have caught up with him."

Right because not being able to catch him in the process of the rape would have made it impossible to arrest him (chuckle) and "quite possibly" couldn't have caught up with him. Because they weren't Carl Lewis, why give it a shot? It's only a serial rapist on the loose, im sure you will get him next time when you don't have to expend any energy.

Shelby's book is full of wonderfully similar anecdotes. You should read the one where he was ABSOLUTELY SURE he saw EAR walking down a street right near him, but did nothing to apprehend him because he had another call somewhere else. He verbally kicks himself in the ass over the incident, repeating that his gut was afire with the assured belief that the guy he saw was in fact the East Area Rapist. 

Fat lot of good that did the subsequent victims, I guess. 

[jordiepants]

Mar 29, 2018 19:12:31 GMT jthou said:

Was the PD inept? Yes but do not attack the intelligence of the officers. It was a systematic failure. Many guys then as today invested much time and effort and poured their hearts and souls into this case but were handcuffed by jurisdictional non-cooperation and admin that didn’t grasp the seriousness or prolific levels of the crimes being committed. But to say they were dumb is simply a bad take and wrong. Re-evaluate and try again.

Hit the nail on the head here. I respect the heck out of the guys who were there around this time. But the way I see it is that they were just working in LE the way they were trained to do so, and with the 70's being a completely different time, things were handled differently. LE didn't automatically suspect the worst when they arrived somewhere. It wasn't the shoot first ask questions later LE that we are used to now-a-days. I wouldn't call them dumb. I am just saying, they were living in a differently world then we are now and they did the best they could with what they had. I wish we could go back in time and tell them the seriousness of this investigation, because I think we may be closer to figuring out EARs identity (or already would have)

[tilomagnet]

Why is this thread about LE being "inept BACK THEN"? Now here we are, 40 years later, technology has improved massively and theres still no solution, except we now know that the rapist they failed to catch became a vicious serial killer!

So either LE CONTINUES to demonstrate complete incompetence or theres something else that keeps this case from being officially solved then and now!

[roberson]

November Evening - 1976
 
Even before the official recognition of this latest psychopath, my days and nights had been very, very busy. The same could just as easily be said about most of the other investigators. While the rapist was preparing for his next victim, we were putting together a request for a search warrant for where ever Art Pinkton was then living which, as it turned out, was with his mother.
 
One night, about a week after the sexual assault on Marcy, we were going to serve that search warrant. The plan was for Sgt. Irwin to accompany a deputy district attorney to a judge’s home and get it signed Once the signed warrant was in hand, they would contact us by radio and we would meet with them to serve the warrant.
 
In the meantime “we” consisted of Sandy Carlson who would ride shotgun with me. Sandy, a former radio dispatcher from Sacramento Police Department, was a new arrival to the Sheriff’s detective division. Her height matched the length of her hair, as in short. Thick and curly, it was the kind that if caught in a rain storm would quickly sprout into a mass of uncontrollable curls. She had a personality to match in that she was quick on the uptake, would go to battle in an instant, and did not worry much about with whom.
 
To keep busy while we waited for Sgt. Irwin, we drove to Dewey Boulevard where it intersects with Woodpark Way and Greenleaf Drive. It was just about 10 P.M. as we passed Woodpark Way when we spotted a man walking north-bound on the west side of Dewey Boulevard. He was passing the empty field, mentioned in the assault report on Woodpark Way, as we came even with him. I got a clear look at him in our headlights.
 
Years of driving a patrol car taught me to look closely at anyone who appeared out of place, no matter how slightly. Other than the recent history of that area and the time of night, there was no reason to bother with this guy. However, this was different. The internal cop alarm was already beginning to sound. As soon as we passed him, I made a cop-type U-turn and doubled back.
 
That took about ten seconds and already he was out of sight. He did not cut across the field, for it was open and too large for him to just disappear, nor could he have entered a house without our noticing. So, glancing down the street to the intersection with Greenleaf Drive first and seeing nothing, we turned onto Woodpark Way. Still no sign of him. I knew he had to be somewhere close-by, for he could not have disappeared that quickly unless he was trying to avoid us. If that internal alarm in my head had been audible, people would have thought there was a four alarm fire nearby.
 
What did catch my eye, as we turned down Woodpark Way, were the lights inside the house on the SW corner of Woodpark Way and Dewey Boulevard, for they went out just as we turned the corner. The people inside might have seen or heard someone in their yard and turned their lights off to better see outside. After all, the recent assault on Woodpark Way and Greenleaf Drive had occurred no more than a block away, which no doubt meant the entire neighborhood was on the alert.
 
By this stage of the investigation I probably knew that neighborhood as well as the rapist or any of the residents, for that matter. After making a normal U-turn on Woodpark Way, we accelerated south on Dewey Boulevard as if we were leaving. A couple of blocks later we doubled around and back onto Shadow Brook, the short street bordering the vacant field used by the rapist in the Woodpark Way attack.
 
Driving over the curb then straight across that field we stopped next to Dewey Boulevard. There he was, very purposefully walking back in the direction from which he had been coming when we first spotted him. He was just staring straight ahead as if he was unaware of a car driving across an empty field at night--sign any cop would spot as, “ Who, me ?”
 
Just about every cop instinct I possessed was shouting. I was sitting there working out just how to go about it, figuring in little things like my partner’s lack of experience, when Sgt. Irwin came on the air announcing he had the search warrant in hand and to meet at Pinkton’s mother’s house. To this day I regret not taking the time to call Sgt. Irwin as backup and checking this guy out. Knowing what I now know, he would probably have taken off at a dead run or pulled a gun. That would have been perfectly okay as I would not have approached him empty-handed, and unlike his victims, I would have had a fighting chance.
 
There is no way I can say positively this guy was our suspect, but any experienced street cop will understand exactly what I am talking about. In my defense I can only say, at that time, I was certain Pinkton was the rapist.
 
The image of the guy we saw walking that night remains with me, and even now, if I saw a photo of him from that time-period, I would recognize him. A name I will forget in an absolute instant, but a face or voice stays with me for a very long time.
 
He was about 5 ft. 9 in. tall, 160 or 170 lb., late teens or early 20’s. His hair was light brown and appeared to be styled, or at least freshly cut. He was wearing a brown, 3/4 length jacket. The jacket may have been leather, but I could not be sure. It may have been corduroy. He walked with head up, eyes forward, and his back ramrod straight. In a word, he was well-dressed, groomed, and with a military bearing.
 
I have been told it was about a year or so later, and long after the EAR had moved into other areas of the state, that a woman living in San Ramon saw a man jump over her fence and into her backyard. He walked towards her back door where he was met by her dog. Apparently her dog, which was still indoors, took offense at this stranger and did its best to remove the door so he could explain his disapproval up close and personal. She described him as 5 ft. 9 in. tall, with blond hair, and someone who obviously frequented a gym. He was well-dressed and groomed. When she told him to haul ass, he responded with, “I’m just passing through.” The attitude and description of this trespasser seemed very close to the man we saw walking that November night.

Shelby should have a commiserating beer with Donald Foukes. 

[Trollin]

Mar 29, 2018 19:45:19 GMT roberson said:

Mar 29, 2018 19:36:07 GMT Trollin said:

This is awesome. "there he goes"  then same bicycle returns (cops didn't move) cool escaping electrons...


"Even if we had gone after the bicyclist, we would not have been able to catch him in the act, and quite possibly we couldn’t have even have caught up with him."

Right because not being able to catch him in the process of the rape would have made it impossible to arrest him (chuckle) and "quite possibly" couldn't have caught up with him. Because they weren't Carl Lewis, why give it a shot? It's only a serial rapist on the loose, im sure you will get him next time when you don't have to expend any energy.

Shelby's book is full of wonderfully similar anecdotes. You should read the one where he was ABSOLUTELY SURE he saw EAR walking down a street right near him, but did nothing to apprehend him because he had another call somewhere else. He verbally kicks himself in the ass over the incident, repeating that his gut was afire with the assured belief that the guy he saw was in fact the East Area Rapist. 

Fat lot of good that did the subsequent victims, I guess. 

I will have to get that on Kindle. There actually is a point to the thread I was trying to make. Most people feel EAR was this highly skilled Keyser Soze type genius, I think he had average intelligence and a LOT of good luck. Makes a difference when you are profiling a suspect. 

[claudius_2014]

Mar 29, 2018 19:50:13 GMT tilomagnet said:

Why is this thread about LE being "inept BACK THEN"? Now here we are, 40 years later, technology has improved massively and theres still no solution, except we now know that the rapist they failed to catch became a vicious serial killer!

So either LE CONTINUES to demonstrate complete incompetence or theres something else that keeps this case from being officially solved then and now!

tottaly agree,problem it s now ...what was was....the past is unchangable, don't look back...nobody could change what happened,we are in 2018

[Deleted]

Mar 29, 2018 19:24:37 GMT Trollin said:

Mar 29, 2018 19:19:34 GMT jthou said:

Got it. Trolls troll. Tried talking sensibly to you but you’re obviously not here for that. Good luck accomplishing whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish by declaring LE from 40 years ago dumb.

Whenever someone disagrees with you yell "TROLL"...got it.

You know minimal facts about the case... only the ones that the Police Deparments have deemed worthy of sharing. Did you work for the Sacramento Police Department or Sheriffs Office at the time the EAR was attacking there? Do you know the types of crimes or volume of calls they answered or how many patrol officers and detectives they had to work not only these cases, but all the other crimes in the area? I work for one of the largest Sheriff’s Offices in the nation and if we had 48 rapes in an area, over a hundred burglaries, and hundreds of prowler reports ALL FROM ONE OFFENDER, that would be a heavy load to carry and would take our entire staff of Detectives and a large portion of our patrol officers to stop this guy!!! And that is NOW, when we have 911, computers, criminal profiling, criminal mapping, DNA, AFIS, CODIS, and crime analysts. They didn’t even have 911 back then, let alone an efficient line of communication. So please don’t judge when you DON’T have all the facts and have never done this job before. And to answer your next question, no, I do not know any of the LE involved, associated with, or investigating these crimes.

[roberson]

I know and understand your point, iwillfindyou, and agree with this:

Most people feel EAR was this highly skilled Keyser Soze type genius, I think he had average intelligence and a LOT of good luck.

Said the same thing numerous times since joining this forum, but if a person has any experience with true crime, especially the famous cases, it's almost a cliche that many armchair detectives will make an uncaught, prolific or frighteningly "unique" perp into some kind of criminal supergenius, when in fact they were mostly lucky, or the benefactors of inexplicable law enforcement errors, laziness, apathy and/or bureaucratic bullshit. 

I think of the Zodiac escaping after the Stine murder because the dispatcher reported a black suspect in error, or the facts surrounding why London police could not legally bring a particular prime suspect to trial for the crimes of the Ripper. Those are just two of the most famous. There are many, many more not so famous and well-known. 

[Trollin]

Mar 29, 2018 19:55:05 GMT roberson said:

November Evening - 1976
 
Even before the official recognition of this latest psychopath, my days and nights had been very, very busy. The same could just as easily be said about most of the other investigators. While the rapist was preparing for his next victim, we were putting together a request for a search warrant for where ever Art Pinkton was then living which, as it turned out, was with his mother.
 
One night, about a week after the sexual assault on Marcy, we were going to serve that search warrant. The plan was for Sgt. Irwin to accompany a deputy district attorney to a judge’s home and get it signed Once the signed warrant was in hand, they would contact us by radio and we would meet with them to serve the warrant.
 
In the meantime “we” consisted of Sandy Carlson who would ride shotgun with me. Sandy, a former radio dispatcher from Sacramento Police Department, was a new arrival to the Sheriff’s detective division. Her height matched the length of her hair, as in short. Thick and curly, it was the kind that if caught in a rain storm would quickly sprout into a mass of uncontrollable curls. She had a personality to match in that she was quick on the uptake, would go to battle in an instant, and did not worry much about with whom.
 
To keep busy while we waited for Sgt. Irwin, we drove to Dewey Boulevard where it intersects with Woodpark Way and Greenleaf Drive. It was just about 10 P.M. as we passed Woodpark Way when we spotted a man walking north-bound on the west side of Dewey Boulevard. He was passing the empty field, mentioned in the assault report on Woodpark Way, as we came even with him. I got a clear look at him in our headlights.
 
Years of driving a patrol car taught me to look closely at anyone who appeared out of place, no matter how slightly. Other than the recent history of that area and the time of night, there was no reason to bother with this guy. However, this was different. The internal cop alarm was already beginning to sound. As soon as we passed him, I made a cop-type U-turn and doubled back.
 
That took about ten seconds and already he was out of sight. He did not cut across the field, for it was open and too large for him to just disappear, nor could he have entered a house without our noticing. So, glancing down the street to the intersection with Greenleaf Drive first and seeing nothing, we turned onto Woodpark Way. Still no sign of him. I knew he had to be somewhere close-by, for he could not have disappeared that quickly unless he was trying to avoid us. If that internal alarm in my head had been audible, people would have thought there was a four alarm fire nearby.
 
What did catch my eye, as we turned down Woodpark Way, were the lights inside the house on the SW corner of Woodpark Way and Dewey Boulevard, for they went out just as we turned the corner. The people inside might have seen or heard someone in their yard and turned their lights off to better see outside. After all, the recent assault on Woodpark Way and Greenleaf Drive had occurred no more than a block away, which no doubt meant the entire neighborhood was on the alert.
 
By this stage of the investigation I probably knew that neighborhood as well as the rapist or any of the residents, for that matter. After making a normal U-turn on Woodpark Way, we accelerated south on Dewey Boulevard as if we were leaving. A couple of blocks later we doubled around and back onto Shadow Brook, the short street bordering the vacant field used by the rapist in the Woodpark Way attack.
 
Driving over the curb then straight across that field we stopped next to Dewey Boulevard. There he was, very purposefully walking back in the direction from which he had been coming when we first spotted him. He was just staring straight ahead as if he was unaware of a car driving across an empty field at night--sign any cop would spot as, “ Who, me ?”
 
Just about every cop instinct I possessed was shouting. I was sitting there working out just how to go about it, when Sgt. Irwin came on the air announcing he had the search warrant in hand and to meet at Pinkton’s mother’s house. To this day I regret not taking the time to call Sgt. Irwin as backup and checking this guy out. Knowing what I now know, he would probably have taken off at a dead run or pulled a gun. That would have been perfectly okay as I would not have approached him empty-handed, and unlike his victims, I would have had a fighting chance.
 
There is no way I can say positively this guy was our suspect, but any experienced street cop will understand exactly what I am talking about. 
The image of the guy we saw walking that night remains with me, and even now, if I saw a photo of him from that time-period, I would recognize him. A name I will forget in an absolute instant, but a face or voice stays with me for a very long time.
 
He was about 5 ft. 9 in. tall, 160 or 170 lb., late teens or early 20’s. His hair was light brown and appeared to be styled, or at least freshly cut. He was wearing a brown, 3/4 length jacket. The jacket may have been leather, but I could not be sure. It may have been corduroy. He walked with head up, eyes forward, and his back ramrod straight. In a word, he was well-dressed, groomed, and with a military bearing.
 
I have been told it was about a year or so later, and long after the EAR had moved into other areas of the state, that a woman living in San Ramon saw a man jump over her fence and into her backyard. He walked towards her back door where he was met by her dog. Apparently her dog, which was still indoors, took offense at this stranger and did its best to remove the door so he could explain his disapproval up close and personal. She described him as 5 ft. 9 in. tall, with blond hair, and someone who obviously frequented a gym. He was well-dressed and groomed. When she told him to haul ass, he responded with, “I’m just passing through.” The attitude and description of this trespasser seemed very close to the man we saw walking that November night.

Shelby should have a commiserating beer with Donald Foukes. 

So other than the obvious face palms in this lovely description, there's the "Sandy, a former radio dispatcher" which is like saying "Sandy who used to work the drive through at Taco Bell" ... then the "Years of driving a patrol car"....similar to Ralph Kramden's years of driving a bus makes him a crack detective...  "figuring in little things like my partner’s lack of experience" ....but but....they gave it their all....oh wait....

[Trollin]

Mar 29, 2018 20:11:58 GMT @dicktective said:

Mar 29, 2018 19:24:37 GMT Trollin said:

Whenever someone disagrees with you yell "TROLL"...got it.

You know minimal facts about the case... only the ones that the Police Deparments have deemed worthy of sharing. Did you work for the Sacramento Police Department or Sheriffs Office at the time the EAR was attacking there? Do you know the types of crimes or volume of calls they answered or how many patrol officers and detectives they had to work not only these cases, but all the other crimes in the area? I work for one of the largest Sheriff’s Offices in the nation and if we had 48 rapes in an area, over a hundred burglaries, and hundreds of prowler reports ALL FROM ONE OFFENDER, that would be a heavy load to carry and would take our entire staff of Detectives and a large portion of our patrol officers to stop this guy!!! And that is NOW, when we have 911, computers, criminal profiling, criminal mapping, DNA, AFIS, CODIS, and crime analysts. They didn’t even have 911 back then, let alone an efficient line of communication. So please don’t judge when you DON’T have all the facts and have never done this job before. And to answer your next question, no, I do not know any of the LE involved, associated with, or investigating these crimes.

Hey you are probably a great guy, but you guys stick up for each other no matter what. [deleted political comment]

[Trollin]

Mar 29, 2018 20:12:08 GMT roberson said:

I know and understand your point, iwillfindyou, and agree with this:

Most people feel EAR was this highly skilled Keyser Soze type genius, I think he had average intelligence and a LOT of good luck.

Said the same thing numerous times since joining this forum, but if a person has any experience with true crime, especially the famous cases, it's almost a cliche that many armchair detectives will make an uncaught, prolific or frighteningly "unique" perp into some kind of criminal supergenius, when in fact they were mostly lucky, or the benefactors of inexplicable law enforcement errors, laziness, apathy and/or bureaucratic bullshit. 

I think of the Zodiac escaping after the Stine murder because the dispatcher reported a black suspect in error, or the facts surrounding why London police could not legally bring a particular prime suspect to trial for the crimes of the Ripper. Those are just two of the most famous. There are many, many more not so famous and well-known. 

This is kind of interesting actually...not sure assuming people turned off lights because they heard something is an appropriate connection. Id think more along the lines of...suspect ran in house saw cop car and turned off lights.

"were the lights inside the house on the SW corner of Woodpark Way and Dewey Boulevard, for they went out just as we turned the corner. The people inside might have seen or heard someone in their yard and turned their lights off to better see outside."

[findons]

Mar 29, 2018 19:12:31 GMT jthou said:

Was the PD inept? Yes but do not attack the intelligence of the officers. It was a systematic failure. Many guys then as today invested much time and effort and poured their hearts and souls into this case but were handcuffed by jurisdictional non-cooperation and admin that didn’t grasp the seriousness or prolific levels of the crimes being committed. But to say they were dumb is simply a bad take and wrong. Re-evaluate and try again.

Hindsight is always 20/20 of course.  I am sure although they tried to catch the guy in Sacramento they were likely slow to get the idea that this guy was not "just a rapist." 
Back in the 70's there were many rapists operating not just in Sacramento, but everywhere.  Also, the fact that rape was not yet seen as serious a crime as it now is with very small penalties combined with more serious crimes they worked like murders I would say it took them the first 6-8 months to really get that this guy was not going to stop.  

He laid it all out there for them so they would know that it was him.  They were forced to tell the public because he was not going to go away - for now.  The trouble also was compared with today the techniques, handling of evidence, you name it was archaic by today's standards.  EAR among tons of other rapists were not caught in the 70's and 80's everywhere.  Rape statistics were:

"Crime rates in the 1970’s were very high. In 1968 in Sacramento California there were 5,744 rapes reported. Each year after 1968 the rates continued to climb. In 1974 the rate was 8,494. During the years of the East Area Rapist in Sacramento 1976 there were 9,614, 1977 there were 10,825 and 1978 there were 11,316 reported. I know there were many that went unreported. By 1981 the number had finally climbed to 13,566 forcible rapes."   This was in my book about how many rapists there were in Sacramento alone.  These are ONLY the statistics on REPORTED rapes.  So you can see Sacramento Law Enforcement were busy.  Add to this robbery, murder and everything else - crime rates were on their way up at that time.  It would be interesting to look at how many rapes were actually prosecuted during the time frame EAR was operating.  And, then of course there was no DNA technology and we could not know what would happen.  They guessed by Profiles that he would likely kill, but because of the jurisdictions lack of cooperation which was very common at the time he slipped through their awareness to Southern CA.  There were those who early on thought it was him but they could not prove it.  Technology had to catch up.  These cases and what happened here and in many cases like this one most likely taught LE much.  You are right jthou - they were handcuffed by their non-cooperation with one another in some places he struck but not all.  Sacramento was likely very relieved when he vanished.  These days getting away with such things should be much harder.