No longer use exact addresses?

[Neil Holdway]

A question has been raised at my shop on whether we should continue to use the exact addresses of suspects/defendants. We had someone claim recently that an address was incorrect and that someone else was living there, and the person was worried about the residents' safety given the vitriol of online reader comments on the story (yes, online comments are a separate topic addressed elsewhere on this board). An editor thought other publications had been going to a block-number only identification -- "100 block of Streetville Street" -- possibly because police are wrong a lot.

Have any of your pubs changed your rules on identification? Have you found that police or other authorities are wrong a lot?

[Jim Thomsen]

We've used the "block" method as long as I've been with my paper. I don't pretend it's an ideal solution, but it seems to strike a rough balance between privacy protections and what readers reasonably expect to be told.

[Pete Zicari]

We stopped using exact addresses sometime in the 80s. Three were problems with fires and crime victims being burglarized in a crime wave that peaked back then; also, the police weren't too exact about details of people arrested. The people themselves sometimes gave false addresses that weren't corrected for the record. It wasn't practical to go after the detail, so we dropped it.

[bthrock]

We had someone claim recently that an address was incorrect and that someone else was living there , and the person was worried about the residents' safety

This isn't just about a hapless tenant who moves into a home previously occupied by scuz. (Kitsappian editors' delete keys would get a strong workout on the non-word "scuz," but unlike the reporters there, evidently, I get to choose the vocabulary in the things I write. There's nothing incorrect about "Phelpsian.")

The resident's safety is worth protecting even if the suspect or defendant is still the resident. Many suspects and defendants are innocent.

The next step is that safety is worth protecting even if the suspect or defendant is guilty.

Writing "Nathan Leopold of the 100 block of First Street" is enough to let readers know that they need not harass/burglarize/kill any of the three Nathan Leopolds who live on their own block. The Internet, "America's Most Wanted" and "To Catch a Predator" seem to be creating a golden age of vigilantism.

Speaking of inciting readers to crime and speaking of Nathan Leopold, a recent Smithsonian article about the Leopold and Loeb murder showed an issue of the Chicago Daily News. For the story in which is turns out that the victim was not only kidnapped but also killed, this was the headline: "KILL BOY KIDNAPED FOR RANSOM." Redundancy, dubious spelling and a potentially fatal imperative resulting from an implied subject -- this head has it all.

To balance out with a GOOD headline, I direct you to the Aug. 10 New York Times, in which a book review summed up the topic with this deck: "Westerners have tried to have their imperial way in Arab lands for more than a century." That idea is encapsulated in the gorgeous headline "Meddle East." Wish I had written that ....

[Gerri Berendzen]

We run a listing of the felony charges filed in our county, and we use the addresses. (This is powerful incentive not to get a DUI in my town.)

And at least once a year, we run a correction because a person who was arrested misrepresented his/her address to the police, or gave their address from 25 years ago. (Imagine that; people who are arrested sometimes give an incorrect address!)

This is a particularly interesting issue in an age where I can look up maps on the Internet to find out things like which sex offender lives around the corner or how much my neighbor got when selling his house or who's ticked off at the person next door and has deemed that person a bad neighbor. (Now there's an interesting Web site.)

For every call saying, "you printed an address in my building and now I'm worried," I can see a call saying "You said Mike Johnson was charged with (whatever) and my name is Mike Johnson and I haven't been charged with anything." The address does serve the purpose of telling the reader which Mike Johnson we’re talking about.