If you think it's bad elsewhere...

With all the complaints about alleged racial profiling, brutality, and the odd stupid story that actually does happen, people might get the impression that law enforcement in the US of A is incompetant.  And they would be wrong.  Our PDs do a ggreat job, handling difficult situations by and large by the book and by and large staying out of politics.  We who have everything at our fingertips sometimes fail to appreciate that.  Here's a story from South Korea that reminds us to be glad we have what we do:

Police Under Fire for Slow Response to Murder Victim's Call

Police are under fire for their slow response to a desperate call for help from a woman in her 20s in Suwon who was raped and eventually brutally murdered. The incident reveals serious weaknesses in the police response to emergency calls.

The victim, who was abducted, gave police a detailed description of where she was being held, but officers still searched in the wrong area.
On the evening of April 1, the victim was abducted by Wu Yuanchun (42), an ethnic Korean from China, and dragged into his home. But she managed to call police on her mobile phone. According to police, the woman was dragged into Wu's home at around 10:50 p.m. When he told her to take her clothes off, the woman laid her coat on his bed to make him believe she was following his orders. When Wu stepped in the bathroom, the woman locked the room door and made the call to police for help.

But she was unable to escape because the entrance to the room she was holed up in was connected to the bathroom. The woman dropped her phone on the floor when Wu broke through the bedroom door but did not switch it off. A police spokesman said, "The emergency call was recorded vividly even after she dropped the phone. It looks like her last attempt to let police know just how desperate she was."

The suspect in a recent rape-murder in Suwon is taken to a detention cell questioning at a police station in the city on Saturday.

The suspect told police he murdered the woman in his room at around 5 a.m. on April 2. That means police had a full six hours to rescue her.
Officers initially claimed the woman's call last only one minute when it actually lasted for seven minutes and 36 seconds.
After murdering the woman, Wu chopped her body into pieces. A forensic expert who conducted an autopsy on the woman described the condition of her body as "too horrific for words." The National Forensic Service received 14 plastic bags filled with altogether 280 body parts. "He butchered her," the official added.

Police on Sunday told reporters, "Based on Wu's testimony, it looks like he tried to rape her but failed. At times, such a horrific murder is an expression of frustration with being unable to rape someone."

More Police Bungling Revealed in Suwon Murder

An official briefing session has revealed further blunders by police in the murder of a young woman in Suwon, who was alive for six hours after placing a desperate emergency call providing the location where she was being held. She was abducted by Korean-Chinese Wu Yuanchan and dragged into his home on the evening of April 1.

The briefing was held on Thursday to explain why it took police more than two hours to arrest the killer after it was given specific directions to the killer's house by a resident in the neighborhood. It turned out that the police went to the crime scene but spent an hour knocking on the door of the next-door neighbor
Gyeonggi provincial police said officers were given the information by the witness at 9:30 a.m. on April 2. An elderly woman lives across a little alley from the shop run by the witness. Wu lived next door, but officers knocked on her door for an hour.

Critics say it is incomprehensible that in a situation where police had already failed to respond to a desperate seven-minute call from the victim crying for help while she was being raped, they would then waste an hour the following morning in front of the house next door.

Suh Jung-bum, a law professor at the Korean National Police University, said, "Someone's life was at stake in this case. Police should simply have broken in if there was no answer."

Police stand accused of spending more time covering up their disastrous handling of the crime than investigating it. A member of the victim's family said in a telephone interview with the Chosun Ilbo, "When we met with police, they tried to haggle, telling us to stop demanding they publish the recording of the victim’s call and let the matter drop."

Late Thursday night police in a statement finally agreed to make the recording available to the bereaved family, but did not say when.

Prosecutors have now started investigating the case all over again as the police's line of investigation is too unreliable.
President Lee Myung-bak on Monday accepted the resignation of National Police Agency Commissioner General Cho Hyun-oh over a bungled murder investigation.

Cho said he would take responsibility for accusations that the police carelessly dealt with a desperate phone call from the victim in which she reported her exact whereabouts. But it took 13 hours for police to locate the 28-year-old woman in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, by which time she had been raped, killed and mutilated.

According to the presidential office, Lee will appoint a new commissioner after the general election on Wednesday.


All right, when have you known your police department to bungle something THAT badly?  If I can make a reference for the benefit of Fort Wayne followers, you could deputize the residents of Eden Green apartments and not fubar the investigation that badly.  Perhaps the Suwon police should do away with their police vehicles and take cabs to crime scenes.


Not quite as bad, but just as bungled, is this news item from the Obama circle:

Cartagena, Colombia (CNN) -- Twelve Secret Service agents sent to Colombia ahead of President Barack Obama were relieved of duty and returned home amid allegations of misconduct that involved prostitution, the man who tipped news agencies to the investigation told CNN Saturday.

The incident in Cartagena -- one of two security issues that occurred Friday -- overshadowed the start of the sixth Summit of the Americas, where the president was to focus on trade, energy and regional security with 33 of the hemisphere's 35 leaders.

"One of the agents did not pay one of the prostitutes, and she complained to the police," said Ronald Kessler, a former Washington Post reporter and author of "In the President's Secret Service: Behind the Scenes With Agents in the Line of Fire and the Presidents They Protect."

The Washington Post, which was the first to report the story, said it was alerted to the investigation by Kessler.

What, we're back in the Clinton administration now?  Luckily for Obama they weren't procuring for him.  Michelle Obama is no politically-ambitious closet bisexual who's willing to play "the good wife"; and if he did, she'd be negotiating arms reduction of a rather personal nature with him.  In the meantime, can we have Jim Bakker out here to remind the Secret Service what PTL stands for:

"PAY THE LADY!!"



In the meantime, work proceeds apace on the Great Eighties Countdown, and I suspect I'll be kicking it off in the next week or three.  Unlike I said previously, it may not be shorter; it will be both rockier and more diverse.  And Keep your prayers ready for those folks in Oklahoma and the area about to kick of a day of VERY severe thunderstorms.  How severe?  Did you see this yesterday?

That, my friends, is four-foot high drifts of ping-pong-to-golf-ball-sized HAIL.  No lie.  Tornadoes are on the agenda for today, the NWS says.  And whatever you do, beware the rainbow at the end of the storm.  Because...