Police Briefly Halt—Then Restart—Weekly Emails

Police at the Towson precinct will resume weekly crime emails, several days after the practice was thrown into doubt.

At the Towson precinct, Sgt. Stephen Fink sends a weekly incident summary with the locations, a brief summary and basic information on suspects or arrests. It's not a lot of information, but it tells residents what's happening where.

That email is sent to community leaders, as well as local blogs and news outlets like WestTowson.com, the Forge Flyer, The Baltimore Sun, Towson Times and Towson Patch.

That practice was briefly stopped late last week, when Fink said in an email to residents that the police department is "reviewing the practice" of sending the precinct's weekly email and that he would not send it again until given approval from police headquarters.

Come Tuesday evening, Fink said in another email he got the approval to distribute the report again.

Why the hiccup? Police spokeswoman Elise Armacost said Monday that the goal of the order was not to restrict information, but to review how the reports are compiled and what information is sent out in them. Sometimes, she said, precinct-level personnel disclose details that the criminal investigation division believes would harm an investigation if released.

That includes what a suspect may have been wearing or other specific information about the circumstances of a crime.

So, Armacost said, the department is telling commanders, "We want you to communicate with the public, but we want you to also protect our investigations by making sure the criminal investigation division has also signed off on the information you want to provide when you're talking about their cases."

Armacost added that the department is in fact looking for ways to expand communication between precincts and residents, through emails and even tools like social media.

"We are empowering all of our captains to reach out to the community and communicate with them about the kinds of activities that are going on in their neighborhoods," she said.

For Towson-area residents, the primary point of communication is in Fink's emails. For Marian Matthis, the webmaster of WestTowson.com, Fink's report matters both as a resident and as a blogger.

"It's one of the things that gets the most traffic to my site and it's highly used by the neighborhoods," she said. "They're highly interested in that information."

The Baltimore Sun reports this isn't the first time there's been an issue with the weekly reports. In 2009, commanders were uneasy that residents were forwarding the incident summaries to Sun reporter Peter Hermann. That order, the Sun reports, was reversed by then-police spokesman Bill Toohey.