No One Knows We Exist

The Sacramento News and Review published an article about this website today in their local news section. The basis of the story was that we have readers here at SACPD.com that use our contact form to report crimes that should be sent to SACPD.org.

Although we had tried for months to find a contact within the Sacramento Police Department to forward these “crime reports” to, all communications including email and phone calls had been ignored until recently. In fact until Kel Munger from the News and Review and I both contacted Claudia Evans from SACPD.org’s record division, a name given to me by a former police officer and not through official channels, not a single email or telephone message from SACPD.com had received a response.

Kel states in her article that Sergeant Matt Young, the public information officer for the Sacramento Police Department, said he had never heard of this site. Although this is possible, it is highly unlikely unless Mr. Young doesn’t have any clue what is happening in his department, as I have personally made his department aware of our presence.

I found it most annoying that after the multitude of attempts to get a simple email address to which I could forward misdirected communications, the PD they would claim to not even know this site existed, especially considering a search warrant had been previously served on my home, and several of my business computers had been confiscated because of this domain. Of course no charges were ever filed in that case, and it was clearly police misconduct by Sacramento officers.

An important point that was left out of the article was that as recently as three months ago the Sacramento Police Department has issued general press releases that contained links to this website. It was also not mentioned that we have devoted a substantial amount of time and resources to contacting organizations and individuals who have republished those press releases or simply linked to us by mistake to have the links corrected.

Incoming one way links, or “back links” as they are called, are an important part of website promotion and taking action to have incoming links removed even when in error is something simply unheard of in the Internet realm. Some organizations pay hundreds and even thousands of dollars a month for links of this nature. We opted to take the action and have the links removed out of a sense of civic responsibility, even though the Sacramento Police Department chose not make an effort to correct these mistakes.

Kel also mentioned my personal police record including multiple arrests for “interfering with an officer.” I think it is important to mention that in every case that these charges were brought against me the charges were subsequently dropped as my actions were justified. In all but one of these cases the charges were dismissed by the District Attorney's Office, and in the case that made it to court the presiding judge threw out the case after verbally reprimanding the officer.

The article also mentions that the site color and logo were recently changed. During a phone conversation with Kel she stated that she had been confused by this site because of “its use of police blue” and a badge as a logo. What she didn't tell me during our conversation is that these were actually the words of Mr. Young. Although the color “royal blue” was in fact a default color of the theme in our content management system we use at SACPD.com, and Kel was the only person to ever express that she found the logo or color of the website to be confusing, I made the decision to change both.

Unfortunately these changes along with a large red STOP sign placed on the contact page have not lead to a decrease in the number of people in the Sacramento area seeking help from the Police Department through our site.

Recent communications have included a police officer from another jurisdiction attempting to report mail theft, a Land Park resident who stated it was easier for her to “talk to god” then contact law enforcement in her effort to report a suspected drug house, and requests from citizens seeking information on careers in law enforcement.