EDITORIAL
As a rule of thumb, the best thing to do when something ill-informed pops up in the spectacularly wrongly-named form of communication everyone calls “social media” is to ignore it.
Something else will soon come along to take its place or it will be filed away in people’s minds as more “evidence” of what they want to believe anyway.
But before that happens with one topic that’s been getting a recent airing, let’s look at the big picture in a some more detail.
Some drug paraphernalia was found in a Rockdale park. Somehow that morphed into comments that Rockdale police aren’t doing anything about the drug problem which exists, more or less, everywhere.
Actually all you have to do is look at the weekly police reports and jail logs which run in The Reporter every week. Even if you don’t do that, here are some eye-opening statistics from the Uniform Crime Report, which law enforcement agencies are required to compile:
• In the past two years—October, 2016, through September, 2018—Rockdale police have made 137 drug arrests and nine more arrests of other offenses which were classified as drug-related.
• That’s 146 in 24 months, more than one per week and an average of six per month.
• Those statistics only cover adults. Do we think there were any juveniles detained during those 24 months over drug-related offenses? Do we think the sun will come up in the morning?
• During 2017, the last full year for which stats are available (obviously), all offenses combined, the Rockdale ISD cleared 45 percent of its cases. That’s the most of any agency in the county. The average for all of Milam’s law enforcement agencies was 34 percent.
• For 2017, Rockdale PD made more than half the arrests in Milam County.
Don’t take this “statistics preaching” as alleging the county’s other law enforcement agencies aren’t doing their jobs. They are. All of them, and we’re certainly prepared to write similar editorials defending them, should the need arise.
Do take this as a whole-hearted endorsement of the job the Rockdale PD is doing, in drug cases and everything else.
The Reporter is in a unique position to have an informed opinion on this as we deal with the Rockdale Police Department every week. We also deal with the Milam County Sheriff’s Department every week and with other county law enforcement entities on a less regular basis.
We’ve found them to be committed, diligent and hard-working, doing a job that won’t make you rich and may get you killed.
It’s said the truth is in the details.
It certainly is.—M.B.
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