Saturday afternoon, a man barged into a lecture hall on the campus of Brown University in Providence, and fired an assault weapon at the 60 or so students assembled there. Eleven people were shot, and two died. The attacker left the hall and is presently at large. Rhode Island police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have not identified a suspect. "Obviously we have a murderer out there," Peter F. Neronha, Attorney General of Rhode Island, said Sunday, conceding that law enforcement has "no way of knowing" whether the shooter is still in town, or is even in the state.
Providence police described for media what authorities had gathered immediately after the shooting, in terms of concrete information about the shooter. "All we have," explained Timothy O'Hara of the Providence Police Department, at a press conference Saturday night, "is a suspect that is a male, dressed in black." Authorities said that a dearth of surveillance footage has made it hard to determine even how the attacker entered the building, let alone to develop a profile of the suspect. Sometime overnight, police received a tip and developed what they described as a "person of interest." FBI director Kash Patel said law enforcement used cell-phone information to track the person to a hotel room in the town of Coventry, R.I. That person was taken into police custody around 3:45 a.m.
Hours later, around dawn Sunday morning, public officials gathered in Providence for another press conference, and this time engaged in some cautious football-spiking about having found their man, hedged somewhat unconvincingly by talk of the investigation remaining underway. "This is exactly the kind of collaboration that we train for and that we hope for," said Providence Mayor Brett Smiley. "Our partnership with the FBI, with the state police, and obviously, the heroic actions of the Providence police have brought us to this point."
Sometime in the intervening hours, someone at one of the assorted law enforcement agencies leaked the identity of the person of interest to the media. This turns out to have been irresponsible and reckless. Hours later, police released the person of interest from custody. "There is no basis to consider him a person of interest," conceded Neronha, and officials said they are still seeking any tips or threads of evidence that might point them toward another potential suspect. The person taken from the hotel in Coventry was not ever charged, but unfortunately this person was in custody long enough for several media organizations to compile, and to publish, frighteningly complete profiles. The Washington Post was the first to name him—they went ahead and congratulated themselves for an exclusive scoop on this—but CNN and the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel were among other media organizations that dumped out for public consumption the person's name, his educational and professional background, his hometown, the neighborhood where his parents live, and the names and biographical details of friends and acquaintances.
Authorities have so far resisted declaring definitively that this person did not perpetrate the crime, which makes it notable that they have released him from custody. It seems safe enough to say that the various law enforcement agencies are having a difficult time, and have taken some false steps. A moderately plugged-in and savvy reader will express no great surprise at this revelation, not only because the FBI is currently led by a swirly-eyed QAnon freak whose body weight is like 70 percent TMHA, but because most American adults have watched enough police procedural dramas to know that investigations are complicated even in the best of times. These factors underline the recklessness of media organizations publishing identifying information about a person who even the schmos of our beshitted law enforcement apparatuses have taken care to describe as something less than a suspect. Not so long ago, this was considered New York Post behavior.
In the hours between the detaining of the person of interest and his release, Brown University and Providence relaxed their security conditions. That turns out to have been premature, although Smiley says there will be no new shelter-in-place order. "I imagine that the Providence community feels a little bit more anxious right now than they did an hour ago," acknowledged the Providence mayor, Sunday evening. While assuring students and faculty of Rhode Island universities that there is "no known threat," police said that they will have "an increased presence" around Providence-area schools.
Publications of various sizes spent Sunday night and Monday morning affixing hasty updates to stories pursued and published in the reckless hurry to complete the biography of that first person of interest. A handful of them wiped the individual's name from their coverage, but the toothpaste has escaped the tube. It's appropriate, in these awful times, to treat with even greater scrutiny the information flowing from within law enforcement.
