Steve Dutton was not your typical under- cover police officer. When accusations flew out of the mouths of the cocaine dealers he allied himself with, Dutton would silence them with the thrust of a knife deep into his leg. The leg was wooden. "Cops don't have one leg," he' d calmly tell them. Dutton was the first amputee to graduate from Washington's police training academy. Crime reporter Scott North from The Herald in Everett, Wash., found this interesting character through the use of his database.
(Dutton's) name kept coming up," North said. A year ago, North went to his editors with a story idea. He wanted to report how the war on drugs was being fought in Snohomish County. North and reporter Dale Folkerts began their reporting by scouring 1,134 drug cases on file with the county. This data was entered by hand into their computers and information about the defendant, charges, depositions and names of the officials involved were examined.
That's how North found Dutton. After they had completed the process of entering the data, they discovered that they had hundreds of files in their computers, but no way to manipulate the files. Last April, North attended the Missouri Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting's TRI/DART (training re- porters in data acquisition retrieval technologies) seminar to learn how to manipulate the data already entered into his database.
The trianing resulted in the Herald's "War Without Victory" series. The reporting team responsible for the series consisted of reporters from the county courthouse, political and crime beats plus a reporter who specialized in demo- graphics. They found that the drug offender wasn't so very different from a typical Snohomish County resident. The demographic description of both were quite similar in relation to age, race and educational level.
This kind of activity could be found in any neighborhood; this kind of criminal was often one's neighbor. "Myths were unmasked our numbers showed that these cases are happening in your own back yard," North said. Unfortunately, the sentence doesn't always fit the crime. The reporters found that 76% of the cases resulted in convictions with 93% of those plea-bargained for a lesser sentence. Of those who were sentenced to serve time, the median jail sentence was only two and a half months.
In 30% of the cases the offender served a month or less, often serving nonconsecutive days. Prosecutors tend to focus on getting convictions at the expense of reducing punishment. Prosecutors are working against time - they put together a case quickly because they don't want it postponed, often up to two years, before it gets to court. One police officer noted that a person with a suspended driver's license is apt to serve more time than someone convicted of a drug offense.
The Herald will continue to use this drug database in police reporting, especially homicides where there is drug involvement. "We often beat our competition with stories on crime," North commented.