"She Ran Away," The Magic Eraser of Police Work

This is something that never stops messing with my head, how quick the police have always been to blame victims. 

Almost every cold case show features (a) a perpetrator who did at least one heinous, vicious crime against someone else that should have let people know he was dangerous, and (b) a victim who could have been helped much sooner had their case been taken seriously. 

Take, for example, Todd Kolhepp, the "Amazon Review Killer."  We, as a society, need to have some way of keeping tabs on people who are quite that loose on their hinges, so that when someone like Kala Brown goes missing in their area, we routinely go check their property.  Todd should've been on the radar after his first horrifying childhood rape.  The boy wasn't right, and that was obvious very early in his trail of destruction.

This report about the murder of Kim Basel made my brain explode on so many levels.  I have really mixed feelings about A&E overall, for one thing, as I've discussed elsewhere.  As a native Chicagoan, I appreciate Bill Kurtis and think he's a good person.  But A&E's true crime reporting -- while often really good, isn't exactly victim-centric.

For example, the title of this clip is "crime family flips on each other."  And for me, that really buries the lead in a dreadful way, which is that these people tortured a teenage girl with her sister on the other end of the line, and then the police said she was a runaway and waited two weeks to begin looking for her.  The fact that these dirtbags all recorded each other to save their own skin is neither here nor there.

Someone on the police department must have been on the payroll, is the only way I can imagine this situation playing out as it did.  This young girl was involved with a local crime family, supposedly a girlfriend of a much older, well-known gang leader, when she got caught shoplifting.  She called home to say she was in trouble and needed help.  Her sister heard her being beaten in a shower before the phone went dead.  And they still had the audacity to say she ran away.  Zero effort by the police.

Watch this show and see what I mean, how infuriating this is for me as a survivor.  A&E does some of the best true crime reporting.  I know Bill Kurtis to be a fairly decent guy personally.  But watch how they report this.  What don't people get about how utterly, non-stop rage-inducing  this is?