Harbor police said because of this widespread attention they investigated the case extensively, This is the relevant part for me. Because the story was shared so widely, the police deigned to put their full effort into investigation. Had this story not hit social media, they would not have bothered. This happened to be a case where there was no assault (whether con-related because it happened at con, by a congoer, or because of her costume; or non-con-related because it didnt happen at con, by another congoer, or regardless of what she was wearing is irrelevant, IMO, to being concerned about an assault). Thats great. The cosplayer got so drunk and so high that she fell and injured herself enough to cause concern that she was assaulted. That sucks. But this statement says that the police will not extensively investigate a teenaged girl appearing bloody with no memory of events unless the general public whips up a frenzy about it. Thats a serious problem. This time was no con-related assault (and I was not one of the people speculating that it was). But what if next time it is? And what if the victim just happens to not catch the sporadic and flighty attention span of the internet? Like all the ethnic minority Americans who go missing but the cute blonde upper-middle class girls get their own publicity agents to spur police investigations? For me, the takeaway from this story is that I was perfectly justified in sharing the story on social media (especially since I did not speculate wildly, I just passed along a request for help in gathering information to an audience that is likely to have the right connections to have answered that request) and I will be sharing such stories again in the future because it is better to over-hype something like this than to sit back and wait to see what happens before getting involved. But this so far does not appear to be a statement on the atmosphere at Comicon. Its a sad day when nope, no assaults happened at a sci-fi convention! is cause for relief instead of accepting as normal.
Posted on: Fri, 01 Aug 2014 03:07:03 +0000
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