Our View

Failure to disclose info
does not serve public

It appears that information about a brutal crime that occurred in Freehold Borough on or about Feb. 21 was kept from the public for almost two weeks.

The News Transcript reported in its Feb. 26 edition that the Freehold Borough Police Department was conducting a missing person investigation. Police referred all comment in the case to the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s Office.

For Freehold Borough police to essentially hand over jurisdiction in this matter to the county was an indication that a very serious crime had occurred.

Prosecutor John Kaye provided minimal details when asked about the incident, noting that police had found items covered with blood in an alley outside the apartment.

No information about the person who was believed to be missing was provided. Perhaps that was another clue that police were not looking for a person who would be found alive.

If that was the case and police believed that someone who was missing had been murdered, the community should have been made aware that such an incident was believed to have occurred.

The News Transcript continued to ask questions about this case during the week of Feb. 24, up to and including our next deadline day, March 3. Through a secretary, Kaye consistently said there was nothing new to report.

Meanwhile, Freehold Borough police said the fact that there was an ongoing investigation prevented them from giving out any more information. That’s the story we printed in our March 5 issue.

Borough officials contacted by a News Transcript reporter either knew nothing of a serious crime having occurred in town or provided little more than an offer to call police themselves.

Imagine our disgust, then, when a local daily paper ran a story March 4 about the missing person in the borough, with her name included, and the fact that authorities were investigating this as a possible slaying. Imagine our surprise at learning that a person had been held in custody all this time on charges relating to this incident — information that had never been mentioned in more than a week of phone calls to the police and prosecutor.

This is shameful behavior on Kaye’s part and close to a dereliction of duty on the part of the borough’s police department.

Citizens who are uniformed about crimes occurring in their community are not well served by those with the power and obligation to make the information public.

State law specifically requires police to provide certain information when an arrest is made, including the names of the people arrested, the charges lodged against them and, at the very least, the general nature of the crime in which they were involved.

We have no answers as to why this information was not provided over an 11-day period when a reporter made numerous telephone calls seeking information about this incident.