Gardaí's poor motoring interactions with the media

Atlantic Dawn

Why do the gardaí have such poor interation with the media when it comes to reporting crimes carried out using certain vehicles that they give pi$$ poor descriptions when they have much more details at their disposal that they could give which would aid witnesses recalling the car. This evenings example is a description of a silver BMW (that narrows it down :rolleyes: ) involved in a shooting, the car was found burnt out which would mean the model and reg should have been known from the chassis number or even basic details from the burnt shell should tell model.

So this evening on my travels if I was looking for a silver BMW it could be any one of about 300 shaped cars based on BMW's for any year and any models available in silver in this country.

The 32-year-old was walking along the South Circular Road with a child when he was shot several times at around 8pm.
The gunman escaped in a silver BMW, which was found burnt out nearby.

http://www.rte.ie/news/2012/0924/shooting-dublin.html

marketty

I have wondered about this before, perhaps they do it deliberately, I mean holding back a certain amount of information so they can confirm any reports they receive or something. I know I heard one recently on the news where they were looking for a car and had the make, model, colour, year and county of reg on car and the 1st 3 digits of reg surely they could find the owner of that car by themselves and were just trying to bring forward more genuine info

MetzgerMeister

Would it be like having a line-up and having a witness pick out the person they think it is? If you give someone too much information, they could convince themselves that they saw exactly that person in order to be the hero and the Gardai are then following a false clue.

langdang

Because many people are confused by too much information, or have their heads full of just plain wrong information.

EG if they said it was a silver mazda 323, you'd have 20% of people expecting (to the exclusion of all other models of 323) to have seen an angular 3 door hatch with pop-up lights, 20% of people who expected the smoother 5door "hairdressers porsche model", 20% who expected one of the saloon models, 20% who expected a Mazda 3 or 6 and 5% who expected a Mitsubishi Carisma.
The rest would be in the "ARE THOSE MY FEET?" category.

God help you if you said it was a BMW 323...

Colour and marque are nearing the limits of many peoples observations.

I was on the way to a wedding in Wesht Cork a while back. On the road, the convoy of guests met an Audi R8, on a road just wide enough for 2 cars. There was only a handful standing around at the church who had registered this fact. "A what now?" "An Audi what?" "What colour was it?"