Confusion or Colusion?

I have hit a bureaucratic brick wall with my crime story. My troubles, however, did not come from obstinate officers as I had anticipated.

I went down to the Northern police station expecting serious opposition from the people behind the counter. To my surprise, the receptionist was extremely helpful and kind. She was more than willing to search the police database for reports despite my relative lack of specific details. I suppose the station the covers the Marina, Pac Heights and North Beach isn’t the worst spot in the city to work.

Where I ran into trouble is when I found out that how the officers had compiled the repot for my incident. Instead of using one incident number to compile the entirety of the burglary ring I am covering, the police filed separate reports for each of the different locations burglarized by the ring. This means that there are 95 separate incident reports for my crime story. The simple logistics of acquiring, let alone reading, these reports makes them completely outside of my reach for this story.

I’ve been wondering about the lack of follow up on this story by local papers. Initial reports lacked any real numbers about how many places were burglarized and how much money all of the stolen items were worth. I figured these stories would happen because the sheer volume of stuff would make the final numbers newsworthy.

I now understand why no one has followed through on this story. It just isn’t important enough to be worth the time needed to put it all together. I can’t decide whether this was a deliberate tactic by the police. It’s not exactly a flattering story for them to have a woman burglarize at least 95 places in their district.
Making the logistics so difficult to overcome keeps this story off the pages and the ridicule off their work.