Goose Creek PD Ends Daily Email to Media

Goose Creek Police Department has stopped sending local TV stations and newspapers a daily email that collected recent incident reports. The policy was one of the most proactive in the Lowcountry, but the department now says the extra effort needs to be applied elsewhere.

Recent incident reports are legally available to the public and standard reading material for local journalists, but most departments leave it to reporters to thumb through a mound of reports and arrest logs, often overlooking the kind of gems that Goose Creek had been delivering in digestible daily portions.

Goose Creek Public Information Officer Capt. John Grainger put media outlets on notice earlier this week that the department will end its policy of sending the emails that would often include six or seven reports from the previous day.

According to Grainger, the change was due to staffing constraints. The work included putting each report in PDF format, collecting them into an emailable folder and sending it out to a set list of media outlets.

"We believe our limited human resources will better serve the citizenry by way of this change in procedure," he told Patch. "Our main consideration in this decision was the best utilization of our staffing."

As a bi-product of the change, readers will likely see a little less "Goose Creek" in their RSS news feeds. The access had made Goose Creek reports easy pickings for news editors looking for quick content.

For example, a police report last week regarding vandals at the city's Crowfield Golf and Country Club went viral on Twitter and Facebook. Staff found 25 unopened condoms in the parking lot, a busted mailbox, and tread marks through the grass.

Comical stories like this liter police logs across the Lowcountry — they're just rarely reported, at least in part due to the lack of access.

Grainger says the department will meet the requirements of the state's Freedom of Information Act, providing incident reports from the previous two weeks upon request at the police station.

Of course, Patch will be making the daily run, regardless of the condom content.