Sometimes I know more than I can tell you. That doesn’t mean I’m hiding something, and it doesn’t mean the department gets to say “no comment” and disappear. It means there are times when putting out everything we know would be a bad idea.

Maybe two witnesses are telling us different stories. Maybe we have a name but haven’t figured out whether that person actually did anything. Maybe one detail would tell the suspectA person whom investigators reasonably believe may have been involved in an offense. Being identified as a suspect is not a conviction. exactly what we know. Maybe the call involves a child, somebody’s medical information, or something the victimA person who suffered harm or loss because of an alleged or proven crime. In court documents, the term may also refer to the person named in the charge. never asked to have spread all over town.

Trying to be transparent doesn’t mean I’m going to turn somebody else’s trauma into public information. Once I put something out there, I own it. I can’t take it back because a video showed up later or another witnessA person who saw, heard, knows, or can provide information about an incident or fact under investigation. changed the picture.

Knowing something isn’t the same as being able to put it out. I still have to ask whether releasing it could damage the investigation, violate someone’s privacy, or mislead the public.

Social media has changed the way people find out about things. Images, names, partial videos, and secondhand accounts can be everywhere within minutes, sometimes before anybody knows whether they’re accurate or whether they tell the whole story. Some of it is right. Some of it is missing context. Some of it is completely wrong.

Verified information coming from me is going to move more slowly because it has to be checked. That can make the department look behind when an unconfirmed version has already spread through the community. But repeating something before we know it’s true doesn’t make us more transparent. It just adds another source to the confusion.

So if all I can honestly say is that we’re still working through what happened, that’s what I’ll say. If I can tell you there’s no known threat, that somebody has been arrested, or that I’ll have another update tomorrow, I’ll tell you that too.

What I won’t do is fill the silence just because everybody wants an answer right now. A quick answer can create a much bigger problem when it changes. If I tell people I’ll come back with more when I can, then I need to come back.