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Does anyone know how to get confirmation / denial from the police or prosecutors as a random nobody from another country? We might be getting a update on the Braveheart incident.
Highly sophisticated Twitter anons are now claiming that Fatos Ali Dumana has been charged with assaulting a minor:
Now, this isn't new information per se, as @FistfullOfCrows pointed out "it has been alleged". I can't find the link to where I first saw the allegation, but I've seen it, and remained skeptical thinking "shouldn't there be a medical report"? Lo, and behold, there seems to be one attached to the above tweet.
Ok, it's still trivial to fake something like this, it would be nice to get some sort of confirmation from a disinterested source.... oh, look (Turn off javascript to read. I tried archiving it, but they seem to have countermeasures) a local newspaper is saying that """Two further people""", """a man and a woman""", have been charged as a result of the incident. No names are named (funny how you can dox a little girl, but somehow adults are a step to far), so who knows, maybe it's the girl's parents that are being charged, but with all the other irregularities around the incident, and the newspaper's cageyness around the names of the suspects I wouldn't bet on it.
So... does anyone know how to go about confirming / denying this? @self_made_human, you're in Scotland, would you be willing to make some phone calls?
EDIT:
I'm not sure who I could call about this really, I don't think the Dundee police would feel any additional obligation to tell me than they would any other rando, and I don't know anyone from those parts myself.
I picked up an eviction case over the summer, and I got a call from my client one morning telling me that the tenant had been arrested. He didn't know what for, just that he had heard about it from other tenants in the building. A couple weeks later, it happened again, and this time he had to fix the door from them breaking in. I told him I had no idea how to figure out why he was arrested (twice), for the simple reason that I didn't have any connections in the police department, and that even if I did they would only be useful if one of them happened to already know about the situation. The only way to figure out why the guy was arrested is to wait and see if he's charged in court, and to date the guy's only contact with the court system has been the suit I filed against him. The other possible way would be to check the police blotter. This is a reasonable course of action in small towns that report every traffic stop, but the Pittsburgh Police, with hundreds of encounters a day, only report on things serious enough to merit general public interest, and some middle aged guy getting arrested for something that's probably minor doesn't merit it. There's a Pittsburgh Police Scanner twitter account run by private citizens monitoring scanners, but, again, they only report on things interesting or (mostly) funny.
It wouldn't show up on something like CrimeMapping.com? You can typically see anonymized crimes reported by the police down to the block of a street and the date and time. Looking at Pittsburgh they even have stuff like disturbing the peace on there.
It works well enough to get an idea of what kind of crimes are occurring and where, but without names it's useless for my purposes. It's also based on reports of crimes not arrests, so if a guy breaks into a building and is arrested a week later at home it's going to map to the building he broke into and not his house. Believe me, I checked that site on the off chance there was a report for the address, but I already suspected that wasn't the case since the other tenants didn't have any information. It's more likely that he was picked up on a warrant for something that happened elsewhere.
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