[UPDATE] The Post's Kevin Thompson 'Lake Worth crime' story ready for print edition

[UPDATE: The Post, it seems, has decided to make a big splash with Kevin Thompson's Lake Worth 'crime' story in the Sunday paper. Maybe next week the paper will do a story about crime in West Palm Beach using their expert source, NeighborhoodScout? According to NeighborhoodScout, West Palm Beach is in the top ten percent most dangerous cities in America.]

Now it's a matter of the story appearing on Saturday or if they're going for the big splash on Sunday like they did with the Joe Capozzi/crematorium one. You know the one where the smoke "curled into the sky, swallowing the tops of palm trees and tumbling down like a shroud" over the poor, hapless citizens of Lake Worth.

First though the oddest thing is Mr. Thompson is also the beat reporter for Greenacres. That city recently voted to merge their police department with PBSO and there is very little news/background on why they made that drastic decision. You would think the elected there all woke up one day and said, "Hey, let's hook up with PBSO!" and along they merrily went. What the public needs to know is why. Was it a spike in the crime rate? I think the public would be very interested in learning more about this, especially citizens in other cities rumored to be mulling a merge with PBSO.

There was a lot of back-and-forth between myself and NeighborhoodScout about their data that Thompson used. From the communications gleaned that Thompson, the Post, and others were also trying to figure out what was true, what was not true, and what simply was unknown. Here is the last post I published on all this.

What we do know is this: NeighborhoodScout crunched their numbers and came up with a score for Lake Worth. What we don't know is the data that was used prior to being 'crunched'. I hope to get that some day soon and share it with my readers.

I'll have more on this and excerpts from Thompson's article soon. Ultimately, all this boils down to the question, "What is the City of Lake Worth and what is unincorporated Palm Beach County". Does the reporter know that Palm Beach State College isn't in Lake Worth?

What we need to do as a community, the City, the CRA, the elected, city manager, staff, volunteer citizen groups, the business community, et al is clearly define for the confused citizens of our City the municipal boundaries we have within Palm Beach County. We are not helped one bit when we're lumped in with all those in the county who just happen to have a Lake Worth mailing address.

Then maybe the media, like NBC5/WPTV for instance, will get the message. No, this carjacking didn't happen in Lake Worth. Believe it or not, it happened in Greenacres. Not kidding.