There have been multiple requests demanding that the university release all their information on the nefarious PZ Myers, and as a courtesy, I get sent the replies. So campus authorities have sent me the complete report on their investigation into the heinous theft and vandalism of the Morris North Star.
Here it is. I was surprised only by how much time and effort the campus police were required to put into this absurd and false allegation by Andrew Geiger.
So far, there’s nothing linking me to the crime, so it’s basically over. Except, probably, for continuing whining by the right wingers.
I also notice that Geiger has not made any friends on the police force: being told that the police don’t maintain video surveillance of the newstands, and then rushing to print to accuse them of losing the video surveillance records, seems to be kind of a dumb and dishonest thing to do.
Of course it was a dumb and dishonest thing to do, look at what he prints!
Can Geiger even show there is a video camera near the newsstand? If not, he is angling for a job with Faux News.
Police report says Jonathan Michael Geiger.
Evil twin?
whoops
Johnathan.
Maybe there’s three of them.
Wait, I thought that was FTB’s job. Are you telling me these accusations have been nothing more than projection all along? I’m shocked!
Is there not an offence of wasting police time?
Incidentally, I can understand people’s ages being in years, and weights in pounds, but what sort of units are the police using for height (“602” and “511”)? Is there a metric conversion factor?
chigau, we need some sort of device for counting Geigers.
That would be feet * 100 + inches. So 6′ 2″ and 5′ 11″.
OK hold on a second – did I misunderstand something or isn’t this a free newspaper?
There’s pages of report here – and it looks like it covers multiple days of investigation. If this was all done to investigate the vandalism of a few copies of a free student newspaper and perhaps someone taking a whole stack of copies for whatever nefarious purposes (probably to housebreak their dog) then if I lived in there I’d be kind of pissed that this guy is wasting everyone’s time and money.
@8 brinderwalt – love the explanation. No European would ever have thought of that.
jerthebarbarian, they’re campus cops. Probably delighted to get a chance to do real cop stuff, with the twenty-seven eight-by-ten colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was to be used as evidence.
jertthebarbarian@9
My thoughts exactly! When we lived on a college campus (40 years ago!) we would grab a stack of the free campus paper on our way home to line the birdcage. I never dreamed that we were doing something illegal.
Moggie @11, I can imagine them bemusedly running to the school’s labs and asking to use electron microscopes, mass specs, gene sequencers, etc., only to be sent off empty handed, with howls of laughter on all sides.
Damn, that Geiger fellow is in good shape. Probably not a lot of muscle on him, but 165lbs for 6’02” is excellent.
Reminds me that I’ve been skipping the gym too much lately.
Nerd, just a reminder that Todd Starnes of Fox News did write an article about a liberal professor suppressing the free speech of freedom loving students. There were pitters who passed along links to that truthy sounding article.
Bet it comes as a surprise that some atheists of the pit really love some christianist Fox News. Such a principled stand.
(Do not even look up the All American Christmas Special that Starnes had last month.)
I am reminded of this celebrated scene from The Big Lebowski (at the police impound):
DUDE: Hey man, are you gonna find these guys? Or, you know uh, I mean, do you got any promising uh, uh, leads? Or–
COP: Leads, yeah sure. I’ll uh, just check with the boys down at the Crime Lab. They uh, got uh, four more detectives working on the case. They’ve got us working in shifts.
What I found interesting is how thorough and professional the police were, even though this would appear to be a simple act of vandalism.
AZ@14 – Through most of college and grad school I was 155 and 6’4″. But we called that “skinny” then…
naivety, ignorance, privilege, and entitlement.
through in arrogance and attention seeking and a desire to important enough to be persecuted. and a would be supreme leader in training who is a lone voice for truth. justice and the American Way!
and there you have it! a rude right wing college kid!
uncle frogy
Hey wait. The sex and race columns for you and Geiger are left blank.
Is white male considered the default value for those spaces?
@16 Piotr Gąsiorowski:
Good thing I refreshed the page and saw your comment, because I was about to post that exact scene.
@13 They did try to get the lab to do a handwriting analysis. But they were too busy, only working on cases involving losses of thousands of dollars.
I read the one edition that Geiger posted online and this is a rag that deserves to be used as a lining for a bird cage.
@Moggie #11
Is PZ going to end up on the bench next to the father-rapers?
procrastinatorordinaire@24, Probably smoking cigarettes and all kinds of things while playing with the pencils.
Patrick #10
Well, depends on whether or not you consider Brits to be European. Apparently you have never read Sherlock Holmes stories and tried to understand British money pre-decimalization.
moarsciencepz @26 – I’m a pro-European Brit and have read all the Sherlock Holmes stories. I can also convert L-s-d into decimal and back again – learned at the age of 10. Can also do irony.
typo: morescienceplz
Damn! that’s worse.
That’s well written, and quite extensive, for a police report concerning misdemeanor vandalism. When I was policing I would have given the matter about five lines. I assume the officers are also students at the college.
The report looks good, indeed. Very carefully done.
I was involved in a few cases where hand-writing analysis was requested, one was a death threat and another was a hand-written Will that might have been the last Will, if valid. In both cases, we were told that there was not enough written so that a firm opinion could be given. In each case, there were about 10 or so words in the sample we had to be analysed.
I don’t know if there are better methods of analysis these days, but back when, say 15+ years ago, I would expect to be told no definitive analysis could be done on that small a sample.
Waayyyyyyyyy more than is necessary for the ‘crime’ of writing on some newspapers.
@7, Moggie: “chigau, we need some sort of device for counting Geigers.”
OK, that was funny.
I think Geiger pissed the campus police off and they wanted to make sure that he looked like a nutjob in the report.
How can you steal a free newspaper?
Theoretically only the first paper is free. Additional copies cost. But that claim was made after the initial loss of newspapers, and there is no mechanism to collect.
I agree that Moggie’s “counting Geigers” was funny.
Dear Glod! Are there no levels to which those darned liberals will not sink?
PZilla Myers; Kaiju Hellbeast!
Seriously though, what are they feeding you if you’re 511 meters tall, but only weigh 200 kilograms?
Reading through these supplemental reports, I suspect there was a significant amount of nose-bridge rubbing involved in the writing. Just how much patience is required to be a campus police officer anyway?
Oh, sure, because helping everyone gain and maintain quick and reliable access to the internet, and therefore information, while on university grounds is clearly less important than giving a student newspaper a dedicated office space.
To the campus police of the University of Minnesota, Morris, should you find yourselves reading through this post on a subsequent investigation of Prof Myers’ villainy: I salute you, your patience and your professionalism. How do you do it?
Of all the BS police have to put up with … So you say someone stole a stack of your free newspapers after you left then in a stack, in a public area, overnight …???? … And you are sure it is one of the biology professors because near the news stand where the papers were stolen you detected a chemical smell … sure … sigh … why not … it isn’t like we have anything else to do .. fill out these forms and we will get “our top men” right on it.
All things considered including that this is on a much smaller scale, it reminds of the threats and harassment in the 60’s of my professor Herbert Marcuse. He was accused of all manner of things for being against the Vietnam War and having world-wide influence by the right-wing and it called for his dismissal. Some of his colleagues and students spent nights watching his house because of the seriousness of threats that had been made.
You can get a good idea of the atmosphere of the time from the documentary, “Herbert’s Hippopotamus”.
“their apparent thought process” (smirk)
@Patrick #6; @moarscienceplz #26
I suspect they use that format (602, 511) in their reports because that’s the format NCIC (National Crime Information Center) uses in its forms when you’re entering this stuff into the computer.
Talk about wasting government money and time (man-hours)… I thought these guys were against that?
26. moarscienceplz,
Please for to show me where Doyle uses 602 or 511 rather than 6’2 or 5’11.
johnberg #18
I’ll take “skinny” any day of the week. It puts less pressure on the spine.
petrander
Love your avatar!
@Patricl #27:
I’m pretty sure I can only convert LSD in one direction.
@Rich Woods, are you sure? Perhaps you just haven’t tried hard enough. Report back when you have a result, won’t you? I can think of some people who would be interested if you succeed.
Who’s up for crowdfunding the handwriting analysis? If we exceed our funding target, we can start adding on some of Professor Myer’s students to rule them out as well.
It would be fun to be able to rub the results in the face of that newspaper and the more definitive vindication would be well worth a small donation. Plus it would signal that he has nothing to hide and won’t be intimidated by bully tactics.
Nerd @2,
People like this never provide any evidence or third-party citations. They expect others to believe them on faith alone. Which is why the cops rightly flooshed his case.
“Geiger also informed me that the writing on the vandalism looked neat and that of either a female or someone who writes a great deal and he assumed that since Myers is a professor that he writes quite a bit.” That was a laugh-out-loud moment for me and I think sums up Mr. Geiger’s intellectual calibre.