Slusher: People will talk, but be careful about judgments

It is ridiculous for a newspaper ever to tell the public not to have an interest in a topic or not to speculate about whether officials are doing their jobs right.

Our job is to respond to your interests and to pique them in areas that we find merit more scrutiny. We can, should and do try to get as much information out in the open as possible.

But that said, developments in our reporting on the Gliniewicz case this week help reinforce the case for measured forbearance, at least for the time being.

In the vacuum of information, as I wrote in a column a couple of weeks ago, people will very naturally begin trying to fill in the gaps themselves. Police in Fox Lake and federal investigators trying to help solve the mystery of Lt. Charles Joseph Gliniewicz's Sept. 1 killing, need to keep that in mind.

Nor is such public speculation necessarily "wrong." As Gliniewicz's son D.J. acknowledged this week in an interview with Daily Herald staff writer Lee Filas, talking about such cases is "an inevitable habit of a human."

But we humans also have to be careful to moderate our inevitable habits.

For one thing, as D.J. Gliniewicz also described poignantly, these speculations are not without consequences. They can be insensitive and hurtful to individuals and families struggling to cope with some of the deepest and harshest pains life can dish out.

For another, as police reacting to information they felt had been prematurely released by the Lake County coroner stated, they can jeopardize efforts to solve a crime.

Details the police officially released to Filas this week emphasize this point. They indicate that a specially trained tracking dog may have identified gun powder residue a quarter-mile from Lt. Gliniewicz's body.

Does that mean he didn't kill himself? No. Does it mean that two white men and a black man killed him? Of course not.

It is merely a reminder that a lot of evidence remains to be collected and analyzed.

We all must hold the police department's feet to the fire to make sure it pursues the Gliniewicz case with due diligence and doesn't withhold important facts needlessly.

Without question that is a responsibility of a newspaper, and it's one that we take seriously at the Daily Herald. Any public death stirs public curiosity, but numerous factors - the death of a police officer, the possibility that murderers who pose a continuing threat remain in the area, the oversight of public resources and more - make this case an important matter of public interest, not some mere topic of public gossip.

But in all these things, we still also have to give authorities the space to do their jobs, and perhaps just as important, we have to remember that our discussion of the topic has both practical and very personal consequences. It may be against our inevitable human nature to stop talking or speculating about a case like this, but a gunpowder-sniffing dog reminds us there is merit and wisdom in reserving judgment.

Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is assistant managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on Twitter at @JimSlusher.