There are 69 days between the rape of the Dutch backpacker on July 15th, 2012, and the rape and murder of Jill Meagher on September 22nd, 2012. So what were the police doing in the intervening two month period? Perhaps arresting drunks at the football, telling us to wipe off 5 because speed kills, and arresting drink drivers.
If there were 1,000 registered sex offenders who fit the bill in this photo:
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/y...er-con-20120801-23dvb.html?rand=1362390558590
and if the police had a competent database- and competent officers- then, let’s say it took 1 minute to compare a registered sex offender’s photograph to the photographic sketch offered by the victim, then you have 1,000 minutes of work. That is 16 hours and 40 mins. That is less than 2.5 days work where an officer is parked on his *advertiser censored* looking at a computer screen, where a sketch of the perpetrator (as offered by the Dutch backpacker) would sit alongside the catalogued photographs of registered sex offenders. The officer would compare the two. Then ‘click’, and the next photograph of a registered sex offender appears alongside the sketch, and going along like this, perpetrator after perpetrator would either be ruled in or out as a suspect. One would surely notice the eerie resemblance between Adrian Ernest Bayley’s photograph and the image offered to sketch artists by the Dutch backpacker. Even if the pool were narrowed down to 50ish likely lookalikes, alibis would rule out a lot of them, which would leave only a very small number.
I think the parole board have an enormous amount to answer for, though I also believe the police share some of the blame for Bayley’s offending. If this work of comparing photos to sketch artists images could not be undertaken by the police force, then it should be outsourced to community volunteers or someone else who could perform this invaluable task. I seem to recall a general consensus amongst the web community on multiple forums that the Dutch backpacker’s sketch photo of her attacker resembled Bayley- this was in the immediate aftermath of the arrest of Bayley and the release of his photo in the blue top. Now, if the public could perform that job within hours of his arrest, then why couldn’t the police compare sketch drawings against photos in their databases- hours after the Dutch backpacker’s rape- to arrive at the same conclusions as so many web users did? It seems to me like this is a missed opportunity. If the police identified Bayley as the Dutch backpacker's rapist, then Jill would still be alive- and identifying him as her attacker is precisely what the internet community did within hours of his arrest and the release of his blue-top photo- that's how strong the resemblance of images is. If we could do it, why couldn't the cops do this? They didn't even have to put the Dutch backpacker before the media to plead for information- they would just take her photo-sketch and compare it to the database of registered sex offender's photos and isolate Bayley as the suspect and interview him and monitor him, etc.
So although the parole board are negligently weak, it seems like the police should expand their efforts also. I would, however, like to say that it might not be as simple as all of this- and the police would have more info which is not released- but even so, this seems to me like a compelling point that needs to be made. I do not for a second doubt that the police wanted this criminal caught as much as the rest of us, but what I have just said raises questions and concerns me. Couldn’t Bayley have been identified earlier?
