Not naming a suspect or POI seems to be standard these days.
So their words mean nothing to me, especially when those words deviate from their actions.
^^
sbbm
Very true and not without reason. Federal agencies no longer do it. Good read at link re. the origins of POI label.
In a trap: What it means to be a 'person of interest' | In the Dark | APM Reports
Sept 27, 2016
"Person of interest" is a term widely used by the police, but it's relatively new, having emerged in the mid-1990s. In most cases, it appears to be a euphemism for "suspect," with enough vagueness thrown in to temper expectations and afford legal protection. "The beauty is that nobody knows what it means and that it has no definition," said Paul Rothstein, a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington, D.C. "It covers a multifarious group of situations and therefore no one can say that it means this person is a suspect, because they aren't yet. Because there isn't enough information.
"It's a way for police and prosecutors to disguise that they really have some grounds to suspect that a person played some role in a crime," he said. "But they don't feel they have enough evidence that they want to essentially perhaps defame the person by suggesting to the public that this person has committed a crime or is a full suspect in a crime."
It seems clear, though, that the term is intended to cast aspersions, said Donna Shaw, a professor of journalism at the College of New Jersey and a former reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer. "There are legal definitions for other terms like, 'suspect,' 'material witness,' 'subject,' 'target,' but 'person of interest,' according to the people I talk to in law enforcement, was left deliberately up in the air as a catch-all for a couple of reasons," she said. "One, so police and federal agents could tell reporters, 'Well, we have a person of interest.' So it kind of gets the reporters off their backs, like, 'Ooh, they're making progress on the case!' But the other thing, which probably (is) a little more bothersome, is that it's a way for them to talk to people who might become suspects, or perhaps are already suspects, without them being Mirandized. And that's the part that really could be troubling, if you're telling somebody, 'Oh, well, you're not a suspect, you're a person of interest.'"
The term apparently arose after the case of Richard Jewell, the security guard who found a backpack containing a bomb on the grounds of the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta. He alerted the police and helped evacuate people before the bomb exploded. At first hailed a hero, Jewell came to be regarded as a suspect. The FBI publicly searched his home and he was essentially convicted in the media, who attacked him, he said, like "piranha on a bleeding cow." His life was upended before he was eventually cleared.
Jewell won lawsuits against various media organizations, and the attorney general at the time, Janet Reno, formally apologized. bbm