Al's Morning Meeting

RELATED RESOURCES

Like Al's ideas? Hear more in our broadcast and online seminars. Sign up to receive Al's Morning Meeting by e-mail: * Click here (sent Monday-Friday at 7 a.m.) Buy Al's book, "Aim for the Heart," here, and Poynter receives a small cut as an Amazon affiliate.

The (Nashville) Tennessean went beyond the usual story of how many murders occur in its coverage area each year. The paper tried to affix a cost to the crime, and determined that murders cost the state about $110 million a year. That includes locking up the criminals, courtroom defense, prosecutors, medical examiners, medical bills, burial expenses -- even the cleanup after a crime. Homicides raise life insurance costs and leave families without breadwinners.

This is an excellent story idea. You may think of even more ways that murder costs your community money, including the loss of human capital and lost work time for surviving family members. Still, it puts a human condition on a statistic that I am sure we all tire of much too fast.

The Cost of Cleaning Up After Crime

I also want to focus on this other interesting aspect of The Tennessean's story. Read this passage and imagine the stories that could flow out of it -- including a profile on the people who do this kind of important but gristly work:

When murders occur on private property -- as many do -- residents are on their own.

Phyllis Payne found this out the hard way.

When a gunman opened fire in her Sylvan Street apartment in Nashville in 2002 -- killing three of her friends and wounding another -- Payne jumped from the second-floor bedroom window to escape.

When the police wrapped up their investigation, Payne discovered that it was her responsibility to clean up the murder scene. Because blood and other potential biohazards were present, it had to be done by a company that specializes in such work.

Trauma Scene Recovery, the Nashville company that handled the cleanup, charged her $319.30, a discounted rate. Payne, who was unemployed, couldn't pay and turned to her mother for help with the bill.

"It hardly seemed fair," Payne said. "This guy killed people in my apartment, and I am the one who has to pay to clean up. I just don't think I should have had to pay for that."

Paying to clean up the crime scene often seems like a final indignity for family and friends of murder victims. The price tag can run from $400 to more than $10,000.

While there are no statewide numbers on the cost of cleaning up murder scenes, some experts place that figure at more than $100,000.

Cleanups in homes and businesses tend to be more complicated than public places like parking lots and streets. As was the case in Payne's apartment, blood and body fluids soak into furniture and flooring and are difficult to remove.

"You never quite know what you will find when you go to one of these places," said Gary Carlisle, owner of the Atlanta-based Bio-Crisis Management Inc., which does cleanups in five states, including Tennessee. "Blood and body fluids must be removed and disposed of in a specific way."

Crime-scene cleanup is a multimillion-dollar business and growing, said Richard Graf, co-owner of Crime Scene Restoration, a Nashville company.

"People don't like to think about it, but when someone is shot or killed, there is often an expensive mess to clean up," Graf said. "And whether it's the homeowner, the insurance company or the business, someone is going to have to pay."

Here is a directory of some companies who do this kind of work.

HowStuffWorks.com produced an interesting background piece on how crime scene cleanup works. The story said:

There are about 300 companies in the United States doing this work. One of those companies, Neil Smithers' Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc., began in San Francisco in 1988 and has subcontractors in 18 states as of 2006. The San Francisco branch handles more than 400 jobs per year.

Of course, in a field that deals with tragic death, advertising and marketing can be tricky. Some companies choose the standard phone-book route, and many advertise on the side of their van. Others avoid mainstream methods entirely and focus on more discreet options, like passing out cards at service-industry functions (hotels and motels need clean-ups more often than any other business), funeral homes and police stations. "Marketing" a crime-scene clean-up business means getting to know police detectives, firefighters, paramedics and morticians, who will provide a list of cleaning services to survivors when it's requested.

While it's ultimately a business like any other, succeeding in this industry means understanding the sensitive nature of the work. Some clean-up companies provide a grief counselor at no cost if the family needs one, and others offer a sliding scale so people who don't have thousands of dollars in their bank account can still afford the service. In some communities, religious organizations help cover the cost of a crime-scene clean-up.

Some people call this growing field a social trend toward the commercialization of death, some call it simple capitalism and others call it a godsend. No matter how you look at it, if you ever end up with blood and brains all over your living room walls, you'll probably be relieved there's someone you can hire to clean it up.

Moving Closer to National Parks

As millions of Americans visit national parks this summer, they will no doubt notice that people are choosing to live much closer to the parks these days. The Associated Press analyzed the trend, which holds true nationwide:

An AP analysis of census data shows that more than 1.3 million people since 1990 have moved into counties surrounding six of the best-loved parks: Gettysburg, Everglades, Glacier, Yellowstone, Shenandoah and Great Smoky Mountains.

The average number of people per square mile in those counties has grown by one-third. The four urban counties around the Florida Everglades show the most dramatic gains. But even in the remote areas of Glacier, the number of people per square mile has risen from eight in 1990 to 11 in 2005.

Likewise, park visitation has soared from 79 million in 1960 to 273 million today.

Pollution that has drifted scores of miles into parks is affecting visitors, plant life and wildlife.

Last year, the air breathed by park visitors exceeded eight-hour safe levels of ozone 150 times in 13 parks, from California to Virginia. Overall, air at one-third of parks monitored by the Park Service continues to worsen even as the government puts in place pollution controls aimed at clearing the air by 2064.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina, the most frequently visited park, has air quality similar to that of Los Angeles.

Many others, including Shenandoah in Virginia, Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, Sequoia and Kings Canyon in California and Acadia in Maine also suffer reduced views and damage to natural resources, mostly from pollutants from coal-fired power plants.

Foreign species of plants, animals, bugs and worms that travel via vehicles and visitors now invade 2.6 million acres of national parkland and are destroying natural resources.

The story contained this context:

Nighttime lights, beaming from cities and towns 200 miles away from parks such as Mount Rainier in Washington state and Yosemite in California, reduce star visibility and can affect nocturnal wildlife.

In urban regions, including Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area in California, visitors can only see a few hundred stars instead of the 8,000 that would be visible in pristine conditions.

"If there's no place that is clear and clean, if there's no place that is dark and starry, where does that leave us?" asks Chad Moore, program manager for the National Park Service's Night Sky Team. "If we can't protect the best parts of America in national parks, then we're certainly not going to be able to protect them anywhere else."

Americans are split on park development.

More than 40 percent favor increasing development inside parks, such as cell towers and snowmobile trails, an AP-Ipsos poll found. One-third favored increasing developments such as resort hotels and residential subdivisions outside park boundaries.

National Parks Charge for Professional Photo Permits

If you want a professional to take your picture in a national park, you will need a photo permit -- and it will cost you. NPR reported the story this way.

The Park Service has a page explaining when you need a permit and how much it will cost.

The Washington Post explained:

Wedding parties and other groups hoping to commemorate their special event with a photograph at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument or other popular landmarks on National Park Service land now have to pay for a permit.

Under a new policy that began May 15, the Park Service is requiring a payment of $50 to $250 from groups that hire commercial photographers to snap pictures at some of the 390 monuments, parks and historic sites it oversees. The cost depends on the size of the group.

The fees are being charged at some of the busiest Park Service sites in the Washington, D.C., area and at the Grand Canyon in Arizona. Other heavily used sites include the Statue of Liberty, Alaska's Denali National Park and Preserve, Big Bend National Park in Texas, and Yellowstone National Park.

Officials said the fees are in response to a 2000 federal law that requires various agencies to come up with ways to recoup the costs of maintenance, security and other expenses stemming from commercial filming and photography on federal land.

Dry Cleaning Goes High-Tech

A few months ago, I asked my dry cleaners if they were working with Homeland Security like some sort of international-bank-tracking money laundering. Sun Country Cleaners, my local store, started placing little bar-coded heat-sealed tags inside my clothes. The bar codes track clothing from drop off to check out. And it is a technology that is moving industrywide as a way to stop the problem of lost clothes.

Zoots, a high-profile and high-tech dry cleaning company, also has ATM-style clothes-dispensing machines, which allow you to drop off or pick up clothes 24 hours a day.

Other companies, such as PurpleTie in the San Francisco Bay area, are Web-based. The company picks up clothes at customers' houses or businesses and drop them off at a central cleaning location. It saves the cost of lots of kiosk stores as collection points. PurpleTie also does shoe repair -- I love that.

Still, there is something creepy about bar-coded clothing. I do wonder if homicide departments could use the bar code to track down the identity of an unidentified body, for example. But then, maybe I've just spent too much time thinking about the first two items in the column today!