After a three-year run in service to the public, Lakeside Crime Watch has gone off line. The website, however, is expected to reappear around June 1 under new management with the same URL, similar content and an updated layout design.
The site www.lakesidecrime.com was created to serve as a reliable internet clearing house so expatriate residents could report and track crime in the Lake Chapala area. The principal content was enhanced with comprehensive information on registering incidents through official channels, modus operandi for common scams and, most recently, summaries and links to relevant news stories carried by national and international media.
According to the Crime Watch webmaster, the decision to fold was based primarily on a significant slowdown in postings, presumably because victims aren’t sharing information. Officials at the local public prosecutor’s office, however, see indications of a downturn in crimes committed against expats, telling the Reporter last week that hardly any complaints have been filed since the end of January.
Alternate sourcesAs recent events connected to organized crime became a hot topic in the community, active net surfers have increasingly turned to other social networks to follow the local buzz, including some that have spread unsubstantiated rumors originating from anonymous sources.
A case in point is a spurious Facebook page registered under the name of Chapala Mayor Jesus Cabrera, where patently false information about the imposition of a curfew and school closings appeared two weeks ago.
The mayor’s authentic FB account goes by the name Jesus Cabrera Jimenez. The bogus page disappeared from cyberspace after being reported as a fake.
Meanwhile – as promised by Chapala police chief Reynol Contreras at last week’s town hall meeting in Ajjic – the city government has started issuing daily bulletins on security issues via its website www.chapala.gob.mx. The information is being duplicated on the Chapala Gobierno Municipal FB account and sent out for publication in the Guadalajara Reporter and local Spanish-language weeklies.
Early this month, the popular web board chapala.com opened up a new forum dedicated exclusively to the theme of local crime. In the space of five days the section became so overloaded with gossip and off-topic comments that it was pulled. Discussion on crime issues has theoretically been banned on all of the board’s other forums.
While regular posters slammed the site for censorship, administrator David Tingen says the crime forum derailed because his team of volunteer moderators simply couldn’t keep up with monitoring the high volume of messages to sort out inappropriate comments and other dross.
In the aftermath, http://lakechapalainfo.bigforumpro.com and other web boards have seen a huge bump in traffic among English speakers interested in airing observations on crime and public security matters.