Danny Thompson exaggerates with his big stack

At the August 2nd, 2010 meeting of the Greensboro City Council, member Danny Thompson said he wanted to discuss "Disturbing things that go on at the public library."  He held up a thick stack of papers and said:

"More than a hundred incidences that go in the public library... Many of them, a great majority of them, and I have, this right here are the incident reports of anything from indecent behavior to looking at inappropriate websites. These are just six months of this year at just the downtown Greensboro public library."

Thompson then proceeded to make a motion that "We institute blocking software devices on our public library computers whereby access is denied and not able to be accessed." (video, 01:48:50)

The News & Record dutifully regurgitated Thompson's claims of what was in his stack of papers without checking it out. So I did.

I requested the incident reports. I received the Lankford Protective Services incident reports through June, 2010. Here's how they break down:

39 sleeping
28 disorderly conduct/fighting/assault
21 viewing inappropriate sites*/pornography/indecent behavior at computer
[As the News & Record's editor John Robinson correctly notes, only one of these involved a minor possibly being exposed to inappropriate content.]
16 stolen/lost items
13 trespassing/loitering/panhandling
12 eating
10 wanted persons
9 drug/alcohol
8 indecent behavior not at a computer
6 skipping school/runaway/missing person
5 patron complaints
5 bathing/shaving
4 other
3 medical
3 vandalism
3 rules violations
2 verbal altercations
2 moving furniture
1 surveillance of a man with "big loops in ears" participating in Food not Bombs feeding of the hungry.

To bring the obvious to your attention, had Thompson wanted to provide accurate information to his constituents, he would not have waved a stack of 190 reports, nearly ten times bigger than what he was talking about, as a pretext for his policy proposal. Thompson resorted to exaggeration and deception to justify his misguided and overreaching proposal. Doing so was misleading and contemptuous of the voters.

[* I am, as of yet, unable to find any information about what guidelines are used to determine if a site is inappropriate.]