March 13, 2107
ALFRED, NY – Alfred Village Police Chief Paul Griffith, appearing on this morning’s Newsmaker Show, spoke of how postings of rumors on social media, regarding the recent stabbing incident in Alfred, complicated things. “Social media is kind of a double edged sword,” said Griffith. “Sometimes it really helps us out in an investigation. We we can find out a lot of information from what people post on their Facebook page, or somebody else posts something that they saw, or even video, we’ve had that help us out before. This time, it didn’t help us out so much, a lot of rumors were being perpetuated on social media.”
The police chief explained that this had some in the Alfred community, wary of what might happen next. “By the end of the week, when the next weekend was coming, everybody was kind of in fear that we were going to have gang retaliation, and a whole bunch of other things that were being said, in social media. So that didn’t really help us out. At that point, we had a little bit of a panic in Alfred, with some of the students not knowing what was going on. We were able to, at that point, get the message out there that this wasn’t really what was being reported, in social media.”
