This makes no sense. Wasn't Annie Le all over the news recently? She is a "woman of color". And God knows if anything happened to Michelle Obama, her daughters, or Oprah Winfrey, it would be front page news. There are countless lower class, blue-eyed, blonde-haired women who are drug users or prostitutes who go missing and are equally ignored... This is about class, people, not race. Please don't use this awful tragedy in Cleveland to stoke racial tension. The real issue here is the extreme misogyny that is festering all over this country.

It's all about PC. sucks for the victims.

If the community is serious about stopping these crimes then step up to the plate. Then man should be hung in the street and castrated. Now I know it ain't gonna happen. But the death penalty applies here. Not as a prevention for the next man but this one won't do it again. It's awful that he got away with it this long, and it's terrible that these women were done this way. But damn, people, he's been caught. Put him in the ground!!!

As any cop will tell you, the cops alone cannot police any neighborhood without the cooperation of the local residents. The neighborhood residents need to know and trust the cops. But trust must be earned.

In some neighborhoods, the cops can organize a "Neighborhood Block Watch" and it is sufficient. Where I live, for example, I know some of the Sheriff's Deputies from church, my children's school and other social activities. If 911 is not fast enough, I call a deputy on his or her cell phone!

In other neighborhoods, people do not know their neighbors on either side, even though they have shared the same street, same building or same hallway for years. Criminals and criminal activity can easily hide in the anonymity. In order to police these neighborhoods, two thing must happen:
1) Neighbors must meet and get to know each other. This makes it difficult for criminals to hide - they must be very circumspect about their activities and appear to be normal.
2) The police must get out of their cars, walk in the streets, be a part of various social groups and, preferably, LIVE IN THE AREA they are attempting to police. The only way for them to build the trust they need is to be there. This will allow their neighbors to feel free to walk up to them and say, "I think something might be wrong in ...." and know they will look into it immediately, not tomorrow or next week or next month.

With this incident in Cleveland, if a neighbor told his neighbor, the cop, that something smelled dead and the cop investigated it immediately, six, seven or more lives might have been saved.

Is there a special way to leave a comment on this? I've tried twice to give an opinion on what should happen to this murderer but it never made the post.

Serial killers usually target women who live life on the margins of society; women who will be ignored when police reports are filed, if the reports are filed at all. These are the women who are readily available, who by necessity are risk takers themselves such as the homeless, prostitutes, hitchhikers, drug users, etc. That these victims were black is one more factor that adds to the police attitude that marginalizes them. All this makes the victims "women not like us" which feeds our voyeuristic tendencies since we can watch while feeling safe.
Do the police ignore these disappearances? Yes. Do we as a society ignore what happens to poor women, prostitutes, drug addicted women, mentally ill women, alcoholic women, homeless women, minority women? Yes. Can a man get away with murdering these women for years? Yes. It happens over and over.

Everyone knows how the blacks do not cooperate with police. What if the cops went to that neighborhood. Everyone would be saying they didn't see anything, they didn't hear anything, or they don't know what the cops are talking about.