Carry On, Officer

Something had come up, but it wasn't something that was going to mess with their appointment. Angelo was still in his office, and when Vatar knocked, Angelo glanced up from his desk, shuffling some papers and making his desk look a bit more organized. He looked alright, mostly recovered after the holidays, although it was awfully hard to tell considering his hair was always kind of wild.

"Come on in and grab a seat," he called. Wasn't he supposed to be doing a ride along? The answer was probably yes, but something more interesting had come up, and he wanted to bounce ideas off Vatar and see what he came up with.

"Have you been paying attention to the news? Current events? Major crimes?" Angelo asked, digging through papers to find the report that had been sent to the newspaper.

"No, not the creatures," Angelo said, pulling out the report. "We've basically handed it off to other departments. We know why they're here, more or less, and while we'll respond to them, we're not in charge of that case. I meant this one."

Angelo carefully handed over the publically known evidence to Vatar.

"That's the jist of what we got. No pictures, since we haven't released those, but guy was a real shady character. Multiple stab wounds, face caved in, CAE symbols on the walls, body posed. Thoughts?"

Angelo was curious to see what Vatar would fixate on. The same things he had?

Angelo nodded along as Vatar explained his thought process. It wasn't too far from his own, although they'd followed completely different paths to get there.

"I started where you ended, mostly," Angelo said. "I have experience with organized crime, so that's where I tend to start. The victim was a gang leader. Any time someone involved in gang life gets killed in a way that isn't related to being a gang, I'm suspicious. Sure, accidents do happen, but more often than not I've come to accept that accidents are just a way of saying don't look too closely."

Angelo carefully filed the papers away.

"It's not my case, and no one wants to be the one to say 'I don't think it was actually a hate crime', but I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be gang warfare. But, religiously, I think the posing is a big giveaway as well."

It took Angelo a moment to remember that Vatar was literally an alien god or something along those lines, and maybe wouldn't get the full significance.

"Christ is a holy figure, and on the cross he's supposed to be dying for the sins of all humanity. Putting a demon in that pose seems to go against CAE beliefs. The demon isn't dying to save humans. In anti-demon rhetoric, they'd be sinners. The only posing I could see CAE doing would be to spread out a demons wings, or make them look otherwise inhuman. This, though? It's putting the demon in the same position as Christ, and that doesn't really line up for me."

Truly, Angelo hadn't gotten that far. He hadn't put very much thought into things like the wounds, in large part because, strictly speaking, it wasn't his case.

"We'll likely never know," Angelo said. "The trick with hate crimes is that the handling for them has to be really, really delicate. You don't say it's not a hate crime unless you know it's not a hate crime, and even then only if you're completely sure. You don't want to be wrong. Hate crimes are considered particularly bad because it doesn't just effect the victim. There's a lot of psychological impact. Demons start to wonder if they're safe. It does damage to the overall community of the island, so they're treated that much more harshly. The case'll probably get a lot of very careful attention, because no one wants to give the impression that the police don't care when a demon dies, even if he was a literal gang leader."

Which was unfortunate. It meant they couldn't do their jobs. "It means we'll have to be more careful in general. More watchful. You don't know if something's going to happen that'll make it way worse. Hate crimes often spark repeat incidents. Anti-demon groups take it as a sign they can get away with it, and pro-demon groups take it as a sign that they're going to be victimized again."

"Have you heard of the prisoner's dilemma?" Angelo said, flipping over a spare sheet of paper and quickly sketching it out as he explained. "It's a thought experiment. In very simple terms, you have two criminals who are asked to confess. If they betray their friend, they'll get a reduced charge. If they both betray each other, they'll both get two years in prison. If one betrays the other, but the other stays silent, then the one who stayed silent would get three years, and the one who betrayed would walk free. If both of them stay silent, they both only get one year. It's used in a lot of situations to explain how people react and cooperate when they can't trust that the other person will cooperate with them."

Angelo supposed his explanation probably wasn't the best, but the neat little grid explaining the options probably helped a lot.

"The way the police deal with hate crimes is kind of like that, except we're playing against the possibility that it's a real hate crime, and the possibility that the public will find out anyway. Like, without knowing who found the body, lets assume it's a random civilian."

Angelo tapped the grid.

"If we don't say it's a hate crime, just a murder, and they don't say anything, good! No one panics. Nothing goes wrong. If we do say it's a hate crime, and they don't say anything, people are stressed hearing it from the police, but it's not that bad. But on the other side of the grid, lets say that we say it's a hate crime, and they say it's a hate crime... again, stressful, but not that bad. The worst case scenario is the last option: That we don't bring it up as a hate crime, but the person who found the body tells people it is."

Angelo cringed, but didn't elaborate. The consequences of that would be terrible.

"So in the end we use language like investigating it as a potential hate crime so that no one gets freaked out if it does turn out to be an actual hate crime."