argh-i-forgot

Last night, I was telling some friends about this one news story about how in Alaska, much of the state has violent convicts running free because that's the one place where they don't have enough prison staff. I searched for it today for 40 minutes and could not find it, often using terms like "Alaska" and "convict" with the limiter "site:propublica.org". I finally found the article by looking through all of the ProPublica Alaska articles.

Citizens Hide From Active Shooters as Alaska Is Slow to Deliver on 2019 Promise of Village Troopers

This is the bit I remembered:

RUSSIAN MISSION, Alaska — As the summer months stretched into fall, Justin Edwards would sometimes bump into the man wanted for his attempted murder. In the street or by the schoolhouse or village store.

“He’d say, ‘Hi,’ and act like nothing happened,” said Edwards, 46, who has about 30 shotgun pellets seeded from forearm to bicep in his right arm. Edwards usually said hi back.

“I know that he was on the run,” he said. “But there was nothing I could do about it.”

In this Yukon River village, population 330, residents have long said that if someone is wanted for a serious crime, all they have to do is hide. The Alaska State Troopers might fly in to look for them, but within a few hours the officers would be gone, and even someone targeted in a manhunt could return home like nothing happened.

So, it was not a prison staffing issue as I had misremembered. It's that 1 in 3 villages in Alaska Alaska communities had no local law enforcement of any kind.

Maybe about ten years ago, I assumed that if I ever forgot where a web page was, as long as I remembered some of the details about it, I'd be able to find it by searching. I never explicitly updated that assumption.

First, misremembering a detail can severely throw off even a good search engine, as in this case. Secondly, there's lots of garbage on the web now, making it much harder to search. If you can't narrow things to a specific domain, you're in trouble. And finally, search engines themselves are compromised. So, it's critical to bookmark and label and, in many cases, archive the web pages you want to recall later.