Whereas in English "Caracal" refers to a “medium-sized wild cat”, in Romania it’s a small town, possibly named after the long disappeared animal. Recently, what may very well be a serial killer has been arrested after some agonizing, train-wreck of a police investigation. This would be the first such criminal there in a long time.

How long? Since pretty much the 70s, Rimaru’s era. Back when we also had “thus my days go” which was recently played as a “manea” at Neversea and Electric Castle and other festivals, causing a massive backlash from blue-blood Romanians (dv-manea).

To the right, the other missing girls most likely murdered by the same guy, from the “missing kids” page, which we linked under the screenshot. Incidentally, the main police website has a few missing kids, but the local county website has nothing listed on its “missing” page (ipjca-polro).

In summary, a girl had to hitch-hike from her village to a town to take “preparations” for school (“meditatii” in Romanian); the driver who took her is probably a serial killer (hn-procron).

• She called 112 (EMS) more than once from his phone, in his house.
• Police was dispatched in several incorrect (and very far) addresses.
• Local police came to the scene called by a neighbour who had heard the girl’s screams and smelled something burning and spent hours in front of the house where the girl was killed, then burned, waiting for a mandate.
• The police entered the house (apparently, anyone can if it’s about saving a life, as provided by the Constitution) 19 hours later.
• Shortly after the news of the quagmire exploded, quite a few bureaucrats were fired.
• We learned that the policemen made it extremely difficult for the father to file the police report (hn-cumpanasu).
• The suspect is one Gheorghe Dinca, 66, auto mechanic.
• PM Dancila calls for a referendum to drastically increase punishments for pedophilia, etc (hn-dancila) causing CTP to call her a “first-class political hyena” (d24-ctphiena)

why

I’ve been reading on most of my Romanian friends’ Facebook walls about the crime(s). People are angry with the government, the country, and within this anger, their personal, individual frustrations surface. For some, it’s the police (“gaborii”), perceived to only “work” for those in power, for others it’s the infrastructure, for some is the current government which may have been weakening police powers, some parents are upset with the bankrupt education system (for which I had some solutions).

I had not read all the details before commenting on a friend’s post, so I took issue with having funds for school-prep (“meditatii”) but not for proper transportation, to which my friend replied that there may have been none, which did strike me as odd, until I remembered about the phenomenally decrepit transportation infrastructure. I’ve written about this in the traffic category: it’s impossible to bring the car infrastructure to a satisfactory level in a short time, and while that work needs to be done at least in part, the focus should be on reviving the intercity railways, public transportation in the cities and separated bike lanes; sadly, none of this is done well and in most of the country at all.

cancrime

However, as many have pointed out (fb-craciun), Romanians overreact by a long shot (not unexpectedly, but still..). Right now, as we speak (i.e., read/write), in Canada there is a manhunt for a couple of guys suspected to have been serial killers of teenagers (cbc-teamkillers). Here in Toronto, police nearly missed a serial killer who killed at least 8 men and there’s been some public scrutiny though not enough according to victim’s advocates (w-tk1017). My point is, serial killers pop up everywhere, even in countries with far better education or transportation infrastructure, at any time (tst-past).

EMS has massive problems in Romania, and it’s been like this for quite a while, falling behind even that in Moldova Republic (here in North America it’s 911, whereas in Europe it’s 112). Romania has a “blocked bid process” for the new system which had been started in 2018, whereas in Moldova is up an running, and Moldovan specialists are eager to help their fallen behind Romanian brothers.

fixes

There are numerous systemic problems that need to be corrected, many not requiring massive investments. I and most of my friends are still peeved by what we see as a wasted vote in the anticorruption referendum and we may be too quick to blame the PSD government for having weakened the police. But that’s not what happened (fb-anpopa). It turns out that STS (which provides, AFAI understand, the tech infrastructure to police) cannot pinpoint the address automatically and supposedly needs more SRI help, if we are to believe some “judges forum” (hn-foju). This is an issue that’s not entirely resolved in the Western world either and though our systems (in North America, for instance) do work, they are tilted toward invasion of privacy. In Romania, it seems that the framework has been corrupted by internecine fights between SRI and PSD, via the Constitutional Court, which back in 2008 I called “Constipational”, and there may be more respect for procedure/privacy (as the case likely is in the rest of Europe).

And that’s why what PM Dancila is proposing is so dangerous. In an attempt to deflect from CCR’s devilishquestionable work and PSD’s weakening of the prosecutorial framework, PSD is attempting to use the referendum tool credited with having lost them the MEP elections. This unconscionable device was incidentally used by Clinton and Democrats to regain power after the Republicans have been cleaning on “security” and “punishment”. And they did get the power at the expense of USA having the largest proportion of incarcerated citizens in the world (only China is close), and now they started killing them again, much like China. Back to Romania, though this is a terrible idea, if USR and PNL will oppose it they lose, and if they go with it we’ll have to take money away from infrastructure investment (where is desperately needed) and build prisons instead to keep idiots in, some of whom may be just so upset with traffic and structural underinvestment that they resort to crime. Many of those communicating aggressively their hatred of the status quo may very well be those who will end up in the soon-to-be-built-prisons (rg-aggressive).

Some people point out that this serial killer was particularly dumb and there may be many others who just won’t ever be caught. It is likely that the upcoming changes (of which quite a few are needed) will overshoot and will transform what is a weak enforcement regime with significant respect for personal freedoms into a more draconian system that will do nothing to prevent crime but will erode liberties.

I know that most people are very upset, but still I will suggest that we could also call Gheorghe Dinca, in an updated joke, “the new criminal after daRimaru: caRimaru.”

Sources / More info: ipjca-polro, dv-manea, cbc-teamkillers, w-tk1017, fb-craciun, fb-anpopa, hn-caracronica, hn-voiculescu, hn-cumpanasu, hn-dancila, d24-dinca, d24-hiena, hn-procron, hn-foju, tst-past, rg-aggressive