The answer, which I'm confident that you know, based upon your allowance that perhaps the attorney is making a falsified claim, is that there is nothing, at that point. Charges for different crimes require different levels of evidence. Charges for the same crimes, committed in different circumstances (motive, for example) require different evidence (and intention). Charges in different locales require different levels of evidence. All these facts, and plenty more, are far beyond the scope of an uninformed Arstechnica columnist.

Edit: the fact that someone saw fit to down vote this comment is proof of idiocy, in and of itself. Just because you don't understand how the criminal justice system works, is no fault of mine.

You're being downvoted for weirdly aggressive attitude and for the insult which you refused to remove.

Is it an insult or a plea for reasoning? No, I have a Bachelor's degree in CJ, but outside of that, if the primary issue is the determination to pursue charges, then what happens if there are no actions which precipitate charges?

> "Is it an insult or a plea for reasoning?"

The former. Possibly also the later, but definitely the former.

And, potentially biased, from the Arstechnica side?? That's an understatement, to say the least. I can say, with a fair amount of certainty, that nearly every, if not every writer on the Arstechnica payroll, is absolutely biased toward the defense side, in this case, and just about every other one. Scrape their site and return the pro-law enforcement vs negative-law enforcement articles, and there will absolutely be an enormous bias present.

If law enforcement is on average generating more negative newsworthy incidents than positive ones, then the unbiased thing to do is to publish a proportionally higher number of negative articles. You'd have to weight the incidents by importance and see if they are more likely to publish less important negative articles and less likely to publish more important positive articles.

This, too, begins with a false premise: that journalists are equally likely to seek out positive and negative stories, and to give both of them equal importance. That is a naive assumption, unfortunately, and the facts of reporting - bad events make for good copy - prove it entirely false.

It's not false, just oversimplified. I swept all that complexity under the word "newsworthy".

This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

Of course, it is a lot harder to prove if you are saying something different than the truth.

> This is incredibly easy to prove. Count all the good stories that have happened, and all the bad. Compare the ratios to different publications.

I think that's likely to be a lot more difficult than you think: how does an independent observer know what the count of good and bad events is, rather than the count of good & bad published events? The trouble is that if an event isn't published, it's practically invisible to an observer.

This is a related issue to the fact that many sensational crimes are less common today, but perceived to be more common due to over-coverage in the media.