Ever since I worked for the imaginatively-named Chapel Hill Newspaper “which made a bold lean forward several years ago and became The Chapel Hill News”, I’ve had a soft spot for local papers. When I’m in a small town I occasionally pick up the paper and see how well their reporters fare at covering the Rotary Club meetings and high school athletic contests and giant tomato sightings which make up the core of community journalism.
If you really want to get the measure of a small town though, the best place to look is the police blotter. “When I worked for the CHN, I was surprised to find that the local perps liked to read of their own exploits, a circumstance which nearly got our police reporter into trouble when she mixed up the street names of two local bon vivants and reported that Heavy D had been caught performing crimes against nature in an alley with another man, when in fact it was Baby D. Heavy D was not pleased.”
Many thanks to Carla, a commentarian over at One Good Thing, for hipping me to The Arcata Eye. It’s a newspaper in Humboldt County, California that has the best police blotter I’ve ever read. Here are a few:
1:41 a.m.
A man and his beige leisure suit were asked to leave a Plaza tavern.
2:34 a.m.
After yelling his way up and down the 600 block of Shirley Boulevard, a man was arrested on a charge of cocktail abundance.
5:25 p.m.
Several frequent flyers got into a hissy-spat over he-looked-at-me-funny-related issues on South H.
12:33 p.m.
A man and his dawg, a big yellow Lab, couldn’t be persuaded to leave the Intermodal Transient Facility so that regular folks could use it for, y’know, catching buses and stuff.
6:25 p.m.
A Valley West motel offered weary travelers all the amenities – cable TV, drinking glasses sanitized for your protection and a dark-hooded freak panhandling for spare change in the lobby.
2:33 p.m.
Everyone loves your dog, lady, but not loose downtown.
7:32 a.m.
A bicyclist wearing a denim jacket nipped into a G Street gas station, snatched a container of fuel injection cleaner and scrammed on his two-wheeled steed. Must getcha high or something.
12:49 a.m.
Cultural festivities on Stewart Avenue were highlighted by a crowbar fight in the street.
3:14 p.m.
Duck or goose hunters turned out to be even less discriminating house-shooters, wounding a home on Larry Street. They agreed to be more careful, but that was of little solace to area waterfowl.
1:02 a.m.
Another adventurer who, armed with naught but a passel of adult beverages, had successfully repulsed sobriety for the night and was determined to share news of his condition with others in the never-a-dull-moment 2200 block of Alliance Road, was defeated by an even sterner foe – the cops, who took him to an unforgiving place of hard right-angles.