Goodbye, Boring Blotters: 'Cop Shop' Gets New Life

By: Mark Fitzgerald As often as not, the cover of the Chicago Tribune's youth daily RedEye is given over to huge photos of Tom and Katie, Brad and Angelina, Paris Hilton, or some other celeb du jour. One day last May, however, the faces of three decidedly unfamiliar young women stared back at readers beside a headline that read, "Life after rape."

Sasha Walters, Mary Simmerling, and Anne Ream were three of eight women who related their stories of rape and sexual assault in the cover story. Regular RedEye readers were likely unsurprised by the grim topic, because the tabloid has committed to document every sexual assault committed in Chicago during 2005. In a newspaper given to whimsical titles such as "Whoville" for its gossip page, RedEye every two weeks runs a feature with the blunt label "Rape Report." The report lists all recent sexual assaults reported to Chicago police by neighborhood, block, time, and date.

"We have made a big commitment to this," says RedEye Co-Editor Jane Hirt. The rape project has its roots in the paper's coverage of a serial rapist who terrorized the hip neighborhood of Wicker Park during the summer of 2003. RedEye has also recently added a feature called "Neighborhood crime."

With its crime coverage, RedEye is part of a larger phenomenon: the revival of the police blotter by youth-oriented and alternative papers. In the process, these papers are redefining the very style of the blotter from the just-the-facts-ma'am style that still prevails at the declining number of mainstream dailies and community papers that run police reports.

Like RedEye, some alternatives' blotters are handled in a straightforward manner, but presented in a themed way to inform and educate their readership about crime in their neighborhoods.

City Paper in Baltimore, for instance, uses its "Murder Ink" feature to report on every single murder in Baltimore, something the daily papers are not doing. "We thought it was a particularly important thing to do because murder is such a problem in Baltimore," says Murder Ink's writer, Special Projects Editor Anna Ditkoff. And lest City Paper's readers think murder is something that happens only among drug dealers in bad neighborhoods, Murder Ink makes a special point of including details of the location, "like a homicide near this landmark, some place you might go," Ditkoff explains.

Other alternatives play police blotter for laughs. Weekly Dig in Boston has "Perp Walk," short reports of crime usually punctuated with a comic one-liner of commentary. "It's seedy as hell," Editor Joe Keohane says, "which is a relief in a town as prim and tight-lipped as Boston."

The Charleston (S.C.) City Paper takes a similarly low-brow approach, says Assistant Editor Bill Davis. "We're not really doing this as a service to readers or anything like that ? we sort of take a 'dick joke' approach," he laughs. For its hugely popular "Best of Blotter" annual issue, City Paper groups its items under labels such as "Crimes With Urine" or "Spoken Word Art," for particularly graphic telephone harassment reports.

Alternatives have not jettisoned all the rules of the traditional police blotter. Davis, for instance, insists that while items can have a funny spin, they must be "accurate, accurate, absolutely accurate." And most alternative blotter items don't name names. "Putting names in police reports that you don't follow up on to find out what the real story is, seems to me to be irresponsible," says Ken Edelstein, managing editor of Creative Loafing in Atlanta.

Creative Loafing was the first alternative to feature a crime log, according to Rodger Brown, who created "The Blotter" in January 1987. Brown liked the tone and "peculiar kind of vocabulary" cops used to narrate crimes, and came to see "The Blotter" as "existential poetry."

Now a freelance writer, Brown doesn't like most alternative blotters these days. "You can't make it any better than the cop's own language," he says. "If you start to tell it as some kind of Borscht Belt gag ... you're missing the whole point of the humanity of the thing."

Creative Loafing still plays it straight ? and for laughs. Consider this recent item by current "Blotter" writer Lauren Keating: "A middle-aged woman bought a rabbit vibrator worth $80 at adult store on Roswell Road. She paid with an 'American Express Gift Cheque' that was worth $100. The cashier gave her $20 back. A few days later, the store tried to cash the American Express Gift Cheque. It was a counterfeit."

Some alternatives look beyond the cop shop to fill blotters. Since November, Washington (D.C.) City Paper has published a feature called "Hall Monitor," verbatim "incident reports" from the D.C. public school system. "Whoever is in charge of writing [the reports] has a sort of intuitive narrative ability," says Editor Erik Wemple. "We keep thinking it's run its course, and then we file another [FOI request] and we get reports that are all the more spectacular."

Whether they take a comic or grim tone, alternatives report that their blotters are often the single most popular feature. RedEye research, for instance, found that the top three topics of interest to readers were, in order, Chicago Transit Authority issues, neighborhood crime, and sexual assaults. In Baltimore, "Murder Ink" is "oddly popular," writer Ditkoff says."Sometimes I worry people read it for different reasons than we intended," she adds. "I've had people tell me, 'Murder Ink is so cool.' That's like, the last thing I want to be."

Sarcasm, though, has its own rewards, many alt-papers are finding. The Charleston City Paper's "Blotter" has even changed how its writer, Bill Davis, introduces himself at parties: "If I say I'm assistant editor of City Paper, and that doesn't get a number of 'oohs' and 'ahhs,' I say, 'Oh, yeah, and I write 'The Blotter.' And then they go, 'Oh, I love that.'"