Weeklies Add Humor to Their Crime Columns

By: Seth Porges Art can appear where you least expect it. Just open up a community newspaper and look at the police log. The who, what, where, and when of petty crime in local communities can seem to be pretty dry, even depressing, most of the time, but a few clever newspaper editors have realized this doesn't mean they can't be funny, creative, or even poetic with the basic facts. The idea seems to be catching on at weeklies across the country.

The father of it all is Kevin Hoover, editor of the Arcata Eye, a community paper in Northern California's Humboldt County whose work has become so well-known that he is currently compiling a collection of his police logs for a book.

Under Hoover, a mundane noise complaint is turned into a Dr. Seuss-esque limerick: "3:55 p.m.: A bongo's percussory drone, Like Lucifer's own metronome, Raged on for an hour, Extending its power, Across Patchouli Plazadome."

Or: "1:12 a.m.: Officials at an all-night Heindon Road diner had some trouble persuading a topless man to put on a shirt, so the other customers could masticate their hash browns in peace without his brazen nipples obtruding on the scene."

Hoover may be the "Living Master" of the police log, as the New York Press deemed him, but other community papers have taken a similarly tongue-in-cheek approach to reporting adventures in their local precinct. Often, the humor of police logs comes from their absurd reality, as in this entry by Charles Mudede of the weekly Stranger in Seattle: "Officer B. Hope reports that today he was told by a complainant that an unknown woman had driven all the way up from Arizona to reclaim her husband (whom we shall call 'Burt'). The woman believes that she is on 'a mission of God' and that she is [Burt's] true wife. The unknown Arizona woman contends that the complainant stole Burt from her, but now she wants her man back..."

The Argus-Courier, a weekly community paper in Petaluma, Calif., utilizes a terse take on Hoover's more ambitious style:

"7:45 a.m.: Maybe in the rush to get to work on time, this free spirit simply forgot his/her pants. Or perhaps s/he wished to experience an all-over breeze. Whatever the reason, police busted the soul for indecent exposure."

Ralph Gardner Jr., in "The Crime Blotter" column in the weekly New York Observer, uses humor, along with a very narrow selection of the prodigious amounts of local crime, to make light of some mind-blowing criminal antics. In his Oct. 20 column, he wrote:

"The suspects ... approached a 32-year-old Columbia University foreign student whose New York City street smarts were apparently still in the developmental stage. 'They set in motion an elaborate scheme where the perp made believe he was a foreign national in possession of $300,000 which he could not take back home,' explained Police Officer Clark Tiger ... The Columbia student was persuaded to withdraw $1,000 from her bank account ... in exchange for being designated safe-keeper of the 300 grand... [T]he student opened the bag ... [and] discovered it contained worthless paper. Her $1,000 had been stolen when she wasn't looking."

In this item, Gardner demonstrates what makes police logs so intriguing: the sheer extent of human stupidity. It was an Ivy League student who fell for this scam.

But some newspaper editors feel that those who try to make police notes too humorous are walking a fine line. Leah Pietrusiak, editor of citylink, a community paper serving Chicago's Near West Side, warns of the dangers of downplaying crime with humor, especially in larger cities where serious crime is more common. "You can be humorous in a small town ... but you have to be really careful to not downplay the seriousness," Pietrusiak says. "If [readers] don't take what they are reading seriously and don't take it as a warning to be careful ... they won't apply it to their own situation. Ultimately, you're there to make people aware of crime and things they should be aware of."

Hoover contends that while the Eye makes light of petty crime, it is careful not to derive humor from more serious situations. "We never make light of anything that's really bad," Hoover says. "Obviously if there's a serious robbery or accident, we're not gonna make light of it."

The humor of the Eye police log (check it out at www.arcataeye.com), according to Hoover, comes from the purely avoidable circumstances of much of it. "I've never understood why [humor] is arbitrarily cut out of things," Hoover says. "If you see some of these incidents going down, they're soaked in humor. To approach them in a serious way is to arbitrarily cut out part of what happened."