The biggest deterrent to crime
in a small rural town may be the newspaper’s police blotter. With
so little crime news, every infraction makes it into print. Worse,
since everybody knows everybody, even your tiniest speeding ticket
goes into a gigantic Gossip Database, to be recalled by little old
ladies at the least appropriate moments.
At least, that’s
the folk wisdom. But I’ve always suspected it’s more complicated
than that.
I live in a town of about 2,000 people, a
county seat with a bit of tourism. That’s actually too big for the
best kind of police blotter: the one that lists every single call
any officer made. Whenever I visit smaller towns, I delight in
reading what really occupies most of a cop’s day: lost cats,
phantom burglars, or nicked fenders.
Instead, our local
paper runs a “Ledger” of court appearances. Since lost cats rarely
lead to legal action, this is a higher threshold, and you learn
less about day-to-day life. But you do learn names, which makes it
a very popular feature. In small-town papers, the Ledger and the
Classifieds — hidden on inside pages and printed in the
smallest possible type — are the first things readers turn
to.
The Ledger tells you who was charged with what crime,
and often provides a follow-up weeks later, when the judge makes a
ruling. The Fifth Amendment may prohibit a person being tried twice
for the same crime, but the Ledger is less kind. When you read
about So-and-So’s sentence, you think, “Wow, he was just in the
Ledger last month!” — thus projecting him as more delinquent
than he really is.
Over the years, however, I have grown
discontented with our town’s police blotter. Part of it is trying
to translate legal jargon into dastardly deeds. When someone I knew
was arrested on marijuana charges several years ago, he was
delighted that it appeared in the Ledger as “possession of a Class
IV substance.” He knew the gossips couldn’t do much with a charge
they didn’t understand.
Worse, even if you can decipher
the meaning, many of the crimes seem banal. Speeding ticket?
Expired plates? Stop-sign violation? (I can just picture that stop
sign. Nobody stops there.) Yet I’m not so morbid as to hope for a
drunk-driving or domestic-partner assault.
Also tiresome
is sifting through all the outsiders: the out-of-state hunting
violators, the out-of-county boaters with improper paperwork, the
Ohio tourists who probably still thought Montana had no speed
limits. If I wanted lists of unfamiliar names, I could just read an
out-of-town phone book.
But one week last winter, our
police blotter accidentally acquired an additional feature: the age
of the accused. I say “accidentally” because the ages have since
disappeared again; I believe the paper’s policy is not to print
ages, but for one week the reporter forgot.
Did that
week’s police blotter make worthwhile reading! After all, though
it’s not very interesting to learn that Joe Blow got a speeding
ticket, it’s extremely interesting to find out how old he is.
I knew Johnnie, the shortstop on our softball team, was a
crafty veteran. But 43? My goodness, that’s old. My admiration for
his athletic skills skyrocketed — and I immediately forgot
the “registration violation” that landed him in the Ledger. And
Mark: I must have missed his 40th birthday party. And Michael,
whose face I can picture, though I can’t remember how I met
him… yeah, if I had to guess, I’d say he was about 44.
I was reading that issue of the paper at a local
café. On her first day of work, the new waitress was very
attentive. As I paid before leaving, another waitress formally
introduced us. “Of course.” I thought to myself, hearing her name.
“I just read about you.”
But this isn’t at all anything
you can say out loud: “I just read about you in the Ledger.” And
already I’d forgotten what sort of traffic violation she’d been
charged with. So I just nodded and said something polite.
While I was thinking: “25! I wouldn’t have guessed you were a day
over 21!”
John Clayton is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He lives and writes in Red Lodge,
Montana.
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