The item ran on a Tuesday in 1994 and it is nine words long: Domestic disturbance, 400 block Vine, no arrest made.
It was printed because it was on the log the department sent over every morning — a record public under state law, which is how the arrangement began — and it was on the log because an officer wrote it, and it was in the paper because the paper had printed that log, item by item, since 1912.
The paper stopped in 2018. The decision took about ten minutes in a meeting I was in. Nobody in the newsroom argued for keeping it and nobody outside the newsroom noticed, with one exception I will come to.
I have thought about that log for a long time and what I have arrived at is not that printing it was wrong. It is that for eighty years we published a police department's own account of its day, verbatim, unedited, under our masthead, and called it the police beat, and a beat is something a reporter does.
Consider what an item on that log actually is. It is a record produced by an officer, for departmental purposes, describing what the officer determined had happened. It is not an allegation tested by anybody. It is not a charge. In many cases it names an address and a category of incident, and in our paper it ran with the address, and the address is a household.
Now consider what the paper added. Typesetting.
The department chose what went on the log. The department chose the words. The department chose which calls were logged as what — and I know from a later story that the classification of some incidents changed twice in the 1990s, without announcement, which changed what our readers saw about their town while nothing changed about their town.
So the accountability relation ran the wrong way round for eighty years. The institution supplied the copy; the newspaper supplied the credibility.
The argument for the blotter is real and I made it myself in 2018, briefly. It is the most-read thing in a local paper, reliably, everywhere. It is the section that tells a reader what is happening on their street, and it is very often the only regular contact a reader has with any account of what the police do all day. Take it away and you do not get better coverage; you get no coverage, and a department that is now reported on only when something explodes.
That argument persuaded me for about a week and then I noticed it was an argument for a police log, not for ours, and that we had never once in eighty years run the log alongside anything that checked it. Not the disposition of the cases. Not the calls where the department declined to log. Not a single follow-up on a nine-word item.
The exception I mentioned: three months after we stopped, the department's public information officer called and asked why, and then asked, in a tone I would describe as genuinely puzzled, how people were supposed to know what they did.
I said they could put the log on their own website, which they now do. It gets, by their own figure, a fraction of the readership. It is also, for the first time since 1912, correctly attributed.