Having the Crime of Your Life

Life is good for the criminals in my college town. This might be because this is (or used to be) a family-friendly city. A city where folks know each other by name. A city where old ladies don't lock their doors and leave pies cooling on window sills. A city where the local preacher has influenced the town council to outlaw dancing and the young people have rallied together behind a troubled newcomer in town to both question the dancing law and to flagrantly plagarize the plot of "Footloose."

Back to my main point. The rise in crime could have some serious effects. For example, we could see a drastic rise in general surliness and curmudgeon-ness. Folks would deliberatelly forget each other's names and/or purposely call them by the wrong name. People would stop holding doors for handicapped people and cute co-eds. Pies cooling on window sills could be filled with with razorblades. Is this the city you want to live in? (If we can dance like Kevin Bacon then yes, I say!)

Well, unfortunately, it seems that there is little that the university police are capable of doing about the rise in crime. This last week the student run newspaper The Daily Galaxy (name has been changed, though now I'm doing it mostly for fun rather than for anonymity's sake), ran a recurring section of the paper called "Police Beat." This section has always been a tremendous source of enjoyment for me and my friends because two of the recurring themes of the Beat are 1) the generally frivolous and unimportant "crimes" that are mentioned and 2) the police hardly ever seem to make any headway in solving these crimes. The most common concluding statement in the entries is "Police have no suspects." It would be entirely appropriate if the title "Police Beat" contained the subheading "We Don't Stop the Crime, We Report the Crime." Alternatively, "Police Beat: Proudly Validating Criminals Through Free Publicity Since 1910"

A typical entry in "Police Beat" runs something like this. "July 31: Pie pilferers strike again, 3 pies, cherry, apple and razzle-dazzle berry crunch were stolen from a local woman's window sill. Police have no suspects." Sometimes there are related entries. "Aug. 1: Police were called in to investigate the report of bloody razor blades found in an alley outside a local creamery. Investigation revealed that most of the presumed 'blood' was razzle-dazzled berries. The incident is still under investigation."

I have not seen "Police Beat" in the paper for a while. And I cannot recall the last time I read an issue of Police Beat that brought such tremendous enjoyment to me. In part, it reads as follows below.

(Notes: D. Towers is a low cost, on campus housing complex. There are a total of six, six-story halls, un-inspiringly, an inexplicably labeled starting at the wrong end of the alphabet. FYI is a fake acronym that I'm using as an inside joke, but is a weekly teenager summer activity camp that the univerisity I attend rents space to every week of every summer. D. Towers are usually given up for FYI participants during the summer weeks. Hundreds of chipper, well-groomed teenagers come, learn, listen to inspiring music, vow to change their lives for the better, and then go home with dozens of phone numbers from the 'hotties' they met at FYI. As evidenced from the "Police Beat" that follows, they also do not exhibit an fantastically overwhelming level of intelligence or common sense).

(A photo of D. Towers)


I have not doctored any of this at all.

"Police Beat
Aug. 9: D.Towers W-hall. Money was taken from a student's wallet.
Aug. 9: D.Towers W-hall. A person attending FYI had $62 dollars taken from his wallet.
Aug. 10: D.Towers W-hall. An iPod valued at $275 dollars was stolen from the room of an FYI student.
Aug. 10: D.Towers W-hall. A two-gig iPod Nano and $10 dollars were taken from the room of an FYI participant.
Aug. 10: D.Towers W-hall. $50 in cash and a bolle of cologne was taken from another FYI participant.
Aug. 10: D.Towers W-hall. iPod speakers and a 30-gig iPod vidoe were taken from an FYI participant's room.
Aug. 10: D.Towers W-hall. A digital camera, cellular phone and $1,250 dollars in cash were taken from an FYI participant's room.
Aug. 12: D.Towers W-hall. $20 was taken from the wallet of an FYI participant"
(This is the end of the real "Police Beat")

Funny potential further entries from the same "Police Beat." (You can decide if they're really funny)(Trust me they are):

" Aug. 14: Police seeking anyone with information about an individual carrying around a bag of iPod's and cologne. Suspects might be flagrantly displaying around $1,300 dollars."

or

"Aug. 13: D.Towers W-hall. D.Towers W-hall was taken from an FYI participant."

or, perhaps not in the "Police Beat" but elsewhere in the paper,

"Study's show University Police remarkably slow on the uptake."
"Local Blog Writer Demands to Know 'Where on earth do teenagers get so much disposable income from?' "
(or my personal favorite)
"iPod's for sale! Cheap! Must sell! Need to raise money for mission!"

But in all of this jovialness, let's not forget the true victims when crime raises its ugly, mishshapened, Kevin-Baconish head. It is us, the citizens, the locals who are forced to face the cold reality: That razzle-dazzle berry is a really dumb name for a pie and doesn't taste nearly as good as the name would lead you to believe.