Close Readings of the Police Blotter

If you read police blotters enough, you start to notice the colors: Pink bike. A yellow color backpack. Silver four-dour sedan. Heather-blue uniform pants. A black male wearing a black hat with white lettering, a navy blue coat, and blue jeans.

You notice the colors mostly because there aren’t many other details. Place, time, incident description—color of suspect’s clothing or car. Often the color of his or her skin.

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I read police blotters because I write about crime, but I also enjoy getting lost in them. I can spend hours scrolling through outdated lists of events that happened places I’ve never visited: Rutherford, New Jersey; Killeen, Texas; Eliot, Maine. Someone told me once—and I’m not sure how he would have known, but I chose to believe him—that police blotters are