Police-Beat Mentality: a Little of It in All of Us

For nearly a year, I’ve been this newspaper’s night police reporter in Orange County.

It’s a beat that many reporters don’t covet. My hours are late, my social life suffers and I deal intimately with two elements of society I normally try to avoid: criminals and cops.

But the night cop beat is unlike any other. There are moments of sheer excitement, the kind that get the adrenalin pumping, like a wild ride down the freeway with the lights and sirens blaring. On occasion I have accompanied narcotics detectives on million-dollar drug busts or followed patrol officers sweeping their city for murderous gang members.

There are also hours of sheer tedium, phoning one police department after another, checking to see if the truly horrific has happened. And during some shifts, there is nothing better to do than call a police watch commander and chat about the weather.

I don’t think you can be on this beat long before it starts to affect your personality.

Like a tour guide with a taste for the gruesome, I occasionally point out to friends gas stations or convenience stores where particularly heinous crimes have occurred.

Other times, I blurt out trivia like: “Did you know 1990 was the bloodiest year in Orange County, with 171 homicides?” or, “The Orange County coroner did an autopsy the other day and found a 9-foot tapeworm in some guy.”

I’ve also developed a peculiar fascination for miscreants with bizarre or creative twists to their crimes, such as the “Potbellied Flasher,” a corpulent man with a fondness for exposing himself, or the wig-wearing bank robber dubbed the “Tina Turner Bandit.”

Scarier yet, I’ve developed a kind of gallows humor. I recall being horrified at myself for snickering when I heard about a man who died when his bowling ball fell from an airplane’s overhead luggage space and landed on his head.

Then there are the repulsive aspects of the beat, like going to the scene of a traffic accident and stepping over carnage after a drunk driver rolled his truck on Ortega Highway, killing himself and three friends who were riding in the open-back bed of the vehicle.

And there are the difficult times, when I have to call people late at night and ask them about a relative who recently died.

But the most unsettling part of the beat is the way so many factors determine whether and how a crime gets reported. Time, space and information constraints often determine whether someone’s life is condensed to a paragraph.

For example, suicide in a private home does not usually appear in the newspaper. But if a suicide is public, chances are it will be reported in the paper.

I sometimes ask myself why we cover crime and other tragedies. I think the bottom line is that everyone, to a degree, has a certain fascination with these events, especially those that involve death.

And if there were a murder in your neighborhood, wouldn’t you want to know what happened? If there has been a rash of burglaries nearby, don’t you want to know how they occur? If your answer is yes, you are part of the reason why we report it.