‘Police Blotter’ a Perennial Reader Favorite in Small-Town Newspapers : Journalism: Residents say it is important to know where that siren was going last night. ‘Any crime that happens next door to me is a major crime,’ one executive says. ‘I think most of our readers feel that way.’

A scarecrow is abducted. A house is egged. Two driverless cars assault each other. This is the underworld of small-town America.

Big-city dwellers accustomed to murder and mayhem may chuckle at such seemingly quaint perils. But these are the sort of entries chronicled day after day in newspaper police blotters across the land. For local residents, it’s important to know where that screeching siren was heading last night.

Police blotters are fixtures in community newspapers in places where violent crime has not yet become commonplace. And yes, such places exist.

Take Montpelier, Vt., population around 8,000. “Juveniles throwing snowballs in front of the City Center, hindering pedestrians,” was the most shocking item in a recent Barre-Montpelier Times Argus blotter.

With only two murders in the entire state of Vermont in the last year, Times Argus blotters typically are filled with “real small stuff,” such as moose accidents and kids hanging on the courthouse light pole, said city editor Steve Costello.

Ditto Quincy, Ill. That’s where that scarecrow-kidnaping was perpetrated, according to the blotter in the local Herald-Whig. Valued at $15, the scarecrow was snatched from a local residence.

Murders in the small Mississippi River town are still rare enough that they’d make the front page, said editor Joe Conover.

“Most of the blotter stuff is pretty routine . . . a DUI arrest, bicycle stolen, a fight in a tavern--that kind of thing,” he said.

Conover said new residents from more cosmopolitan areas ask him, “Geez, why do you print that stuff?”

“Because people read it,” Conover says. “This sort of thing is extremely well read. People are just interested in what their neighbors are doing.”

Tonda Rush, president of the National Newspaper Assn., said police blotters are fixtures at nearly all the 4,000 community newspapers her group represents.

Rush said some newspapers may run blotter items for the humor value. But she defended printing even the most seemingly trivial of blotter crimes.

“Any crime that happens next door to me is a major crime,” she said. “I think most of our readers feel that way, whether it’s a stolen radio or a mugging.”

The police blotter has been a fixture of American newspapers large and small since as far back as the 1830s, according to Mary Ann Weston, an assistant professor of journalism at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. That was about the time the now defunct New York Sun borrowed the idea from newspapers in England.

Here’s a sampling of items from blotters across the country:

* The Centralia, Ill., Sentinel reported on two parked cars that assaulted each other--one rolled into the other in a grocery store parking lot.

* The Daily Register in Portage, Wis., told of a door that was egged.

* The Valley Voice in Penn Valley, Calif., listed a false alarm for a vehicle fire. (A non-fire, perhaps?)

Former big-city residents say such anecdotes are a refreshing change when they move to small towns.

Chuck Matroni left the Los Angeles area last year to become an innkeeper in Nevada City, Calif., in the Sierra foothills. He also became a regular reader of the blotter page in The Union of nearby Grass Valley.

“That’s the fun thing to read in the newspaper,” he said.

His all-time favorite blotter item appeared shortly after he moved in. It involved a barkeeper who was putting up Christmas decorations that irritated a drunken customer.

“The owner got pretty annoyed by it all and hit the guy with a beer mug. The guy came back with a bunch of buddies and they went at it with baseball bats,” Matroni said.

“When I saw that I said, ‘What’s going to top this?’ ”

He also is aware that the blotter might be the best-read feature in the paper.

“My wife got locked out one night and had to put up a ladder to get into the house,” Matroni said. “Her biggest concern was she would wind up in the police blotter the next morning.” She didn’t.