BETTER CRIMINALS AND BETTER VICTIMS

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BETTER CRIMINALS AND BETTER VICTIMS

In case you haven’t noticed or been paying attention, I live in a small town.  Not just a small town but a small town in Georgia.  Now that in itself probably brings up some mental images depending on where you live or the books and movies you’ve seen.  To set the record straight, I haven’t always lived in small town Georgia.  I’ve lived in San Francisco, Honolulu, Los Angeles, Miami, and the Washington, DC area several times. I don’t even count the other garden spots the Army has sent me. Leesville, Louisiana, Killeen, Texas, Fayetteville, NC, Anniston, Alabama and Columbus, Georgia, also several times.

This brings me to the point of this blog. It’s not a travelogue, but an observation on living in a small town.  We have a weekly newspaper because we don’t have enough news to publish one every day.  I really…really love the newspaper.  We’ve got a great columnist and the publisher and I play poker occasionally, but the thing I enjoy most is the police reports.

The paper breaks down the crimes in the county by those handled by the city police and the sheriff’s office.  This ain’t Chicago but we do have our share of crimes and criminals.  For instance, this week the city police handled 376 calls.  Those calls resulted in 74 major crimes.  Major, you say.  Everything is relative. Somebody actually had less than an ounce of marijuana. Somebody else was driving without a tag and another person changed lanes without using his signal…or his arm depending on the age of the car and the driver. Now to the serious stuff.  We had 13 speeders, eight “hands free” law violations. Were they driving Teslas?  Maybe they were trying to drive with their knees…”Hey, y’all hold my beer and watch this.”  And my favorite that I’m still trying to figure out…”one laying drag.” Now we’re a small town and I suppose there may be one or two in the county, but where would you…never mind. Let’s move on to the Sheriff’s report.

A man was going 85 in a 55 zone.  Sheriff lit him up and he took off finally turning into a driveway.  Report said he was “extremely intoxicated”, claimed he was in his own driveway and if the deputy would just let him or help him into his house, he’d forget the entire episode.  The deputy had no sense of humor and the man spent the night as guest of the county.

Sheriff was called to the home of two brothers who evidently had been to the same place as the above gentleman and had consumed far too many adult beverages were doing batting practice on each other with baseball bats.

Then there was the lady who threatened a deputy and told him he was a worthless piece of humanity for attempting to arrest her for destroying her boyfriend’s tractor.

We get a lot of loose cattle, dogs chasing chickens and occasionally someone dispatching a dog to that great doghouse in the sky for said crime. People really take that one personal. 

As a writer the report is the equivalent of a gold mine for me.  I can’t make some of this up even at 3 AM when the crazies come to call.