I am not quite curious enough to go ringing random doorbells across the street and asking folks I have never spoken to. ..

but police and a pair of crime scene techs were in the building across the street earlier this week and today there was police drama involving at least two households and no arrests but some really bizarre behavior on their front porch.

Curiosity is . . . . well, alright it is a burning curiosity.

A lot of the information about police calls is public. That stuff is commonly available in an abbreviated format.

At my office, the records department refers to it as "the blotter".

It gives, time, date, address, type of call. Anyone can come in off the street and ask to see it.

You just need to figure out where to go to ask, I think.

All sorts of ways to find out. My temptation would be to call the precinct, explain that I'm curious about stuff going on in my neighborhood, and ask -- as a favor -- if the sergeant could take a look and fill me in, or if he was too busy, and would prefer that I do a data practices request; no problem, either way.

The two times I've done that, I got a quick answer; in one case from the sergeant, in the other, it got kicked upstairs to the lieutenant, and we chatted a bit.

I'm perfectly willing to be the squeaky wheel, if necessary, but my own experience is that a low-key, friendly approach tends to loosen tongues more, and I found out stuff that wasn't, I believe, in any report.

While you may not hear everything, all the time, a police scanner is a very discreet way of doing the same thing.

If you wanted to, you could even hook it up to your computer to record when you can't listen.

Off the top of my head, I could probably list about 10 seriuos criminal activities in the last week that haven't nor won't hit the news.

While IANALEO, my guess is that there was some type of violent altercation, such as a domestic (with or without a weapon), and the crime scene guys were collecting as much evidence as possible to lock down the conviction.


MM