The Suspect is Outstanding

(Note - This is one of the entries that I submitted as a portion of my application to be a columnist with the Stanford Daily during Autumn Quarter 2010.)

Crime is an exciting subject - to read about, to watch in movies, to perpetrate in video games. From Capone to Gordon Gekko, the Joker to Bernie Madoff, we as a society make a point of paradoxically reviling the perpetrators of horrible crimes while sometimes finding ourselves admiring the sheer gall of their “achievements”.

A serial manifestation of this mixed disgust and fascination is the “Police Blotter”, a compilation published in the Stanford Daily and based upon reports provided by the Stanford Department for Public Safety. This section details three weeks’ worth of assorted rule-breaking, misdemeanors, and felonies. While the purpose of this publication is primarily to keep the Stanford populace informed about criminal activity on campus, I often find myself reading it not out of any desire to protect myself but rather out of need for some shallow voyeuristic intrigue and some useless statistics. It’s easier than reading an IR paper and a better stall tactic than refreshing my Webmail account (again). There’s something about the contrast between the extremely detailed reporting of the time, location, and nature of the dirty deeds in question with the extremely vague descriptions of the (anonymous) persons involved. No motivations, no complications, no judgments. Just the facts.

Just to spice things up, the writer of the August 12th edition of this feature goes so far as to (inadvertently) praise a wrongdoer: “At 2 a.m., a suspect used a fire extinguisher in the hallway of Branner Hall. The suspect fled on foot and is outstanding.” Even though this complement is the result of a grammatical error rather than honest appreciation of fire-extinguisher use, it’s nice to finally hear some passionate character assessment in our otherwise clinically dry crime pages.