Small Town Crimes Are Hilarious

Sometimes the Google Alerts send us crap and sometimes they send us great things like the one in this post about a small town police log. Today's find comes from Lodi, California just east of the Bay Area. Before I get into this story, though, I want to tell the story of the best police log entry I can remember from my own small town newspaper.

I went to law school in Oregon and the place I lived had a weekly paper with the crime blotter. This town was very white (like most all of Oregon) and fairly affluent. Anyway, some women called the police reporting she had spotted a member of Al Qaeda entering the local Safeway. She knew it was Al Qaeda because he looked middle Eastern and had a towel on his head. No joke, this is what she reported. The fellow was not contacted according to the police log. This one was slightly better than the lady who kept reporting that a mysterious pair of black pants kept showing up in her house.

Anyway, on to the soccer related police log entry. On this past Sunday in Lodi there was some property destruction going on and soccer was the culprit.

Wayward soccer ball, times two
1:51 p.m.: Adults were playing soccer at Needham School, 420 S. Pleasant Ave., and couldn't keep the ball on the correct side of the fence. First it hit a woman's pick-up truck, and then it destroyed her flower bed.

Well, that's a shame.

More importantly, though, it is clear Lodi's police force is handling some very important matters and mediating disputes:

Refusing to nap

12:46 p.m.: A 9-year-old boy didn't want to take a nap and was screaming at the top of his lungs in a backyard in the 500 block of South School Street. Police mediated the dispute between child and mother.

Glad it all worked out.