Dispatch log provides new insight into local world of law enforcement

A new feature in this week’s edition of the News-Register is something we’re calling the Law Enforcement Dispatch Log. 
For as long as anyone can remember ANR has published every week the court docket of traffic and speeding offenses as well as the activities of the county and district court systems. However, as a result of recent focus group meetings, all part of our participation in a national weekly newspaper revitalization initiative, we have decided to publish a weekly list of calls that come into the Hamilton County Dispatch Center for the Aurora Police Department and the Hamilton County Sheriff’s Office. Readers will find it on Page A2. (Our thanks to Chief of Police Paul Graham and Sheriff Jeromy McCoy for their cooperation and help with this effort.) 
These records are public information which the public has a right to know, but more than that, the public has a genuine curiosity about the work our law enforcement officers do on a daily basis. And needless to say that no matter what you see on the TV cop shows, law enforcement isn’t all chasing bad guys and solving crimes. 
This truth became abundantly clear to me in my former job as a reporter at the Custer County Chronicle in the Black Hills of South Dakota. For years, the Chronicle has published on a regular basis the Sheriff’s Log, a compendium of several days worth of calls to the dispatch center for the only law enforcement agency (besides the highway patrol) in a county that is just slightly larger than the state of Rhode Island, and which takes in the world famous Custer State Park with its herd of free-roaming buffalo. 
The Sheriff’s Log is edited by Custer County Deputy Sheriff Seth Thompson, whose quirky and dry sense of humor adds greatly to the entertainment value of the material. As a result, the log has become one of the more popular parts of the paper each week and there are people who subscribe to the Chronicle just for that. The presence of a number of popular tourist attractions in the area provides much of the humor for the log. For instance dispatch recently received a call from some out-of-state visitors complaining that people were feeding the state park’s herd of begging burros, which is something EVERYONE does and is hardly a heinous crime. 
Readers of the News-Register should not assume from this that our law enforcement log will be in the same vein. There won’t be any editorial flourishes or humor, just a simple reporting of the dates, times and types of calls that come into our local 911 center. We do believe, however, that it will give readers a unique insight to daily work performed by the men and women who serve and protect our local citizens. It also may have the effect of bringing a greater understanding between cops and citizens. 
In the Black Hills that has been one of the side benefits of publishing the Sheriff’s Log – a boost to the sheriff’s office’s community relations efforts. My friend, Custer County Sheriff Marty Mechaley, says members of the public come up to him all the time to bring up things they have read in the log, and he knows of people who read it religiously every week. He said if a group of calls listed in the log deals with thefts in a certain area, for instance, the log reminds people living in that area to keep an eye out for suspicious activities which results in more calls to dispatch. 
“If it’s on social media, it doesn’t seem like people spend a great deal of time,” he said. “They kind of just scroll through it... But the one thing I’ve noticed about the paper is people spend more time reading it, and then they probably go back to it throughout the week and read up on some things... and then get into conversations about it.”
While for years police cruisers have proclaimed the slogan of many agencies that they are there “to serve and to protect,” it seems like often the service part, which can make up the better part of an officer’s shift, is forgotten by members of the public. Mechaley said the Sheriff’s Log has a way of bringing those more mundane functions of law enforcement to light. 
“That’s another comment they make to me sometimes, ‘I can’t believe you guys have to deal with this stuff!’ And it’s like, ‘Well, there’s nobody else, you know. It’s just us!’” 
We hope our new law enforcement dispatch log will have the same effect – to foster a greater understanding of and appreciation for our law enforcement officers who work hard to serve and to protect us every day of the year. 
RON BURTZ can be reached at newsregister@hamilton.net