Small Town's Police Blotter Is A Riot

toggle caption Alexandra Gutierrez/KUCB

In one Alaskan fishing village, crime is a laughing matter. It's not the crimes that have residents chuckling so much as how they're written about. The Unalaska crime report is full of eagle aggression and intimate encounters gone awry in the Aleutian Islands.

When Sgt. Jennifer Shockley heads out on patrol each day, she's got the police blotter on her mind. Her goal is to paint a detailed picture of the town's often ridiculous crimes.

"I can only imagine that someone who's never been here would think that this is some kind of Twilight Zone town where every form of human oddity and absurdity exists all at once — exacerbated by alcohol," she says.

Twilight Zone is an understatement.

Since Shockley first started compiling the Unalaska crime report six years ago, she's written about vampire attacks, herds of feral horses chasing down cyclists, and "ravenous prowlers" who steal boxes of handkerchiefs — only to be discovered by the trail of blood and pizza they left behind.

The crime that happens in Unalaska, also known as Dutch Harbor, is innocuous for the most part. That gives Shockley some creative license.

Take this item for example:

Domestic Disturbance

A grown man asked an officer to tell his grown dipsomaniac son to go beddy-bye. The officer helped the drunk to bed, but declined the request to feed the family cat on the way out.

Or this one, about a routine animal complaint:

Petite piles of poo prompted protests to police.

While most blotters are dry retellings of a police department's calls, Shockley's are so outrageous that they even make her laugh. She strews her write-ups with words like "ruffian," "sternutation," "belligerent" and "lout," and her storytelling has earned a following larger than the town.

James Mason, the editor of the Dutch Harbor Telegraph and regular publisher of the blotter, says that Shockley has readers across Europe and South America, according to Google Analytics. He describes Shockley's entries as little soap operas and says that they're far and away his most anticipated feature.

"My hits on Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday are the highest of the week, and that's because of the blotter," Mason says.

For her part, Shockley enjoys the positive feedback and gets a kick out of being able to mix a little bit of wordplay into what would otherwise be a dull part of her job. As far as she's concerned, any minor incident is a poem waiting to happen.

"I'm still searching for the perfect palindrome," she says. I haven't found it yet, and I think it's gonna be really, really difficult to do, but I would love to have an entry that's a perfect palindrome."

And one day, Shockley thinks, she'll find a situation out there just waiting to be turned into a limerick.

Reports From The Unalaska Police Blotter

Here are some highlights from Sgt. Jennifer Shockley's crime reports. You can keep up with Unalaska's blotter on KUCB's website.