Crime doesn’t pay, but it entertains> Police beat collection ‘a modern encyclopedia’ of Bar Harbor malfeasance

BAR HARBOR POLICE BEAT, by Richard Sassaman, published in association with Words and Pictures of Bar Harbor, 163 pages, $12.95.

With the possible exception of restaurant reviews, no feature has more potential for creating public relations problems for newspapers than the traditional police beat column that essentially is a listing of police business as gleaned from the daily police blotter.

The column in many daily and weekly newspapers has always been a popular feature with readers — except, as you might suppose, for those whose names find their way into print, either as perpetrator of some petty misdemeanor or as innocent victim.

If the offended scream long and hard enough, newspaper editors have a problem on their hands. Soon, to keep peace in the community and the libel lawyers out of their hair, they begin publishing the police beat, sans names. Better safe than sorry, despite that old newspaper edict that names make news. Besides, they rationalize to anyone who questions such a cop-out, the items in the column are no less bizarre for want of a name.

That is the approach taken by the author in this amusing compilation of police beat items that ran in the weekly Bar Harbor Times over a 10-year period from 1979 to 1988. Much of the material was taken from the official files of the Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor and Tremont police forces. The book, first published in 1994 by Yardbird Books, is in a second printing and presumably available at your favorite bookstore.

“I enjoy that Police Beat often leaves a lot to the imagination, which usually is far more satisfying than real life,” Sassaman explains in an introduction, choosing this item to illustrate his point: “A Bar Harbor man escaped injury after being struck by a gasoline pump on the 23rd.”

Turns out that the guy was standing in front of the Cottage Street Variety Store, minding his own business, when a 1972 Mercury driven by a teen-ager slid on ice and sheared off the store’s gas pump, which, in turn, knocked our nameless man to the ground, creating one hell of a mess, etc.

Sassaman has categorized the police beat items under such subjects as “Acadia Accidents,” “Wild Kingdom” and “Senseless Violence.” Under Chapter 9, titled “Just The Facts Ma’am,” we learn that on Nov. 11, “police responded to a call for assistance from the operator of a Cottage Street restaurant who reportedly evicted a customer he found sitting at a table with his pants not all the way up. The subject claimed he was in town to conduct a taste survey of the seawater in various New England harbors.”

In “The Naked Truth” chapter there is this entry: “At 7:15 p.m. on the 26th, a Ledgelawn Avenue woman reported to police that when she went out on her porch at 2:30 that morning, she saw a nude man standing next to the porch. Police advised the woman not to wait 15 hours to report the incident should it occur again.”

Sassaman lists his top 10 police beat items, including the one about the bizarre behavior of a babe driving a yellow Vega while eating a banana, combing her hair and bouncing up and down in her seat as she made a U-turn in heavy traffic. And the complaint from the Northeast Harbor lady that someone had stolen all the leaves from her yard. (An intense investigation showed that the culprit had been a strong wind.)

I personally enjoyed the one about the Bluenose ferry workers and police struggling to remove an unstartable car from the cargo area below decks on a busy Friday night. The problem stemmed from a domestic dispute between a traveling Nova Scotia couple. During an argument at sea the husband reportedly threw the keys to the late-model Cadillac overboard. Served the woman right if she couldn’t take a joke.

As Sassaman states in a preface, the book “turns into kind of a modern encyclopedia of small-town crime, and as such probably shouldn’t be read straight through.” True enough. But reading it in fits and starts should produce fits and giggles, and an author can’t ask for more than that.