BEYOND THE BLOTTER

Police headquarters is to street crime what the Pentagon is to the foxhole, flight line, or carrier deck. It's the place where law enforcers fly desks. It's where the brass hide and scheme and where the hapless and over-the-hill are kept out of harm's way. The street is sirens and dying victims. Headquarters is memos and doughnuts. Politics turn police headquarters into something closer to I,Claudius, than to Hill Street Blues.

Somewhere in the confines of police headquarters in every decent-sized city is a room where the reporters work. In some towns that place is called The Shack; in Chicago, like most towns, that room is the Cop Shop. To the cop shop on the seventh floor of Chicago police headquarters one day in May of 1988 came yet another kid reporter hoping to change the way newspapers covered crime.

In walking through the cop shop door that spring morning, Tribune reporter Robert Blau was reenacting a cliche: the police beat going to either some freshfaced rookie sniffing the air for whiffs of the ghosts of Winchell and Hecht or to some superannuated oldtimer awaiting retirement.

The Tribune's new guy at the cop shop does a good job taking us along as he learns the ropes. He envies the practiced eye of his Sun-Times competitor, appreciates the work ethic of the underpaid staffers of the City News Bureau, and understands the burn-out of those cop-shop colleagues who have set their career compasses to auto-pilot. He knows he has entered the game in a late inning because his police pressroom of 1988 reveals no poker games, bourbon bottles, or displaced bodies lying about. My generation of newsie is the last to remember spittoons, scribes in comas, and legmen who couldn't operate a typewriter, let alone a computer terminal.

Blau's teacher -- for one and only one day -- is his predecessor and does not love Blau. The new kid, it seems, has aced his predecessor out of a twelve-year sinecure at police headquarters. The old guy was pushed into another journalistic purgatory: the overnight city desk. The press room and the police superstructure surrounding it do not love the parvenu Blau either. They believe he screwed their friend. It is not a good start. Awkwardness turns to tragedy three months later. The "old guy" dies of a heart attack. He was in his mid-forties. After the funeral, at the wake in the man's home, a colleague says to Blau, "You must feel pretty weird. I mean, people see you as partially responsible."

We watch Blau lose his innocence and his high school certainties. He works the beat hard, learning to spot the subtle clue -- an unexpected address, an I-think-I-know-that-name name -- that spurs him to push beyond the bloodless shorthand of official police language. Male, black, DOA, drive-by. Male, white, hispanic, thirty-three, DOA, gunshot wounds, argument on street. Charged with murder, Ortiz, Luis, age fourteen.

We learn as Blau learns the universal truths of police reporting wherever you may be, but especially in big cities. To wit:

* Most victims of violent crimes are minorities, as are their assailants.

* When crime victims are white and middle class, their plight attracts significantly greater coverage from the mainstream press.

* Most cops think most stories reporters are interested in are crap and turn the extraction of information into an intellectual taffy-pull.

* Most editors think remarkably like cops when it comes to valuing a crime story and thus must be pitched like 1940s housewives opening the door to a vacuum-cleaner salesman.

* Even a murder is not news ipso facto these days. Unless the victim is prominent, the perpetrator noteworthy, or the means of death baroque, a tag on your toe no longer is a ticket to page one. (This follows an awful logic. If one definition of news is the odd or unusual, note Cop Shop's statistics on homicides in Chicago: 1988 -- 660; 1989 -- 741; 1990 -- 851; 1991 -- 920.

* We are losing, or have already lost, the war on drugs.

* Cops hate their commanders, maybe more than they hate criminals. Blau does a good job explaining why.

* Police assigned to public information (press) functions will actively work "against the media, plugging up the flow of information with nonanswers and foot-dragging." Therefore . . .

* Police reporters cannot succeed without making friends and establishing trust within the department. Even the best reporters get co-opted. The arm's-length relationship you bring to the cop shop shrinks -- rightly or wrongly -- to a handshake. Or maybe even a hug. They're helping your career. You're helping theirs. Blau gets this part just right. The press may have been the enemy (of the police), he writes, but not the police reporter.

It's fun watching the rookie Blau go through Stockholm Syndrome, that psychological transference wherein a hostage (the reporter) relates to and identifies with his captors (the cops). In other words, he falls in love. How could he not? One of his sources, the chief of detectives, ends all interviews with this warning: "Treat me nice or I'll come piss in your soup."

So Blau got hooked. The kid who, in chapter 5, telegraphs his politics by using "progressive" and "vigilant humanists" in the same paragraph is, by the end of the book, cursing the Chicago police commanders, bowling with off-duty narcotics detectives, and choking up at the sight of kilted, Irish cops blowing a mournful skirl on their bagpipes at the funeral of a fallen black comrade.

Most reporter books are lousy. They're indulgent and provide no lessons. But someone aiming to be a reporter might actually learn something from Cop Shop. So might an editor, though they tend to suffer from deficits in reading comprehension.

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