Come Monday, we will launch our free Police Blotter newsletter, which we think might be one of the fastest growing newsletters we’ve offered. We’ve barely mentioned it up to now, but we already have more than 650 people signed up for it at cleveland.com/newsletters. People love reading these blotters. We produce as many as 45 police blotters a week, from various communities throughout Northeast Ohio covered by our weekly Sun newspapers. A team of hard-working freelancers compiles them. Ann Norman, the editor of the Suns, coordinates all of the coverage. The blotters are a unique form of crime reporting. They don’t contain names or specific addresses. They can be one paragraph long or several. They are a “just-the-facts” chronicle of what police are handling. If you’re not familiar with them, this kind of item from the Cleveland Heights blotter is representative of a shorter item: Theft from auto: Woodridge Road At 10:50 a.m. Jan. 9, a man reported that, during the previous evening, someone entered his unlocked car and stole his loaded gun, credit cards and a pair of shoes. The car was parked overnight on the street near his house. And this one, from North Royalton, is a longer item: Drunken driving: Sprague Road On Dec. 26, police observed a gray Chevrolet Impala with an expired license plate on Sprague Road. While talking to the driver, the officer smelled booze and observed an open can of White Claw. The man said he had just left a Christmas celebration at his dad’s house, where his brother had forced him to watch “Die Hard.” Asked about the odor, the driver said, “I got to be honest with you, I’ve had a couple of pops.” When the open container was pointed out, the man said it was from earlier. During a field sobriety test, in which he was wearing slippers, the driver had a hard time understanding instructions while also losing his balance. That’s when he said, “I’m well aware of what I’m doing, but you’re also well aware that I’ve been drinking.” He was arrested for drunken driving and cited for having expired plates and an open container of alcohol. It turned out that the driver had a 2008 OVI conviction. Plain and simple, right? And sometimes, humorous. Readers love them. The blotters give you news from around the corner and throughout your town. It gives them a touchstone for their police, a window into the services their tax dollars provide. The blotters are usually the most read pieces from the Sun newspapers on our website. If the artificial intelligence tool we use opts to limit a blotter to paying cleveland.com subscribers, which it does occasionally, we hear from people who are upset they cannot get to them. (Of course, they could get to them if they subscribed, which you can do here.) We publish the blotters online throughout the week, which can make catching up with them challenging. That’s why we are launching the free blotters newsletter. If you subscribe to the newsletter, each weekday you will receive an emailed edition with the top items from five blotters, along with links to the full blotters online. Reporter Molly Walsh will put the newsletter together each day. Because we publish so many blotters each week, the newsletter will not contain all of them from every week. We will rotate them, though, so that each community shows up regularly. Blotters for the larger communities, such as Parma, Lakewood and Cleveland Heights, will appear each week. I should mention, too, that we have blotters only for the communities covered by the Sun newspapers. So, we don’t have blotters for Euclid, Mentor and some other large Cleveland suburbs. As this is new, we’re interested in feedback. If you subscribe and have thoughts after you’ve received a few editions, please let me know at cquinn@cleveland.com. You can sign up for the Police Blotter newsletter at cleveland.com/newsletters. Separately, I predicted correctly that I would receive a strong response to the column last weeks about comics, but I was way off the mark in predicting those responses would be cranky. Far from it. I heard from many people with thoughts about the comics, but most of them were written with good cheer. Thank you. Thanks for reading. | 