Crime log the ticket to 15 minutes of fame

As a senior resident assistant in Northeastern University's White Hall, Frantz Edouard is charged with turning in troublemakers. After the deed is done, he likes to see his work in print.

Edouard is a self-proclaimed fanatic about the campus newspaper's most popular section, the Northeastern News Crime Log, which lists a grab bag of offenses collected from university police reports.

"Reading the crime log is scheduled into my life," said the 20-year-old nursing major.

But Edouard isn't the only one secretly waiting to see if a documented incident shows up in newsprint. Sometimes, the troublemakers themselves are seeking a bit of fame.

"I don't think people are aiming to get in trouble to be placed in the crime log," Edouard said. "But when people do unfortunately get into trouble, I feel as if they wait in anticipation to see if they made the crime log - possibly to brag."

How do students celebrate making it into the log? Often, they'll post the newspaper clipping on their residence hall's door, tell their peers, or even join online groups.

Edouard founded a Facebook group called "Reading the Northeastern Crime-Log Completes My Life," - though he notes that his name has never surfaced in the report.

The top wall posting on Edouard's 128-member group is a Northeastern alum who writes, "God, I miss my school of freaks. I was crime-log of the week once. I was so proud!"

Another like-minded Facebook group is called "A good friend of mine is the Crime Log Entry of the Week."

Occasionally, an on-campus incident will get noticed around the city, as happened early this month when a freshman allegedly shouted from his dorm window that his roommate had marijuana for sale. This story not only made the front page of the Northeastern News, it was also reported in The Boston Globe and the Boston Herald. But with the school newspaper's Crime Log, a certain fame is available to anyone at Northeastern.

Through last spring, the weekly report received an average of about 700 online reads per week, consistently placing it in the top five stories in the paper, according to College Publisher data.

Other local college papers, including those at Emerson College, Boston University, and Harvard University, also rely on police report recaps for readership.

"It's almost got a voyeuristic appeal to it," said Matt Collette, a third-year Northeastern student who took over as the paper's Crime Log reporter this month.

A look at last week's log illustrates his point. The 13 incidents included four cases of underage drinking and three of intoxication. But there were also such allegations as tampering with a smoke detector, students being threatened with a knife, and a man shooting passersby with a BB gun.

Even before he took the job, Collette knew the section was widely read on campus.

"It had come up in my journalism classes before about how it's the most read section of the newspaper," Collette said. "Students said even if they don't pick up the paper normally, they'll get it for the Crime Log and read that at the very least."

The log has always been popular, for the same reasons people are attracted to tragedy stories, said Dave Wood, a Cambridge-based realtor who was the feature's first reporter when The News started running the log in 1975. ."Any crime story tends to draw people's attention, and it did just by the nature of what it was, asking 'Is there crime on campus? And if there is, we, the student body, want to know,' " said Wood, who wrote the report from 1975 until he graduated in 1979. "I always got the impression it was widely read."

But just because the log offers a crack at notoriety doesn't mean everyone is itching to be included in the log.

After getting busted with three fellow underage students last year for trying to sneak alcohol into his dorm, Charlie Woo had to pay a $100 fine and take an online alcohol course. Although his name didn't appear in the paper - The News prints names only if a suspect is arrested - many of his peers were able to pick out Woo from word of mouth.

"It still is your name in the paper, even if they don't name you, and that's kind of accomplishing something in itself because people know a lot of people read it," said Woo, a 20-year-old photography major. "But it's kind of bittersweet - like, I'm in the paper, but still you just don't flaunt getting in trouble."

It hasn't always been popular to make the log. Wood said he doesn't recall anyone celebrating their name popping up in his reports. But with the addition of the "Entry of the Week" in the decade after he left, he said, the feature took on a new dimension.

"It seems like it's been taken to a whole new level, trying to make it amusing, like a reality show on paper," he said. "We felt that it was a hard-news piece. We did it not so that people could wear it as a badge of honor or circle it and put it on their doors, but just to try and educate students that they shouldn't leave purses unattended, or to be careful walking around campus.

"We made it amusing where we could, but I don't think any of us envisioned this new cult status it's achieved."

Wood said he hopes that the writing hasn't drifted too far off course.

"I hope it still serves students and that they get some sort of education out of it so they perhaps will behave a little more smartly, cautiously, because hey, you're in a big city," he said.

"That was the ultimate message and the original intent."

Glenn Yoder can be reached at gyoder@globe.com.