‘Man shoots self in privates’: Behind the scenes of our ‘Cop Shop’ police blotter

The idea is to show people things that might otherwise go unseen. Small things mostly. Things that might not necessarily be news in the most general sense, but occurrences that are nonetheless items of interest.

Not ones, mind you, of mere ordinary interest, but ones that have compelled someone to CALL THE POLICE.

They are curiosities of the highest order.

Such matters have involved dog poop, a bad haircut, slain chickens, mouthy grandkids calling their grandma “crackhead,” not to mention others about a snake in a car or women threatening one another on Facebook, men threatening one another on Facebook, Bible thieves, biscuit thieves and just about any caper you can imagine.

For two years now the Cop Shop column that I write for The Telegraph has served up weekly compilations of such oddities.

The unusual anecdotes and incidents are, for the most part, culled from police reports at the Bibb County Sheriff’s Office.

I sift through hundreds of incidents each week in search of ones that I think might resonate with locals. The items, published on Sunday’s local page and online throughout the week, show you, the reader, some the strangeness that goes on in these parts.

Take, for instance, the man who ate rabbit poop. (Yes, a fellow reportedly did just that at a house on Napier Avenue in February of last year. Yes, he was drunk — on mouthwash.)

Or the woman who nearly snatched a door off her husband’s pickup truck because he was dancing with other women at a Luke Bryan concert.

Or a couple in west Macon accused of hurling dog droppings at their neighbor’s house. (The neighbor’s dog, the couple told police, had deposited the droppings on their lawn, and they were merely returning it to the rightful owner.)

Perhaps the most memorable item so far came in June 2014 when a man outside a Zebulon Road gas mart reportedly shot himself in the penis. National news outlets and late-night TV hosts caught wind of the wounding. But the initial report was wrong.

As we at the Cop Shop — being the highly trained investigative reporter that we are — later learned, the bullet had instead penetrated the man’s pelvis.

“My penis,” the fellow said in an interview, “wouldn’t even be there anymore if it got hit with a .45, you know what I’m saying? … It would’ve messed some stuff up down there. … That would’ve sucked. It still sucks, but I’m healing pretty fast.”

Scoff if you must. The items are among the most-read parts of the paper.

Part of the reason may be that they present an up-close and unfiltered view of real life, of real people in real situations — personal glimpses of our neighbors.

They are glimpses that newspapers have in large part stopped providing.

Papers, this one included, used to devote entire columns to hometown news — who visited whom, what happened at church, where people were traveling for vacation. Papers also, in far more detail, noted the smallest of criminal comings and goings in the towns they covered.

Consider the Cop Shop a throwback to the old days, a compendium of outlandishness that were it not for our trained eye would have gone undocumented. Think of it as a hodgepodge of happenings that if they had to happen, at least they happened to someone else.

This story was originally published May 18, 2016 at 5:51 PM with the headline "‘Man shoots self in privates’: Behind the scenes of our ‘Cop Shop’ police blotter."