The police scanner I keep fastened to my hip is supposed to transmit crime news and emergency calls. But I swear that sometimes sad songs play over those airwaves.
Amid the violence and chaos of the downtown night, brooding songs are sung about hard times and crumbling lives.

All the saddest songs have children in them.

Thursday night. A report of a stolen car here, a possible drunken driver there. Domestic assaults downtown, a broken window on the outskirts. Business as usual in the rock-‘n’-roll world of police business.

I was tapping my foot to the music.

Then a dolorous tune began to play. A rustle of static was followed by the calm voice of a dispatcher. He could have been a washed-out country singer with alcoholic eyes in a smoky bar.

A 16-year-old girl has run away from a group home in Lewiston. A teen without roots, wearing denim and on the run.

“She’s seven months pregnant,” the dispatcher sang. “And said to be high on drugs.”

Give the dispatcher an old guitar and he might have a hit on his hands. But it isn’t music he’s putting out into the world. He didn’t sign up to wail the words to heart-breaking songs. It’s just the nature of the work that provides the melancholy. It’s the sad story of a runaway teen and it’s happening now. The words sound lyrical because they’re shabby, authentic and as cutting as glass.

“Her mother lives in Rhode Island,” the dispatcher crooned. “But her mom is not home and no message was left.”

Play a few solemn riffs and be done with it. The song ends and we never find out what happens to the poor, pregnant girl. Ultimately, we never do. She writes the last refrains in the song of her life and she doesn’t share the music.

What becomes of that melody is not for me to know, because the next scanner call will be about fire, or murder or a car crash – something a reporter can get his hands on and mold into a front-page story.

But I could collect these sad songs like I used to collect top-40 hits on a cassette tape. The 9-year-old boy, found drunk and hitchhiking out of Auburn. His dad could not be contacted because Dad was in prison. Mom could not be called because she was in the county lockup.

Another sappy tune from Twin Cities Radio. The kind of mad melody that plays all night, every night of the week.

Hear the woeful song about the 6-year-old boy who bites a cop when they try to drag his daddy away. Listen to the morose music of the 13-year-old girl caught prostituting in the park because her momma needs money. Behold the ugly ditty about the kindergarten kid hawking cigarettes in the playground to finance his dad’s drug addiction. Wail along with the song about the 10-year-old who stole a six-pack of beer for his drunken, fast-fisted old man.

You think of kids and imagine the high giggles of boys and girls on monkey bars. That music fills the world, too. But after hours, when most others are asleep, some children roam the night.

They run and scream and flee from their misery. Cops run after them and scoop them up, like uniformed pied pipers. The kids screech and parents lurch from dark alleys and it all starts to look like some fantastic play from a Dickens story.

And the music plays on and on into the night.

It’s a wonder songwriters have to make stuff up at all. The real world screams real-world horrors and it can all be put to music: the snap, crackle and pop of digital static over the police radio, the raspy voices of over-tired cops, the footsteps of kids in flight …

Every night, it plays on and on.

Mark LaFlamme is the Sun Journal crime reporter.