For a reporter, working at a weekly newspaper is an exercise in learning to comb through a sea of factoids, numbers, words, and data to recognize the bigger narrative emerging.
It’s work that calls for an unusual combination of skills: the finicky precision of, say, a librarian with the sensibility of a short-story writer who finds the drama, the pathos, and sometimes the humor in the bulging pages and dry language of a water-quality study or a court transcript.
This week, we noticed a gratifying story emerging from the just-the-facts data of the East Hampton Village Police Department incident reports from the last month and a half: There seems to be an ongoing crackdown over landscaping noise.
It’s all a bit data-wonky, but stay with us. Police reports from East Hampton Village show a marked increase in landscaping-related police responses in mid-June and early July compared with the number of those responses in May, despite May being peak season for whipping yards and gardens into shape. (In both the Village and the Town of East Hampton, the gas-powered blower ban runs from May 20 through September 20.) The clearest spike this summer so far came in the June 16 to 22 report, which included many summonses for noisy and environmentally awful gas-powered leaf blowers and weed whackers, as well as noisy work in general — whether with gas-powered or electronic equipment — being done during prohibited hours or on prohibited days. The report for the week ending on Tuesday also shows a high number of landscaping-related summonses.
The dispatch record for June 16 through 22 shows the village police being called out 138 times in total for any reason, from arguments between neighbors to drunk driving); only about 11 percent of those responses were for disturbances caused by landscaping — but nearly 42 percent of the actual summonses that week were regarding landscaping violations. That’s a large percentage of summonses to appear in court.
Police reports are a requirement of democracy, to keep the curious public informed, but a police report can also function as policy signaling. The police blotter tells us that the department is taking landscape noise and the gas-equipment ban seriously and treating violations as enforcement opportunities rather than just an opportunity to remind the landscapers of the law.
Silence on a summer morning is music to our ears. Keep it up, officers. Let’s hope this small, emerging trend toward quiet-landscaping enforcement grows and spreads like Japanese knotweed.