Dear Reader,

This story is in black and white. Adjust your settings accordingly.

It’s early morning and it’s quiet – too quiet. This sleepy town tries hiding its secrets, but some slipped out overnight. Some people’s lives changed, and not in a good way.

A stocky man with a serious demeanor steps out of the gray mist and through the door of the police station. He pulls off his fedora and tugs a reporter’s notebook out of his trench coat.

“Hey Sarge – whatcha got on that shooting? Drug deal gone bad? Jealous lover?”

It’s Younkman – Tim Younkman, cops reporter for the daily rag. That rag happens to be The Bay City Times, where I cut my chops as a young metro editor around the time Al Gore was inventing the internet.

He roughed me up, time to time. Seems the over-enthusiastic editor didn’t understand the nuances of police scanner traffic. “Not every fire alarm is a fire,” Younkman would grumble.

Younkman, rest his soul, wasn’t some kind of caricature. Nah, those are for dime-store novels. He was cut from a bolt of cloth that’s been around as long as newspapers. Thick skin, a short memory and an instinct for being where the action is. It’s in a cop reporter’s marrow.

Today on the streets of Bay City, that marrow belongs to Cole Waterman. He started walking the crime beat in 2008, a couple years after Younkman retired. Waterman cuts a different figure – imagine tattoos instead of a fedora – but he has the same approach: Go where the story is, get the story, tell the story.

Like that time he knocked on the door of a suspected killer, then sat across the kitchen table with the guy for a long interview.

“Yeah, that was pretty intense,” Waterman says. “I texted my boss right before I walked in – ‘If you don't hear from me in two hours, this is the address.’”

Or that other time, when he got to the scene of a barricaded gunman as police were arriving, got stuck inside the yellow police tape. The gunman figured Waterman would be there – why wouldn’t he be, right? – and asked to negotiate with him instead of the cops.

“I told the police chief, ‘That’s not my expertise and I don’t want the responsibility of saying the wrong thing and this guy shooting somebody.’”

I’ve known enough cop reporters to know Waterman wasn’t scared or being dramatic in either situation. Just realistic. Bad things happen, you know?

None of us journalists like it when bad things happen but we know they will today, tonight, tomorrow. No one wants to see the ambulance on their block, but everyone wants to know what happened.

I know that because the most-read news reporter in all of MLive last year was Cole Waterman. More than the reporters who cover politics, coronavirus or that Harbaugh guy and his football squad.

From the sleepy but apparently very interesting streets of Bay City.

“Yeah? I didn’t realize that, honestly,” Waterman says, matter-of-fact.

Matter-of-fact is what a good cops story is – and a good cops reporter. Like Younkman and all of the professional journalists before and since who wade through a tide of pain, wrong-doing and mayhem to make sense of it for readers.

MLive’s public safety journalists are on the job. You may now resume your day in technicolor.

🎧 In this week's podcast, John Hiner and Eric Hultgren talk with Cole Waterman, John Tunison, and Roberto Acosta about what it takes to cover the crimes and courts throughout Michigan. Listen to this week's episode of the Behind the Headlines podcast here.

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John Hiner is the vice president of content for MLive Media Group. If you have questions you’d like him to answer, or topics to explore, share your thoughts at editor@mlive.com.