One night in 1940, a resident of Pauline Boulevard called the Ann Arbor cops because some owls hooting in a tree outside his bedroom window were keeping him awake. An officer named Hank Murray was dispatched to the scene. He found the owls, and shot five of them. Case closed.

Fourteen years later, on April 21, 1954, this same officer, now a lieutenant, was called upon to employ his skills again. A flock of pigeons had somehow managed to get into the U-M Dental School. He shot them, too, right in the building.

I learned these stories from Mike Logghe’s book, True Crimes and the History of the Ann Arbor Police Department, which he spent five years researching and writing before self-publishing it in 2000. His interest in the subject wasn’t theoretical. He spent 23 years with the Ann Arbor Police Department, the last 10 of them as its public information officer, before retiring at the end of June. He’s now an officer with the Eastern Michigan Department of Public Safety.

I recently had the honor of preparing a revised edition of Logghe’s opus for the Ann Arbor Historical Foundation, which is how I came to be instructed by it. (Full disclosure: I was paid to do that - I’m a free-lancer, and such projects comprise my living - but I’m not getting royalties and won’t benefit financially if they move more product.)

The book is full of anecdotes like these, and they have the effect that history, at its best, should produce. They lure the reader into another time, and remind us that the way things are is not the way they’ve always been.

For example, I also learned from Logghe’s book that Murray’s marksmanship was legendary in the department, that he once shot 95 pigeons in an hour at the County Courthouse, and that many officers would kill ducks and pigeons while on duty and bring them home for dinner to help stretch their meager salaries.

But the most important thing I learned was that times do, indeed, change; not a startling revelation, perhaps, but it seems so easy to forget.

Such behavior by a cop would be inconceivable today, but there was no hue and cry at the time. Officers didn’t stop slaughtering birds because a task force mandated it. Their approach to their job reflected the town’s norms at the time, and it evolved along with them. There have been times in the department’s history when significant resources were devoted to battling gambling, pornography, pot smoking and, during Prohibition, booze. It makes me wonder which of our current concerns will seem quaint in 50 years.

When I asked him what he learned from doing the book, Logghe, who calls himself a “history buff,” took the long view, too.

“I think what fascinated me so much was what a short snippet of time we’re all here for,” he said. “It made me appreciate that you’re just a small cog in the machine, your efforts live once, and that’s what I wanted to capture.”

Of course, history can also show us what doesn’t change (although probably not the wisdom to know the difference). “When people don’t know what to do, they call the police,” says Logghe. “It might not have anything to do with a crime, but when people are in crisis, that’s what they do.”

That’s as true today as it was in 1940. What’s different is that a call like the one from the insomniac on Pauline wouldn’t end with a bunch of dead owls.

Jeff Mortimer is a free-lance writer and editor who lives in Ann Arbor.