Every day, police officers respond to reports of all sorts of events and nonevents, most of which never make the news. Here is a sampling of lesser-known — but no less noteworthy — incidents from police log books (a.k.a. blotters) in our suburbs.

HELL IN A HANDBAG

At 6:39 p.m. Dec. 22, Salem police and firefighters were dispatched to a Target store on Highland Avenue for a report of a fire on the premises. When they arrived, firefighters found that a small blaze, which began in a handbag on a shelf, had been extinguished by a customer, but not before damaging three handbags overall and two small purses. The fire had been set, according to the police log item, and both police and fire investigators were called to the scene.

MOVING VIOLATION?

At 11 a.m. Dec. 30, Norwood police received a 911 call from a woman who reported that she spotted two young men entering a bulkhead and removing furniture from a home on Yew Drive. An officer responded, located the homeowner, and quickly solved the crime: The young men were with a moving company he’d hired to lug his belongings to a storage facility.

JUST ADMIRING THE VIEW, OFFICER

At 10:36 a.m. Jan. 8, a Salem police officer was dispatched to a marina on Kernwood Street to deal with a dispute between a motorist and a tow-truck driver. The truck driver, it seems, was trying to lock the marina’s front gate, but the motorist, who’d pulled into the lot “to view the water,’’ was refusing to leave. The officer spoke to the guy and explained that the towing company had permission from the city to use the lot to store vehicles towed during snow emergencies. The motorist finally exited when told he was going to get locked in if he didn’t.

IMPATIENT PATIENT

Usually police and fire departments get 911 calls from people needing a ride to a hospital, but it’s less common to get a call from someone already in the emergency room. That’s what happened just after 4 p.m. Jan. 3, when Melrose police received a 911 call from a man in the waiting room at Melrose-Wakefield Hospital. He reported that the wait to receive treatment for his relative’s nosebleed was too long, and asked to be taken to another hospital. Dispatch referred the man back to the emergency room staff for assistance, and made a separate call to that ER staff, and soon the situation was reported to be under control.

I FEEL LIKE I’M FORGETTING

SOMETHING

Usually when cars get broken into, things disappear. But just the opposite occurred on the evening of Nov. 21 in Watertown, when a woman reported that her car, parked on Palfrey Street, had been broken into. Nothing was missing from the vehicle, she told police, and the car wasn’t damaged in any way, but there, sitting on the front passenger seat, she said, was a blue backpack that didn’t belong to her or anyone she knew. If there were any clues to the owner’s identity inside — or valuables, for that matter — they go unreported in the police log.

Emily Sweeney can be reached at esweeney@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter @emilysweeney.