In the world of law enforcement, every day is an unpredictable journey, a rollercoaster ride through emotions that range from uproarious laughter to heartwarming compassion, and even spine-tingling fear. These are the unfiltered stories that seldom make it to the headlines but leave an indelible mark on those who wear the badge.
So, Dispatch advised my partner and I of a 911 call, where the caller advised there was a “pilot” who parked a “plane” in his yard and then went to the nearby bar. Dispatch advises the caller doesn’t speak conversational English and the call was translated via a translation service. Knowing the address is on a lake, I assume there is a mistranslation. Someone probably drove a boat up to his dock and went to the bar.
Partner calls me. He’s on the sh*tter, and going to be a minute. He assumes the same thing regarding translation that I do. That’s cool. I arrive first.
Holy sh*t, it’s an actual plane. In his driveway. Specifically a seaplane. Apparently, it was driven up the boat ramp, turned off into his driveway, and shut down.
I call my partner. Yeah. You need to come here and see this sh*t.
Go to the bar. “Who owns the plane?” Drunk guy does. Apparently, he was there to visit his friend, landed on the lake, and taxied to his friend’s driveway. Except he got addresses mixed up apparently. And now he’s drunk so I don’t want him to move the plane.
Turns out planes are light and he pushed it to the correct driveway.
Had a Domestic in Progress I responded to during Christmas Day and the excuse for them fighting was “We’re not mad at each other, we’re just upset because we wanted to surprise the kids for Christmas, we got some Deer, dressed them up, now they’re destroying our house.”
Turns out there were literally three fully grown white-tailed deer in the house somehow dressed with full bell harnesses like Santa’s reindeer.
I had to call the Game Wardens down who were then able to help me remove the deer from the property without injury to us or them.
How they managed to get the Deer and dress them up is still a mystery to this day.
Got called to a retail theft. Security caught a young teen girl stealing clothes from a store. When I walk in I see her crying her eyes out. I ask her why she was stealing and she says her sister, who has some sort of medical condition that made her use those arm crutches things just got asked out on a date for the first time in her life and she wanted to make her sister look beautiful because she was so happy she got asked out.
I got a lump in my throat from her story. I tried to plead with the managers to let me pay for her but they refused. Had to arrest her but I let her sign a promise to appear and gave her 30$ and told her to go to another store and buy her something.
I used to be an instructor for the Security Forces (USAF cops) students in training. I was a firearms instructor, but we dealt a lot with dorm inspections and all that other fun stuff. Well, this one kid kept falling asleep in class. After many counselings and some paperwork, he said he couldn’t sleep because the devil was in his dorm room. Of course, we thought maybe he had some mental issues going on but decided to get to the bottom of things. He said every night around midnight or later, he would hear a voice saying to keep his eyes shut and nothing would happen to him. He was freaked out, so he complied. A couple of the instructors decided to sit with him in his room one night and told him to go to bed like he usually does. Well lo and behold, around 0100, the instructors heard something in the ceiling. They started freaking out a bit but watched and waited. The next thing they knew, they heard the voice and one of the ceiling tiles was moved and something jumped down. They flipped the f*ck out and turned on all the lights to see wtf was going on.
Apparently, this other kid had been kicked out of the military while in training. He didn’t want to go home and face his family, so every night he’d go into that kid’s room, scare the sh*t out of him, and then take some food or whatever and stretch his legs a bit. I guess he would shower during the day, but stayed up in the ceiling for the rest of the time. Needless to say, he was promptly sent home, and our freaked-out student was finally able to get some much-needed rest.
Not really an excuse, but shocked the sh*t out of me. I’ve always been told a diabetic with high blood sugar acts the same as someone who is drunk.
Get a call for a car all over the road, hitting trash cans on the side of the road and whatnot. We stopped the car and got the driver out. He’s slurring his speech like no other, and can’t maintain his balance to save his life. He failed all the sobriety tests but blew 0’s on the PBT. He denied drinking and swears up and down he didn’t do any drugs and never mentions diabetes.
We’re all scratching our heads and I remember the blood sugar thing. Called medical to our location and sure as sh*t his blood sugar was 550, and he finally remembers that he hadn’t taken insulin in 8 hours.
Had a call one night for some teenagers trespassing on one of the large properties in the more wealthy part of my patrol area. Get there, my partner and I found the kids and asked them what they were doing. They said they heard a school rumor there was a camel kept on the property….this is in the Southwestern US ain’t no camels here. We told them to get out of there and they didn’t argue. My partner looks at me and goes “You know I kinda want to see if there is a camel”. So we’re wandering around the property with our flashlights when all of sudden I turn and my flashlight reveals an actual, live, untethered camel just hanging out and chillin’! We talked with the property owner, who wanted to press charges on the kids for trespassing but my partner was able to talk him out of it when we started asking if he had the required permits for the Camel and if the city knew about it because if he wanted a report they would. Was an interesting night.
I was a Boarding Officer in the Coast Guard. We were doing recreational boat boardings around Catalina Island, mostly educational/safety boardings but always looking for smugglers. Stopped a small boat just to do a safety inspection and inform them of the small craft advisory. I jumped on board first and before I could say a word an 8-year-old boy thrusts his hands out at me (for handcuffs) and cries “I’m sorry officer! Grandpa told me it was ok if I had one! Please don’t hurt him!” His grandfather had let him drink one of his O’Douls…we told the kid it was our little secret.
One night I’m out working, and as I go down the street (a fairly nice middle-class area surrounded by some high-crime neighborhoods) around midnight I see a dude on a bike, no lights on, pulling a lawnmower behind him on a rope.
I immediately flip a 180 and light him up. Recognize the guy as a local homeless dude with some prior burglary/theft arrests. I walk up and just open with “Dude, come on…”
The guy holds his hands out and swears he didn’t steal the lawnmower. Claims someone just gave it to him. I ask who, and he doesn’t know a name. So I demanded he tell me where to find said lawnmower owner. The directions he gave were literally “Go that way a bit, then right at a stop sign, and take one of those side streets that way. It’s about halfway down a street, at a house that has a pickup and a car in the driveway.”
By this point, backup had arrived, so I left him in the presence of backup and drove off in search of his mythical donor of lawn equipment. I made a decent guess as to the first turn, then flipped a mental coin as to which of the next three side streets he would have gone down. I pick the second of the three streets and start down it. Every other f*cking house has a truck and car combo…there must have been a dozen houses that matched the description.
Halfway down, I see an average-looking house and go “Ehh, I’ll try this one”. After all, it’s midnight and this is a wild goose chase. Go up, and ring the doorbell… middle-aged dude comes to the door. “Hello sir, have you been giving away lawnmowers to random sketchy homeless guys at midnight today?”
Yes. As a matter of fact, he had. The homeowner went on to complain to me that his wife was upset about his continual inability to get the mower running and had ordered him with some severity to remove the mower from the house or face the consequences. He pushed it to the curb right as a homeless guy rode by, and the latter had asked and received his permission to take it.
I drove back in shock and amazement. Apologized to the homeless guy, and sent him on his way. A few months later we ran into each other at a nearby gas station, and he told me it turned out just to need a new spark plug, and that he had gotten it running again, before going on to sell it for $150 to someone.
For years after, whenever I would run into him, he would always make sure to remind me of the money he made from selling that “stolen” lawnmower…LOL
Obligatory not me, but a close family friend.
“So I’m patrolling in [beach tourist destination] and it’s about 2 a.m. so I’m on the lookout for drunk drivers. There’s a guy swerving a little bit up the road. He was on a back road and there was nobody else around. I decided to check it out. Flip on the lights and the guy pulls over immediately.
I start chatting with the guy and he’s slurring his words.
Cop: ‘Where you coming from?’
Guy: Just heading back to my hotel from the beach
Cop: ‘Any reason why you’re swerving?’
Guy: I’m on some medication from a surgery I recently had and I’m pretty tired.
So I’m thinking ‘ok buddy’.
I grab his licence and registration, I run it and it comes back clean.
I take a look in his backseat with my flashlight on the way back. Not only are there two 30-packs of beer in the back seat. The floor is absolutely littered with empty beer cans.
Cop: So What’s with all the beer in the back?
Guy: Well, my neighbor really likes that brand of beer and he was house-sitting for us, so we are bringing some back to him as a gift.
Cop: So what’s with all the empty beer cans on the floor?
Guy: Well while we were at the beach the other day we saw a part of the beach that was trashed. I couldn’t leave the beach like that.
Cop: Alright buddy, you need to step out of the car.
So I make him take a breathalyzer and he blows 0.000. So I make him blow again, 0.000. Keep in mind this guy is slurring his words left and right. So I asked him if I could take him back to the hotel and I drove his wife back to pick up his car. He agrees.
I got to the hotel and the wife was worried sick because he had been out so late. The wife confirms that he’s on medication. He goes to sleep and as the wife and I are walking out, I start questioning her.
Cop: I saw a bunch of empty beer cans in the back seat. Does he drink a lot?
Woman: Oh no, he insisted we spend an hour of our beach trip cleaning up the beach. He wanted to drop off the cans at the recycling center before we go back home. He doesn’t drink at all.
Cop: Interesting, there were 2 cases of beer in the back seat.
Woman: Oh yes, my neighbor absolutely loves the beer. Can’t get it where we’re from.
Easily the most surprised I’ve ever been.”
My first ever real call was for a flasher at the local park, when I got there and finally found him it was a mentally impaired young man 16-17 who had a pair of headphones on in a full pooh bear. I said hey man come here what the heck is going on you know you have to keep your pants on, especially at the park.
He went on to tell me he had bad itching down his pants and couldn’t take it anymore so he had to rip his pants off and was running home to get help, I said come on you couldn’t make it home first? He said no I had ants in my pants. As sure as sh*t according to more than one witness’s account, he had been sitting in a sandbox playing at the park and accidentally on a nest of red ants that had crawled up his pant legs.
Cop here – got a call of a domestic dispute that sounded very heated and a lot of banging was heard. Get to the scene and I can hear someone yelling and swearing and brawling, doesn’t sound good at all. The guy answers the door, shirt off and angry, but seems bewildered as to why police had been called. He told me he was building Ikea furniture – sounds like the most bullsh*t thing. But, we enter, and see the new IKEA furniture half set up and no one else is home. Colour me surprised.
My father was the chief bylaw enforcement officer where I grew up. After a person complained that his neighbour’s chickens were eating his asparagus, my father had to write a law that made it illegal for chickens to cross the road. A TV show in Canada called “On The Road Again” made a whole episode about it.
Stopped a guy on a suspended registration and he started getting upset, but not at me.
I asked him why he was so upset, and he said it was the wife’s car, she stopped making payments and it got suspended. On top of that, he was pissed because he was on the way to the new GFs and she was probably gonna dump him if he no-showed her.
I issued him a criminal ticket, thinking he was gonna back off and leave the story. Instead, he goes “I totally get why you gave me a ticket, but I don’t want this girl to dump me. She’s a smoke. Can you give me a ride there?” I say fine, but you have to introduce me… again thinking he’d back off the story.
He says ok deal and away we go. Were sitting outside and this girl refused to come out, so he put me on the phone. I tell her that it’s either she comes out and says hi or I bring him to jail.
Out she comes… 11/10. The dude hit the jackpot.
He also pleaded guilty to the ticket haha… I never told him to do that but I got a kick out of it. I like to think it was him giving me a wave back.
Late summer night responding to a call in a rural area. My partner and I were driving down a winding two-lane highway in the middle of nowhere. No light of any kind other than the headlights and moon. We’re coming up on a sharp right turn when I see a man traveling across the grass from an area of brush. He’s moving very quickly and smoothly as if hauling a** on a bicycle. No, up and down motion like running. Obviously, I’m pretty confused about a hillbilly on a bike in the middle of the night but not surprised. He comes to a tree and stops. It’s about this time we’re driving by him. Look out the window and see a man standing next to this tree with no bike or anything in sight. Just standing there staring at the truck passing by. My hair is standing up. We continued towards the call and I asked my partner if he had seen that guy. His response is, “Man I thought I was crazy.”
My wife’s dad was a fire investigator. He was investigating a house that got burned down. The homeowner said they sent a turtle with a candle on its back under the house as they were trying to locate a noise. Later my wife’s dad found a burnt-up turtle with wax on it.
Very early on in my career, I went to a domestic. A husband and wife were on the outs and separating. They were arguing, and a neighbor called the police. During the argument, the husband takes their wedding photo, rips it in half (bride on one side, groom on the other), and hands half to the wife saying “Here’s your half.”
In my jurisdiction, I have discretion over nearly every enforcement I want or don’t want to take. Except for domestic violence. Advocacy groups have forced the issue so hard that I get no discretion at all, without placing my job at risk. By definition the picture was communal property, ripping it was criminal damage, and thus a DV crime. The wife didn’t want anything done. But in DV crimes (because of advocacy groups) the state assumes the role of the victim. And I was forced to arrest him. He spent the night in jail for ripping his own wedding picture because his marriage didn’t work out.
I understand why some domestic violence laws exist. We have pushed the umbrella so far to encompass things like ongoing sexual relationships or romantic relationships. And we have lowered the bar of what crimes are included. So now if a third party hears something they didn’t like, and you and your boyfriend of 4 weeks were arguing, you can go to jail.
People have forgotten that couples argue. Arguing is normal and healthy. But the hands of the officer have been bound by legislation. People are being arrested for losing their temper, raising their voices, and are taken out in handcuffs in front of their spouses, kids, and neighbors. Those arrests never sit right with me.
My father was a police officer for 28 years in Colorado. He was parked at an intersection when he noticed some guy sticking his hand out the window to continuously flip him off for the 30 seconds or so they were parked.
The flip-off guy then drove forward and immediately got a ticket from my father. Apparently, in Fort Collins (our town), if you stick your left hand out the window in a specific manner, then you HAVE to turn left. It’s considered a failure to signal.
Then the guy battled it in court and lost, so he had to pay extra.
My dad used to work as a correctional officer at Goulburn Jail in Australia, which is probably one of the oldest and hardest prisons there. A story he tells of his time there is one I always remember. He said that the whole place was creepy anyway, not helped by some of the inmates at the time including the notorious Ivan Milat (on which ‘Wolf Creek’ is based). Anyway, the first thing he noticed was that dogs would outright refuse to enter the prison. He said they couldn’t get them past the gate no matter how hard they tried. But the creepiest occurrence was one night when they heard the sound of running booted footsteps, everyone was in their cell so they couldn’t figure out what was causing it, and next thing all the doors of the open and unoccupied cells on the top floor were banged shut, one after the other with loud clangs. Then they see the source of the running noise. Now Dad swears this is what he and his colleague (so he has another witness) saw. Apparently, they looked up and saw what looked like disembodied hobnail boots run down the aisle right over their heads, banging as they went. Dad decided to stop working in the prison not long after this. Super creepy.
This first was one of my very first calls, in a law library; a mentally ill homeless man had found his way inside somehow, and once staff determined that he wasn’t a member, they called us. When I arrived, it was quickly obvious that the guy didn’t pose a threat to anyone, I think he probably just wanted to be somewhere warm, and they had a very swank interior, like a posh gentlemen’s club in London, circa 1920.
As we explained that he wasn’t allowed there and that we were escorting him out, one of us on each side of him, he just started trembling, seemingly uncontrollably. I could see the panic in his eyes and found myself wondering what his prior experiences with law enforcement had been. I was unhappy with having to chuck a guy out in a snowstorm, but he refused the offer of driving him to the shelter nearby, saying he’d been robbed and beaten up there. It was then that I realized I needed to carry food with me to take the sting out of these roust encounters. I figured out later that you can fit 4 Powerbars in your trauma plate pocket.
I was once part of an undercover sting to bust up an armed hold-up gang that had been targeting local banks. Being relatively new to the details, I got to know the ring leader pretty well despite there being all kinds of regulations to the contrary. He was a cool guy, and I came to appreciate his laid-back attitude and worldview.
In the end, we dropped the net on them whilst they were trying to hit another bank. The cool guy makes a run for it and he gets cornered and refuses all verbal instructions to stop. I have a valid reason to fire my weapon, but in the end, I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I think I wound up shooting into the air out of frustration. Man, I got chewed out for that!
I made a routine traffic stop for speeding. The man in the front seat was visibly nervous when I approached the car. When I got close he threw his hands out of the window and claimed he was a woman and was having a miscarriage. After EMTs got there it turned out it trans man who was having a miscarriage and had no one to bring them to the hospital and decided to drive themselves
We had a woman calling almost nightly that her neighbors were terrorizing her. She claimed they were prankcalling her, setting off their car alarms in the middle of the night, leaving things on her doorstep, etc.
Every time we responded, we found no evidence of anything. One time, an officer parked a block away and heard nothing while she called 911 and said the neighbors were setting off car alarms.
I looked into her history and found out she had lived in three different cities and filed harassment complaints against her neighbors in all 3 cities.
Clearly nuts, right?
One time, she downloaded an app that unblocks phone numbers. I responded and called the number….. it was her neighbor. After enough pressure, we found out that these two 70-year-old lesbians would get high in the middle of the night and torment their neighbor.
I turned it over to our detectives, who had a warrant authorized. I never found out why they were doing it.
Stopped a speeder in a residential neighborhood. The female driver said she was in labor and was driving home to get her insurance card. She was a few blocks from the hospital but traveling in the opposite direction. I called her out on that and she said the hospital needed the card and would not see her otherwise. My son was born a few months prior so this story reeked of BS. I told her if she mailed me a copy of a birth certificate showing a birth within 24 hours of the ticket I would talk to the DA about dismissing the ticket. Sure as sh*t, three weeks later I get a letter in the mail with a copy of a birth certificate with the driver listed as the mother, time of birth was 9 hours after the citation. DA dismissed the ticket.
I saw two suspicious vehicles around 2 a.m. pull up to each other in a closed deli parking lot where we had a lot of drug activity. One driver handed over a plastic bag to the other driver, in which they both quickly sped away. I stopped the vehicle that handed over the bag while my partner stopped the other vehicle a couple of blocks up. I asked the driver about the bag and he stated that he was giving a VCR player to someone. Clearly, I did not believe this because at the time it was 2018 and a VCR sounds ridiculous. Sure enough, I radioed to my partner to check the bag for a VCR and sure enough inside the bag was an old VCR player. Both stories matched perfectly in that they were meeting up from Craigslist for this VCR. Just found this comical that they made a very suspicious VCR trade in a closed deli parking lot at 2 a.m.
My boyfriend is a bylaw officer in a small town. My favourite story of his is about the lady with barbed wire all over her yard. He received a complaint from her neighbours and went to check the place out. She had completely covered her bushes and trees and the top of her fence in barbed wire because she was convinced that her neighbours had trained their cats to dig up her garden. They were throwing them over the fence she said, so there was obviously no other alternative. He spent twenty minutes fighting with her about why she needed to take it down before he came up with an idea she was satisfied might work. Use motion detector sprinklers to keep the cats away! So she takes down the wire, he gives her a warning, and everyone seems happy.
A week later he gets another call saying the barbed wire is back up. He goes to check it out and sure enough she has doubled the amount of wire and is furious when she sees him pull up. The cats LOVED the sprinklers! They would run in and out of them all day playing and now the yard is wet and muddy! The neighbours hated her and were using their cats to drive her insane!!! After an hour of trying to sort out her psychobabble and reason with her, he gave up and just handed her a huge fine.
I got a call of a domestic violence argument in progress. Arrive with backup and stage. We hear a male yelling and crying at his wife. He refused to answer the door so we kicked it in. We clear the house and find him in bed. The wife is nowhere to be seen. He is still all worked up and crying. We finally get him to focus on us and ask where his wife went. He pulls back the covers and shows us her urn. He just brought her home from the cremation!
My dad used to work as a CO (corrections officer) at a rural prison. He drove perimeter, which just means he made circles around the jail in a truck, checking empty buildings for runaway inmates and just generally being bored for eight hours every night.
One night, my dad was parked on a hill just reading a magazine when he started to feel a thumping in his body. He described it as the feeling you get when speakers are playing a song with really heavy bass and you can feel the bass in your whole body.
Anyway, he puts the magazine down and checks his rearview, and he sees someone outside the truck. He grabs his pistol and jumps out of the truck, weapon drawn. When he gets outside, he sees a procession of Native Americans walking through the truck (and directly through his seat) only to disappear at the exact spot he was sitting. He said it was clear they were ghosts because many of them appeared injured. This went on for a few seconds, and then the whole procession disappeared.
He called the other perimeter guy on his walkie to try to explain, and the other guy almost immediately stopped communicating. Turns out the other guy had seen this happen before, but didn’t believe in ghosts, so he wouldn’t talk about it.
Police officer here. Three years ago, living in CO, the station got a call about a ‘ghost’ in someone’s house. I wasn’t the one on the phone, but apparently, the person was hysterical and hard to understand. I arrived on the scene, this woman of about forty was standing in her front yard. The house is upper middle class, and pretty bland.
She swears there is a ghost inside. The only reason we didn’t disregard the call was because she claimed there was screaming in her attic. She claimed the ghost was doing it, I was supposed to make sure an animal wasn’t stuck up there or something. She explains she has been hearing this screaming and bumping on the walls for the past two days, she is the only one who lives there, no pets who could cause it, neighbors are on vacation. So, of course, the logical explanation is a ghost.
She was far too afraid to check the attic, so I headed up there. It was full of cobwebs and musty, and of course, the only lightbulb didn’t work. I take a step, and all of a sudden I hear banging and muffled yelling. Navigating with my flashlight, I head over to the source, a corner in the far back.
There was a hobo there. His leg had fallen through the floor and was stuck, and he couldn’t get out. He started crying tears of joy when I walked over, thanking me and asking for help simultaneously. I pull him out, trying to scratch his leg as little as possible, and lead him outside after letting him stop and get some water.
He told me he was just looking for a place to spend the night, and I felt like he had gotten punished enough for his trespass. I asked if he needed anything else before I sent him on his way. Right when he opened his mouth to speak, I realised that he was a fifty-foot tall, grey leviathan from the Paleolithic era. He said, “Well, could I have about tree fiddy?” I responded, ‘I ain’t givin’ you no tree fiddy, Loch Ness Monstah! Get outta here!” Looking defeated, he began to make his way to the nearest lake.
Back when I was a cop, my colleague and I stopped a car driven by an old lady. No insurance, No licence.
We had the car confiscated and towed.
As she collected her belongings out of the car, pretty sullen-faced, she pulled out a cake from the back seat.
Turned out she spent all of her days looking after her severely handicapped daughter and had run out in the car to buy her a birthday cake.
During writing her up and waiting for the tow truck to take away the car, said daughter calls her up and asks where she is.
cue the most depressing phone call I ever had to overhear.
felt bad man.
Respond to a bar fight. One suspect allegedly a**aulted the other and a fight ensued. When interviewing the man who threw the first punch, he claimed that he went to stand up and there was a step down behind the stool. He got off the stool and lost his footing on a thing of a ranch that was on the floor and went for footing and ended up slapping the guy. The guy was watching a sports game or whatever and must have been irate, to begin with, and saw it as an act of aggression and swung for the fences. Watched the bar video and he was 100% telling the truth. Didn’t even look like a punch but probably felt like a sucker punch to the other guy. Charges on all parties dropped.
I could not count the times that I have spent a whole day getting signed witness statements, filing signed complaints, and audio/video recording of a statement from the victim only to have them drop the charges because “he/she loves me and it won’t happen again”.
Those are the ones that always get away, and there’s nothing I can do about it. Those are the ones that make you want to clock out and go home.