Cops can sure do some dumb things. Here are a few from cops I have known. None were life threatening, not even major issues in the grand scheme of things but dumb enough that the involved wish they had never happened. The names have been omitted to protect the guilty.
- The officer is working midnight shift and sees a glow from the peaks of nearby mountains. He calls in to report a ‘fire on top of Saddleback Mountain’. The fire department is alerted and responding but several minutes later the officer calls in to report it was really the moon rising.
- The officer is dispatched to a silent alarm call in a commercial area in the wee-early hours. He arrives and begins a perimeter search with service weapon in hand. He peers around a corner and sees a man with a gun. The officer jumps back behind cover and calls for backup. He kneels to get another peek from a different perspective. He looks around the corner again and the armed man is still there. The armed man is looking back at the officer from his own kneeling position. The officer decides to hold his position until backups arrive. They all conduct a perimeter search for the intruder and find no one. The Field Supervisor arrives and the officer goes to show the Sergeant what he had seen. The officer peers around the corner and, sure enough, the man is visible but his gun is not visible. The armed man was actually the officer’s reflection in a window.
- The officer is skillfully patrolling his assigned area when he receives a radio call for the Watch Commander to meet with him and the Field Supervisor to the rear of a bar to take a vehicle burglary call involving the WC’s patrol vehicle. Of course everyone listening to the radio gets a real hoot about the WC getting out of the office only to get his car broken into. The WC and FS say they were doing a bar check and when they returned to their cars they found the WC’s car with the driver side window completely broken out in an apparent attempt to steal the phone or radio inside the car. There was glass both inside and outside the car. The officer goes about collecting evidence, doing preliminary CSI, getting a report number and filling out a crime report, adroitly demonstrating his crime investigation skills. The WC opens the driver’s door and rolls up the intact window. The WC and FS had gathered some glass from a prior traffic collision scene and sprinkled the ‘crime scene’ with the glass. No auto burglary had occurred and a good laugh was had by all but one person on duty. Everyone else knew it was a setup.
- The officer is assigned to Traffic and riding his Kawasaki police motorcycle. He is patrolling the downtown area during an annual parade and celebration of the beautification of the main downtown intersection. The officer is looking incredibly cool; you, know, the whole ‘boots, chrome and leather’ thing. As the parade approached he turned onto a side street to give way to the parade. He fails to notice a small ditch running across the street that was part of the beautification project. He also failed to notice all 3 of the big ‘Road Closed’ signs. The front wheel buries into the ditch just enough that the officer can’t power out of the ditch, even after burning off about $20 worth of Dunlop rubber. Because the wheel is in the ditch the kickstand will not deploy so the officer can’t dismount without the motorcycle falling over. The officer is really not feeling so cool anymore as several parade watchers come to pull the MC out backwards. The officer beats a hasty retreat away from the parade.
- The officer is assigned to Traffic, still riding his ‘Mighty Kaw One Thou’ when he is dispatched to handle a non-injury traffic collision near the local high school. Patrol units are already on scene and the officer can see a small group of police officers, high school students and people involved in the collision. The officer, still looking really cool, heads for a curb to park on the far side of the accident scene. Unfortunately the pool of what he thought was water was actually engine coolant. The coefficient of friction between coolant and motorcycle tires is roughly equivalent to wet ice on wet ice. The officer did not crash and did manage to stop at the intended curb. However, the path from the point of hitting the coolant to stopping at the curb was highlighted by the MC trying to swap ends in a violent display of a high-speed wobble done at slow speed. The officer was able to marshal all the skills learned in his motor training to get the MC to the curb unscathed. Actually, he did nothing more than hang on for dear life. This display of superiority of man over machine was greeted by a standing ovation from the assembled masses. Actually, they were standing to begin with and the ovation barely beat out the laughter.
- The junior officer, working midnights, calls in for help locating a woman screaming in the area of Red Hill Avenue and S.E. Walnut. The screams are not continuous but rather about every 10 to 20 seconds apart. Every available patrol unit, mostly junior people, is now responding Code 2.5. This goes on for several minutes (actually about 10 minutes) until the Senior Dispatcher, who’d been there since God created earth, comes on the air to laughingly advise it is actually the peacocks on the ‘Old Man Nisson’s property’ (one of the city’s founding fathers). All the senior people on duty knew about the peacocks. The junior troops were, well, junior.
The common thread of these 6 officers dumb things is they were all done by one officer; Me. And, no, confession is not good for the soul in this case. They are but a few of the dumb things that I’ve done over the course of a 27-year career. I hope I had done enough intelligent things over those years and I was not a poster boy for ‘What do you do with someone who constantly screws things up? You promote him’.
If you have any ‘dumb moves’ you’d like to share please send them my way. It might help relieve my pain.
