After the last couple stories seemed to resonate with people, I wanted to share my other two classic stories of our wonderful public servants in action.
Case 1: The Case of the Stolen Wallet
A good friend had her wallet, stereo, and a couple other items stolen from her car while it was parked at her apartment. She found her items missing after being parked less than an hour and immediately called the police. The officer took his sweet ass time getting there, probably because he was avoiding stray dogs in the street that had been caught and released sometime during the night based on police advice. When he did arrive, he told us the following pieces of advice:
1. There has been a lot of thefts from cars near here because of the large dirt lot right next to it. People just steal stuff and run off.
2. There is no way we’ll get fingerprints off these surfaces. Besides, they were probably wearing gloves.
3. You might want to walk around in that dirt lot and look for your wallet. They probably took the valuables out and threw it down.
Wow. Let’s respond.
1. So wait, you know there’s crime, actual crime happening here frequently, and you know HOW the crime is happening, but nobody’s gone so far as to say, “Hey, maybe we should hang out and watch the area. What could it hurt? Either we’ll catch these assholes or they’ll see us and go somewhere else.” Jesus, no wonder they haven’t put you on the case tracking a serial killer. “Let’s see, we know where he’s going to kill, and we know he doesn’t go more than a couple days without killing in this particular area smaller than a football field. But what the fuck could we possibly do about it?” You are such a dumb bastard, and I hope you have a mouse problem in your home because the concept of a mousetrap is so far beyond the workings of your debilitated mind that the mice would breed until you were helpless to stop them.
2. Maybe they were wearing gloves. As a criminal I wouldn’t waste the time because apparently even the potential THREAT of wearing gloves is enough to keep you from attempting to get some kind of fingerprint shit going on. And what surfaces won’t get fingerprints? Vinyl? Metal? Glass? Seriously? Lord knows we’ve never seen fingerprints on GLASS. You’re probably right, but could you at least fucking try? On the other hand, I understand that fingerprinting is tedious and difficult, especially because criminals aren’t all like you with Cheetos dust all over their fingers all the time leaving a perfect neon orange fingerprint.
3. Really? We can go look for the empty wallet in the field? Hey, thanks for the advice. Is this your actual thing you say to people? Do you apply this to other crimes? You got raped? Well, maybe take a look around the bushes for your underpants. I bet he really didn’t want those and just discarded them anyway.
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Case 2: Case of the Hidden Mary Jane
Here I am, driving from one job to another. At this time I was volunteering as a high school cross-country coach and also working at a Cerebral Palsy call center. So based on resume alone you can see why I might be considered a dangerous criminal.
As I enter the highway, a state patrol car is leaving, but immediately flips around, catches up to me and pulls me over.
He pulls me over for a legitimate reason, no front license plate, which is legitimate in that all the front plate is good for is getting you busted by those red light cameras. Oh, and I guess you have to have it so they can pull you over when you don’t.
The guy runs my shit, then comes back and says, “What am I smelling in here?”
Huh. That’s a stumper. Well, I did just run about 5 miles in the sun. So balls? Although I suspect that smell would be familiar to you, so maybe it’s something else. This car is 15 years old at this point, so I suppose you could be smelling…anything that has passed through the car sometimes in the last 5,475 days. To be honest, I can’t account for all of those.
His next question: “When was the last time you smoked marijuana in this car?”
Okay, I now know why cops don’t solve fucking crimes. They really don’t. Hell, that woman who almost got raped and inspired the “Bedroom Intruder” Youtube craze? Her rapist is possibly the most famous criminal of our time. What crime do more people know about, in detail? And that moterfucker is still at large! Not only does the whole world know the details of the case, they can recite it in song. How have the cops not caught this asshole? Seriously, you’re not going to get more help than millions of people hearing about what happened. That fucking song should be like a dagger in the heart to any self-respecting cop.
But anyway, what was my cop’s plan? He was really clever, asking me “When was the last time” instead of “Have you ever,” but unlike him I do listen to what other people say from time to time which is probably why I finished high school and didn’t become a police officer.
And the worst part, being 100%honest here, I had never once used marijuana in any form at this point in my life. At all. Period. So this asshole is trying to trick me, trying to make me think he knows something.
Then he says, “You have an awful lot of bags back there. Do you mind if I look in them?”
“An awful lot” is three. One for class, one for my sweaty running clothes, one that I brought into work. So three bags is an awful lot, which makes sense from some piece of shit who carries everything he’s ever owned on his BELT.
I say, “Knock yourself out.” I wish I’d said something else, but we’ll get to that in a minute.
He goes through one bag and finds –gasp- school supplies. Then he goes for the second bag. He unzips it to my sweaty running clothes, underwear on top.
Some people sweat when they exercise. I do too, although it’s beyond sweat. It’s more like converting my top layer of skin to liquid that sloughs off as I move. It’s disgusting. If I wear a white shirt it’s about twenty minuets before it’s soaked through more than the t-shirt of a drunken coed in Cabo during Spring Break who is trying to win eighty dollars. And I’m not even going into what happens downstairs. There are some things you just don’t talk about.
He opens this bag of sweaty clothes and uses his pointer and middle finger to move the underwear aside. Then he hands me the bag back right away.
“Are you sure you don’t want to search the other one?” I said.
“No, I trust you,” he said.
He trusts me. That’s why he searched two of my three bags. I would say his trust is awful tenuous, and that mathematically he trusted me, at most, 33.333%.
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Thos are my last cop stories for now. I’m sure there will be more. As a law-abiding citizen who hasn’t provoked police behavior, it seems the past was dotted with run-ins, so that makes me optimistic for the future.
We all look back and think about what we would have changed. For example, if I had a time machine I would do things differently. But if I had a time machine I would probably be more concerned with telling my past self how to get babes. My advice would have to do with building a passenger seat in the time machine so I could bring back someone who knew something about getting babes.
But in the future, when you deal with the police, I want you to remember to ask them one thing.
When someone asks you if they can search your bags, and you know damn well there’s nothing in there, you tell them yes. You don’t put up a fight, and you don’t try and be an asshole about it. You say, “Yes. But when you don’t find anything, can I get an apology?”