Thirteen Funny Police Reports (TT #36)

Every time I look at my local paper I find humor in it. Sometimes the humor comes from unfortunate misspellings and other editorial errors, but sometimes it comes from the types of police reports that are made public.

I've compiled these from several different issues of the paper, so different seasonal reports are even included! (I left out the one where a guy called the cops because someone had rearranged his reindeer at Christmas time so that they were in a rather "compromising" position.)

Some names and addresses have been changed to protect the alleged guilty parties.

1. A woman answered a knock on her door Friday morning to encounter a heavyset white female wearing a brown hat and scarf and "big dark glasses" spraying her in the face with what seemed to be hairspray and beating her with what is described in the report as "a plastic dump truck."

2. An officer responding for a second time before dawn Sunday to reports of a disturbance at a First Avenue address saw a man standing in the doorway of the residence holding an object "approximately 18-24 inches in length (that) shone brightly in my spotlight." The man, identified in the report as 50-year-old [crazy person], threw the object inside the apartment when he noticed the approaching police cruiser. "I asked [crazy person] what the large metal object was that he had tossed inside and he responded by saying 'a banana,'" the officer wrote in the report. "At that time ... [crazy’s] girlfriend approached the doorway from inside the residence and stated that [crazy] had grabbed her 'Legendary Sword,'" the report continues.

3. A 21-year-old female shopper was asked to come outside and talk with an officer about her beverage choice on March 13. She was told by police that it was indeed illegal to shop while drinking a bottle of strawberry daiquiri, cited for public intoxication, and released.

4. Residents awoke Sunday morning to find that several colorful, hard-boiled eggs placed about their yard the previous night had been stolen.

5. Police went to Regional Medical Center Monday to take a report from a 22-year-old female who said that a large group of girls beat her with a high-heeled shoe. On Tuesday one of the alleged shoe-wielding assailants, a 29-year-old woman, called police to say that this victim was out of the hospital and in a Family Dollar Store parking lot beating her 1994 Oldsmoblie Cutlass with a baseball bat.

6. While an officer was responding Saturday morning to a report of two 9-year-olds fighting and threatening each other and one woman trying to run over some of the other children involved with her car, the officer heard "a few loud thumps and then a small child screaming." An unsupervised 13-month-old had tumbled down a flight of stairs.

7. A teenager told police he was riding his bicycle down Prince Street to pick up a pizza when another teen stopped his truck in the road, got out, punched him in the left side of his face, and drove away.

8. Concerned residents were reporting that a group of young men were overturning port-a-potties and blocking the road to tell passing motorists they were conducting a "sobriety checkpoint."

9. Dispatch sent us to Prince St. for a lady stuck in a car wash," a report filed Sunday reads. The woman said she had been trapped inside her Lexus for 45 minutes before being rescued from the car wash. The car wash owner arrived and re-washed her car, the report reads.



10. A 23-year-old woman called police to report that her mother-in-law had entered her home without permission and, finding the home's odor unsatisfactory, made insulting remarks.

11. A man reported that vandals had been at work on Applegate Drive Saturday, leaving sardines in his mailbox. On Tuesday, a few blocks away on Cutter Ridge Road, a woman checking her mail found that here too vandals had struck, leaving the same pungent and tiny fish as their calling card.

12. A resident told patrolmen a suspect stopped in front of his house and shot a .22 rifle at a deer, "toward his residence and shop." The deer had been hit and was lying in a ditch. Officers agreed to put down the deer with a gunshot, and some neighbors took the dead animal home.

13. A man called police to report that his neighbor had trespassed onto his property. "Upon my arrival (the resident) advised me that his neighbor ... had trespassed onto his yard by mowing over the property line." The officer estimated that the neighbor had allowed his lawnmower to stray as much as "a couple of feet" past where the resident believed his property to end.

The website for Thursday Thirteen doesn't seem to be working anymore, so maybe nobody does it anymore. If the link has changed, let me know.

ETA - New Thursday 13 link.