“This is exactly the kind of thing police talk about, because it is unusual and breaks up the monotony.”
I worked at a law firm years ago when young, and moonlighted at my best friend’s bar on the weekends. She had a new alarm system hooked up that if you pushed a buzzer under the bar, the alarm rang over in the police dept. Someone told me it was there, but as I was part-time I didn’t know much about it. One afternoon, a bunch of biker types came into the bar, proceeded to drink, and when I could see they were starting to get loaded, I cut them off, very nicely. Well, the didn’t take it nicely, got belligerent and one kept making like he was going to jump over the bar at me. So I pushed the buzzer alarm.
The police came over, guns drawn, put one up to the head of one of the biker’s and the cops’ adrenaline was coming out of their pores. I told them what had been happening and they kicked the bikers out of the bar. Meanwhile, they were all real po’d with me. The alarm buzzer was for robberies in progress or the like I learned later, and I was supposed to use the regular phone line for less serious problems. These guys were all hyped up expecting the worst, and I blew it, because I didn’t know better. These cops were real upset with me because they thought something really bad was going down and it made them go into fight mode unnecessarily. After I explained my ignorance about the alarm, they calmed down and forgave me (I knew one of them). So don’t tell me how going out on a call is just a lark for Cops to alleviate boredom. They don’t want to put their lives in potential jeopardy unnecessarily any more than we do and they never know the exact circumstances of any given call.
Yeah, right. I have been a peace officer, and a lot of them do get perturbed at false alarm calls.
A whole lot of them talk about the unusual calls for years afterward. This was not a dangerous call. No officer drew their gun. They were polite. The citizen was polite.
Let us see if any other former officers agree with me or not.
Good lord, I’d heard people who think like flaglady exist.
As an aside, is it extreme of me to say we ought to have live camera’s on all courthouses, police stations, jails etc.? I mean they are up in our grill storing phone records, google searches etc. (in case it’s ever needed). Maybe we ought to have the chance to watch the watchers.
Obviously joking...sort of.
Didn’t Bush say about the terrorists “they hate us for our freedoms”. I can’t help but wonder, do you think they like us now?