Yeah I’ve been at it for about 7 years now, as a very rough ballpark I’ve probably answered well over 100k calls at this point, so plenty of opportunities to pick up some funny calls. This is just kind of a best-of list of funny calls that aren’t too traumatic or personally identifiable. I’ve handled some pretty crazy shit in my time here and I’d generally consider the area I work in to be a pretty boring and safe place, I can’t even imagine some of the stuff some other places deal with.
I started typing a few of them out, it became a very long long post, and then I set my phone down for a minute and it got deleted somehow and I’m not gonna retype it all right now, because I probably should have gone to sleep about 2 or 3 hours ago after getting off work.
But if you remind me later today, I’ll try to type some of them up again.
Also gonna get my disclaimer out of the way for it now
The problem with talking about the craziest calls is because they are crazy and often pretty unique incidents that sometimes make the news, someone could probably Google the details and figure out exactly where I work and I don’t particularly want to put that out there. And if I strip out the more identifiable details, that often kind of gets rid of the parts that made them so crazy so they just don’t make for as good of a story.
That said, before it got deleted I feel like I had a pretty entertaining and still properly anonymized post going, but it did only scratch the tip of the iceberg for some of the crazy shit I’ve handled.
I’ll leave you with one more story that fit the OP’s request for dumb calls though
I had to send police out to basically tell two grown-ass adults to say please and thank you to each other.
I got a call from a lady who was absolutely furious.
The problem was she wanted to park in a particular parking space, but there was some guy already parked there and sitting in his vehicle.
Now this was just public street parking in a busy downtown area. Not some private lot, or permit only area, or even the space right in front of her house I don’t think it was even metered or time-restricted. Just a first-came, first-serve space on the side of the street that anyone can park in.
So she asked him to move, and based on how she was talking to me, I suspect that she didn’t ask nicely.
To which he responded “say please”
Which pissed her the fuck off enough to call 911 about it.
I also get the impression that she did not, in fact, try saying “please”
I work in a pretty diverse county. We have some of the richest communities in the country here, and we have areas that are pretty economically depressed with high crime rates, we have semi-rural areas with hundreds of acres of woods and farms and we have areas that seem more urban than some parts of the major city that we border. We got a bit of everything here.
This particular story took place in a little microcosm of urban blight. It’s a rough, pretty urban little town, full of drugs, crime, homeless encampments, graffiti, decaying homes with boarded up windows, etc.
And the police in this town really are… something.
Overall, as far as cops go (which is a big qualifier,) the cops in my county are pretty good. I’ll go into that a bit more in my other stories if/when I get around to them.
The ones in this town are cut from a different sort of cloth though. Not that they’re necessarily bad, when shit is hitting the fan and there’s been a shooting or some other major incident, they’re exactly the cops you want running the show, they are organized and they get shit done
And they are actually very familiar with their community, it sometimes almost feels like they all personally know each and every person who lives in their town
However, for anything short of a major incident, it feels like they want nothing to do with it and calls end up sitting in pending for ridiculously long times even when they don’t seem to have anything else going on.
So how or why the police actually went out to this petty squabble in a timely manner is a mystery for the ages.
But go they did, and, per the notes they entered into the call, they “explained the concept of street parking to the complainant”
Now, my first instinct here is to say that my caller was an entitled asshole. And she absolutely was. But the other party wasn’t actually that much better. He chose to engage with and antagonize her, and while he did have every right to be there, he could have deescalated the situation at any time by just leaving. Was a parking space really worth wasting the police and my time over? What if she had escalated further and gotten violent?
Yeah I’ve been at it for about 7 years now, as a very rough ballpark I’ve probably answered well over 100k calls at this point, so plenty of opportunities to pick up some funny calls. This is just kind of a best-of list of funny calls that aren’t too traumatic or personally identifiable. I’ve handled some pretty crazy shit in my time here and I’d generally consider the area I work in to be a pretty boring and safe place, I can’t even imagine some of the stuff some other places deal with.
Now share the craziest stories!
I started typing a few of them out, it became a very long long post, and then I set my phone down for a minute and it got deleted somehow and I’m not gonna retype it all right now, because I probably should have gone to sleep about 2 or 3 hours ago after getting off work.
But if you remind me later today, I’ll try to type some of them up again.
Also gonna get my disclaimer out of the way for it now
The problem with talking about the craziest calls is because they are crazy and often pretty unique incidents that sometimes make the news, someone could probably Google the details and figure out exactly where I work and I don’t particularly want to put that out there. And if I strip out the more identifiable details, that often kind of gets rid of the parts that made them so crazy so they just don’t make for as good of a story.
That said, before it got deleted I feel like I had a pretty entertaining and still properly anonymized post going, but it did only scratch the tip of the iceberg for some of the crazy shit I’ve handled.
I’ll leave you with one more story that fit the OP’s request for dumb calls though
I had to send police out to basically tell two grown-ass adults to say please and thank you to each other.
I got a call from a lady who was absolutely furious.
The problem was she wanted to park in a particular parking space, but there was some guy already parked there and sitting in his vehicle.
Now this was just public street parking in a busy downtown area. Not some private lot, or permit only area, or even the space right in front of her house I don’t think it was even metered or time-restricted. Just a first-came, first-serve space on the side of the street that anyone can park in.
So she asked him to move, and based on how she was talking to me, I suspect that she didn’t ask nicely.
To which he responded “say please”
Which pissed her the fuck off enough to call 911 about it.
I also get the impression that she did not, in fact, try saying “please”
I work in a pretty diverse county. We have some of the richest communities in the country here, and we have areas that are pretty economically depressed with high crime rates, we have semi-rural areas with hundreds of acres of woods and farms and we have areas that seem more urban than some parts of the major city that we border. We got a bit of everything here.
This particular story took place in a little microcosm of urban blight. It’s a rough, pretty urban little town, full of drugs, crime, homeless encampments, graffiti, decaying homes with boarded up windows, etc.
And the police in this town really are… something.
Overall, as far as cops go (which is a big qualifier,) the cops in my county are pretty good. I’ll go into that a bit more in my other stories if/when I get around to them.
The ones in this town are cut from a different sort of cloth though. Not that they’re necessarily bad, when shit is hitting the fan and there’s been a shooting or some other major incident, they’re exactly the cops you want running the show, they are organized and they get shit done
And they are actually very familiar with their community, it sometimes almost feels like they all personally know each and every person who lives in their town
However, for anything short of a major incident, it feels like they want nothing to do with it and calls end up sitting in pending for ridiculously long times even when they don’t seem to have anything else going on.
So how or why the police actually went out to this petty squabble in a timely manner is a mystery for the ages.
But go they did, and, per the notes they entered into the call, they “explained the concept of street parking to the complainant”
Now, my first instinct here is to say that my caller was an entitled asshole. And she absolutely was. But the other party wasn’t actually that much better. He chose to engage with and antagonize her, and while he did have every right to be there, he could have deescalated the situation at any time by just leaving. Was a parking space really worth wasting the police and my time over? What if she had escalated further and gotten violent?