Being a former police office was an eye-opening experience. Your life is a constant challenge when dealing with criminals, domestic violence, and hundreds of other petty and sometimes stupid crimes and incidents. My first year required that I ride with a more experienced officer who would further explain the job and the handling of the many different types of incidents. Even back then I maintained a diary of sorts for unusual cases and unforgettable moments. It also was extremely handy to have that book as reference material when appearing in court. I always referred to it as my Cover-My-Ass diary. It would eventually be replaced many years later by the bodycam. The veteran officer also explained to me his philosophy on law enforcement very quaintly. “If it wasn’t for the stupid criminals, we’d never catch anyone.” He meant it tongue-in-cheek, but it was also true in many cases. Here are a few tidbits I’ve saved from my old files and additional research.

• Two men once tried to pull off the front of an ATM machine by running a chain from the machine to the bumper of their pickup truck. Instead of pulling the front panel off the machine, though, they pulled the bumper off their truck. They panicked and fled, leaving the chain still attached to the machine, their bumper still attached to the chain, and their license plate still attached to the bumper.

• An Arizona company specializing in staging gunfights for western movies, received a call from a 47-year-old woman who wanted to have her husband shot. She was later sentenced to four years in jail.

• A man had been ticketed for driving alone in the carpool lane. He claimed that the four frozen cadavers in the mortuary van he was driving should be counted as passengers. The judge ruled that passengers must be alive to qualify.

• A judge decided that a jury went “a little bit too far” in recommending a sentence of 5,005 years for a man who was convicted of five robberies and a kidnapping. The judge reduced the sentence to 1,001 years.

• When a man attempted to siphon gasoline from a parked motor home, he got much more than he bargained for. Police arrived at the scene to find a very ill man curled up next to the motor home near a puddle of spilled sewage. A police spokesman said that the man admitted to trying to steal the gasoline but plugged his hose into the motor home’s sewage tank by mistake. The owner of the vehicle declined to press charges, saying that it was the best laugh he’d ever had.

• A drug-possession defendant claimed he had been searched by police without a warrant. The prosecutor said the officer didn’t need a warrant because a “bulge” observed in his jacket could have been a gun. Nonsense, said the defendant, who happened to be wearing the same jacket that day in court. He handed it to the judge who discovered a packet of cocaine in the pocket and laughed so hard he required a five-minute recess to compose himself.

• Clever drug traffickers used a propane tanker truck entering the US from Mexico. They rigged it so propane gas would be released from all of its valves if checked by border agents, while the truck actually concealed 6,240 pounds of marijuana. They were clever, but not too bright. They misspelled the name of the gas company on the side of the truck.

• A defendant was on trial for the armed robbery of a convenience store in a district court this week. The store manager testified that he was indeed the robber. The defendant jumped up, accused the woman of lying and then said, “I should have blown your [expletive] head off.” He then quickly added, “-if I’d been the one that was there.” The jury took 20 minutes to convict him and recommended a 30-year sentence.

🚨🚓🚨

STUPID IS AS STUPID DOES

(Forest Gump)