Do you ever walk by a situation where the cops have already shown up and you can just tell it's a mess?
Yeah, imagine how the cops who showed up must have felt. The situation was likely even more of a mess before they got there.
You don't know what fires got put out, what people got arrested, and how much of the mess got cleaned up before you ever laid eyes on it.
u/HelpIsWhatINeedPls asked:
Cops of reddit, what is the most "What the heck happened here?" moment you've experienced?
Here were some of the answers.
Trigger warning for extreme violence, blood, and gore.
Nothing To Be Done
Giphy
Former cop. Was a rookie deputy and got this call that a man got his foot caught in a garden tiller and was bleeding profusely. It was a 20 min drive running code so I had time to plan out my actions. I figured the ambulance would be about 10 minutes behind me so I was gonna tourniquet above the knee and i assumed he'd be unconscious and/or needing cpr. I get there and it's a big farm building with two guys just standing their smoking. I grabbed my medic bag (not a medic but it had tourniquet, c collars, gauze etc,,) I run towards them to ask where the patient was and they were white as a ghost just smoking while pointing behind them. I went inside and behind a big John Deere tractor was a huge pto driven tiller about 7 feet wide and 3 feet tall.
There was my victim, with his back against the tractor tire, his left leg was sucked in the tiller and wrapped twice around it with the sole of the shoe next to his face and toe pointing towards the left. His femur shot out underneath the tiller and was beautifully white with no blood. He looked up at me and said "can you help me?" Now keep in mind, I'm 21, thought this was a garden tiller and assumed I'd be able to do something but I was completely out of my element. Two ambulances, the rural fire department extrication team, a welding company to cut the machine apart on scene, a helicopter and a surgeon that came to amputate on scene later he was free.
Not What It Seems
Late to the party but my favorite so far has got to be the tale of the UFO/ALIENS.
I was a cop on the rez for a while and had my fair share of crazies. One night, I'm out driving around and I get a call from dispatch. There's a UFO out in one of the farmer's fields.
Ok?
So I get to the house and talk with the guy. We know each other, he doesn't seem to be THAT looney. I turn my spotlight onto said field and sure as heck, there's something not quite right there. It's metal.
So I go bee-bopping through the furrows and hoping my scarediness isn't showing because this. Is. Freaky. It was an autumn night with the wind howling and clouds blowing overhead.
I get closer. I have one hand on my holstered gun and the other shining my flashlight. I was rehearsing what I was going to say to our new overlords and then my brain finally clicks as to what it actually was.
A wad of those STUPID MYLAR BALLOONS! All blown up and caught on some weeds. I'm talking like twenty of them, just chilling and scaring the heck out of me.
I grab them and walked back out to the farmer. He started laughing and then I did too. I handed them over to him and got back in my squad, still shaking.
The sad part was, he passes away a few years ago, and his family gave me those deflated balloons that he had kept. I have them in my basement now.
What Kind Of Bird?
I'm taking a slightly different approach in answering this question.
A couple of months ago, I got a "QA"/ Questionable Activity call...it's a catch all for anything suspicious...
The caller stated she believed someone had snuck into her backyard, climbed up onto her second floor deck and then left an imprint of their penis on her sliding door.
I show up to the call about 5 minutes later and she's mad at me because I didn't schedule an appointment to come over and her kids saw me...she didn't want her kids to think something bad had happened.
After we get past her anger towards me for showing up, she shows me the glass sliding door in question. In all fairness to the caller there was a sizable smudge and imprint on the glass.
However the imprint looked nothing like any penis I've ever seen...in fact the imprint looked really similar to the dead bird laying on the deck next to the door.
When I pointed out the dead bird and explained my belief that no penis had been placed on her door, the caller became incredibly irate and told me she moved to our city because it was supposed to be very safe, but now she was thinking of moving away because naked people throwing dead birds at her house was more than she could handle...
Realizing I would not be able to rationalize with penis bird, I left and wrote my report...
...some people don't deserve to call 911
New Kinds Of House Calls
My dad told me the one time he went to a house and and a women pulled something out of her shopping bag and started hitting him with it. He's trying to stop her but the other officers are all laughing. Finally he realizes that she's beating him with a dildo.
Quite An Assortment
One time we got a call about a minor wreck in a highway corridor. We get there, I'm handling the accident.
A hundred yards down there is a car on flats. And another further down from that. Unrelated to the accident. One of the drivers walked back to us and told us a sketchy guy had been stopping at these cars to offer his help in fixing the flats. The theory was that he threw something on the road to flatten the tires so that he could 'help' and get money from the drivers.
I'm stuck at the back end of this mess, on the radio trying to get another unit to detain the shady guy.
All of the sudden I look over and there's a guy in nothing but a hospital gown and an IV hanging out of his arm just toddling along the shoulder. The nearest hospital was several miles away so I have no idea how he covered that distance with nobody noticing.
So here I am with 1. A car wreck 2. A guy possibly flattening tires on purpose and 3. An escaped hospital patient. All completely unrelated, on a major highway late at night.
A Mobile Limb
A friend of mine is a cop in the UK and his story is more wtf as he saw it unfold, but missed how it all started. It was his first week out on patrol and he was assigned to an experienced partner. They respond to a burglary in progress and are told that a nearby dog unit was on the scene already. When they arrive at the property they hear a commotion outside that's clearly between an officer and a suspect, and they open the garden gate to assist the dog unit.
What they then witness is a suspect face down on the grass, an officer stamping on the suspect's back whilst holding his arm up near her hip and shouting "stop resisting!", and the police dog absolutely going to town on this guys buttocks with his teeth. The suspect is, unsurprisingly, struggling and resisting and then ends up kicking the dog. The dog then latches onto the guys leg, starts ferociously tugging, PULLS IT OFF and then runs towards the new cops on the scene with it. It turns out that was a false leg (which no-one except the suspect knew at the time), and my buddy the cop said he just froze whilst trying to figure out how the hell he calls this in and whether or not he should retrieve the man's leg from the police dog.
Oh The Shudders You'll Shudder!
As a brand new ER nurse we had two police officers drop off a naked man bleeding from his groin area. We were informed he was not in custody but they would be in the waiting room to arrest him when he was discharged (the city would have had to pay for his care if he was under arrest) the man refused to say anything "without his lawyer" so all I knew was the chief complaint, cut on scrotum. I take off the towel and get to see my first testicle, as in without the normal fleshy covering. The way the skin was ripped I thought for sure a police dog was involved. I'll spare you the rest of the gory details.
Someone manages to get the backstory out of the cops, dude was in the shower when they arrived to arrest him on a meth charge. He runs and tries to hop over a chain link fence. Not nearly as exciting as I was thinking.
An Extreme Overreaction
Show up to a "trouble unknown" call. Teenage looking girl walks out the front door as I arrive, and sits on a chair in the front listening to an iPod. This was pretty disarming for me, she was clearly not distressed at all from whatever the "trouble unknown" was.
I didn't even disturb her as I knocked on the front door. I can see an adult male through the side glass by the door, he has a look of absolute terror. As he reaches the door, a crazed looking woman attacks him from behind, biting his shoulder like a zombie. I would later learn this is his wife.
Dispatch, give me the channel and get me more officers here now. I open the door and the fight is on. Pull this woman off and wrestle her to the ground, face down. She's very small framed, probably 5' and 100lbs max. I'm a foot taller and 80lbs heavier. She's screaming and flailing. I grab hold of her right arm, attempting to put it behind her back for handcuffing but she is supernaturally strong for some reason. I've got both hands on her right wrist now trying to control her and she's not giving at all.
I try pain compliance, muscle gouges, anything to give me an advantage. No response, still fighting. It felt like this was going on for a long time but in reality it was a few minutes. Finally backup arrives, and he immediately goes to grab her left arm, seeing what I'm trying to accomplish. I'm finally able to get a handcuff on her wrist and pin it to her back, and my partner cuffs the other wrist, but she slips out (small frame, small hands/wrist). This happened a few times in a row, and finally out of frustration I yelled "just clamp the cuff all the way down, we'll adjust it when she's under control!"
Finally get her cuffed but she's still flailing and screaming. Other officers arrive at this point as well as paramedics. They're unable to assess her at all really. The husband tells us they bought some cheep herb from a sketchy dude in town and after smoking it she flipped out. I assume it was laced with something, he said he smoked too but didn't have a reaction, so who knows.
We had to drive this lady up to the hospital in a patrol car. She calmed down a little but the entire ride she was rambling about nonsense. The hospital was prepared and had several large nurses waiting and we got her strapped down to a bed, I told the staff about the weed and said "good luck!" When my adrenaline was gone, my forearms were so sore, they felt like rocks from fighting with this tiny woman. Moral of the story, don't smoke stuff you bought from the town crack head.
When The Law Doesn't Work
Too many to choose from I forget them all. So how about non-fatal ones that are kinda upbeat?
Car in a pond. Guy bought the car, hated it, got so angry he literally drove it into a pond and they left. Ticket for littering cause I jumped in to see if anyone was in the car.
Car wrecked in a tree...IN A TREE, like up in the middle of the branches, I just..don't know how.
Half missing decomposing dead body from natural death. Turned out the many cats in the house ate half that person. (Ok that ones gross)
A ride-along had a warrant and got tased by the Officer they where with, trying to run from. That was a more of wtf moment hearing it over the radio.
Guy going through a divorce and decided to renovate his house at 2am with a sledge hammer, by taking out all the walls and furniture, cause his future ex got awarded the house. (Didn't arrest him, was still his house, just keep the noise down please)
The Crazy Lottery
Giphy
Not me but my dad but when he was on the road years back he got a call from a man saying he was locked in someone's closet. So he goes to the location of the call which was a project housing unit and knocks on the door. A man answered exclaiming "I CAUGHT ONE! I CAUGHT ONE!" My dad has absolutely no idea was this dude means until he opens up the closet and sees a man with dwarfism tied up in the closet. Apparently the man was going door to door for some organization and when the psycho dude opened his door he thought he found a leprechaun and proceeded to "catch" it and throw it in his closet for safekeeping.