These cops from Ask Reddit have heard it all.
1. One of the funnier ones that I remember. We got a call for a kid (he was 18 and a gang member) brandishing a firearm. He had pulled up his shirt pretending to brandish a firearm to intimidate somebody. The person calling only saw a holster. After we got there, he kept telling us it wasn’t a gun but a dildo. We took him down at gunpoint and he was right. He was walking around with a holstered, black dildo. Why? Because he could.
2. My dad is an officer and he pulled someone over for speeding and running a red light and they said their breast implant burst. He called ems to rush them to the hospital and turned out it did and it’s actually very dangerous if they leak.
3. Pulled a guy over who was speeding profusely. Guy was obviously disheveled. He said he was headed to the hospital because he had a tick on his penis. Cop was confused, but he escorted him there, then waited in the lobby to check on him/ see if he was blowing smoke. After a while, he asked the desk what was going on, why it took so long to take a tick off his penis.
Her reply: “It wasn’t on it. It was in it.”
4. Cop here – got a call of a domestic dispute that sounded very heated and a lot of banging was heard. Get to scene and I can hear someone yelling and swearing and brawling, doesn’t sound good at all. Guy answers the door, shirt off and angry, but seems bewildered as to why police had been called. He told me he was building Ikea furniture – sounds like the most bullshit thing. But, we enter, see the new IKEA furniture half set up and no one else is home. Colour me surprised.
5. Recently, in College football, a Georgia Southern player got in trouble for possession of cocaine. He claimed it was bird poop. It was bird poop.
6. My wife’s dad was a fire investigator. He was investigating a house that got burned down. Home owner said they sent a turtle with a candle on its back under the house as they were trying to locate a noise. Later my wife’s dad found a burnt up turtle with wax on it.
7. Had a friend that got pulled over for speeding. Cop asked why, friend said he had to shit. Cop didn’t believe him, friend shits pants in front of officer and got a warning.
8. I once stopped a guy at night on a dark country road for throwing a lit cigarette butt out the window of his car. I distinctly saw the distinctive spray of sparks from the area of the passenger side rear wheel.
When I went up to contact the driver, he was polite, but told me he didn’t throw any cigarette butts out the window. I reminded him I have a dashboard camera, and asked if he wished to revise his story. The driver was adamant, saying he doesn’t smoke, and that I could search his car if I wanted. I leaned in and noted no smell of tobacco. I went back to my car and reviewed the video. Near as I could tell, the car drove over a lit butt on the roadway and threw a shower of sparks. I cut him loose and told him to drive safely.
9. This still happens more often then you think:
See cars driving very slow and very odd in the middle of the night. Like at store parking lots, churches, closed parks. Think they might be casing or whatever its odd enough for a casual contact.
Fucking Pokemon Go every time.
10. Had an unemployed guy on video giving large sums of cash money to an employed guy. I knew unemployed guy had recently robbed a place and had lots of cash on hand. During questioning I confront him about having the extra cash as a guy with no job to give to the guy with a job. He says he recently won the lottery and was helping dude out. Just to cover bases, I went to lottery department to verify if he had any winnings. Dude had won $5k shortly after the robbery. Still had enough evidence to convict on robbery though.
11. I pulled over a guy and arrested him for an active warrant and a suspended license. As I spoke with this individual while he was handcuffed I noticed a look of extreme discomfort on his face as he was slightly bent over. This guy was a known drug user so I made the assumption he put drugs up his rear end. I then asked him the obvious question “Do you have dope up your butt”. He denied at first. After telling him that it would be recovered at the jail, which would lead to additional charges. He then let me know he had a “Plug” up his butt. While handcuffed he removed a 13 inch dildo from his rectum and attempted to hand it to me.
While at the jail I had 1 question, Why? He told me that his wife is very rough on him with a strap on and he was simply trying to “loosen up” before getting home.
12. I had a heroin addict who I arrested for a warrant. While searching her purse, I found a small container with a grayish/brown substance in it, consistent with heroin. When I asked her what it was, she started laughing. She told me to test it because it wasn’t heroin. I tested it and sure enough, the test came back negative. She explained to me that inside the container was the ashes of her dead cat. She said that when she goes to pick up heroin for her friends, she’ll take some for herself and cut the rest with her cat’s ashes. Her friends have been snorting or shooting up some of her dead cat.
13. Many years ago I was on ride-along with my cop father when he and another officer had to conduct a felony stop on a vehicle that came back reported stolen. While frisking one of the vehicle’s occupants, he discovered a little baggie containing a pale, crystalline-looking substance. The kid’s story was that his mother gave him these baggies of crushed peanuts because he liked to eat them on his oranges. I don’t know about the mom part, but he wasn’t lying about the substance being peanuts.
14. I got a call of a domestic violence argument in progress. Arrive with back up and stage. We hear a male yelling and crying at his wife. He refuses to answer the door so we kicked it in. We clear the house and find him in bed. The wife is nowhere to be seen. He is still all worked up and crying. We finally get him to focus on us and ask where his wife went. He pulls back the covers and shows us her urn. He just brought her home from the cremation!
15. My cousin was a cop who pulled someone over speeding at night. He’s got his flashlight out for visibility. Starts the standard traffic stop routine. Guy isn’t cooperating at all, not being an asshole, just not cooperating. Cousin asks him again for papers. Guy points to the side of his own head and just ¯_(ツ)/¯. Cousin yells louder, guy remains stone faced and keeps up the ¯_(ツ)/¯ routine refusing to even show license registration insurance. This goes on until it becomes like a sovereign citizen stop (look it up on YouTube, very entertaining). Cousin grabs him by the lapel and pulls him out through the window and tosses him up on the car. Then the guy finally decides it’s time to say “I’m deaf! I’m deaf!” In the mwoppiest deaf guy voice imaginable. Turns out he wasn’t just mocking my cousin, he was pointing to his ear and shrugging to say I can’t hear you. Deaf guy explains he reads lips, but the flashlight was blinding him. Cousin verifies this somehow (license restriction?) and the guy was in fact deaf. Cousin felt like a massive dick and basically just dusted the guy off and sent him on his way with an apology and told him to slow down.
16. I went to a burglary a couple of years ago at about 1am. Found a guy about half a mile up the road hanging around so I ask what he’s up to. He was quite shifty and vague and just said the classic ‘waiting for a friend’ line. I told him I didn’t believe him and unless he told me why he was really there I would nick him for the burglary. He eventually pulled out his phone with a swingers app on it, turns out they only give you the postcode for the party and you have to contact the host for the exact address once you’re nearby; he was waiting for the host to get back to him so he could go join in.
17. Had a Domestic in Progress I responded to during Christmas Day and the excuse for them fighting was “We’re not mad at each other, we’re just upset because we wanted to surprise the kids for Christmas, we got some Deer, dressed them up, now they’re destroying our house.”
Turns out there was literally three fully grown white-tailed deer in the house somehow dressed with full bell harnesses like Santa’s reindeer.
I had to call the Game Wardens down who were then able to help me remove the deer from the property without injury to us or them.
How they managed to get the Deer and dress them up is still a mystery to this day.
18. Popped a college kid for shitty driving and pulled a hundred grams of weed off of him. Also, a 1lb glass pipe shaped like a huge nail. No biggie. Also find weed under the other college kids in the car. Driver falls on the sword and tells me all of it is his and lets his friends walk free. I like this kid.
However during the search we find packaged addies in the cellophane of a cigarette pack with the top melted closed. <goddamnit intensifies>. Ask kid if he’s dealing addies at school. Tell him I’m aware of the prescription pill epidemic. He says no and spins a huge yarn about how he only carries a few on him because he’s had his orange pill bottle stolen so many times. Kid seems like a pretty good dude. I decided to take the x-files approach. Supervisor tells me pursue charges for dealing… blah blah blah. I tell the kid he has one chance to prove he’s telling the truth.
Shows me the broken glass under his drivers seat from a vehicle burglary. Gotta do better. I follow behind him back to his dorm, he lets me in and shows me the busted footlocker he kept them in under his bed. Dunno. Kinda weak. Supervisors telling me to hurry and and drop the axe. Tell him to do better. He calls one of the soccer team assistants up and we meet him in the locker room. Shows me the little wooden locker which has a broken lock. Ehhh.
Assistant coach tells me they have replaced the lock on his cabinet three times. Campus security has numerous reports of medicine theft from this kid. Nice. I call supervisor up and tell him I have no grounds to pursue delivery charges.
Poor bastard just kept getting his adderalls jacked and being the big dumb meatball he was, he started packaging them like that. I end up talking to his best friend breaking up a house party a couple months later. Friend tells me kid is a stand up guy who only uses weed due to extreme anxiety (totally believable from my interaction with him) and has never sold anything in his life. Friend thanked me and told me his buddy spoke well of me. Friend also tells me he had to drive his buddy to the hospital a few hours after I left from a panic attack due to the whole incident.
I felt bad for the kid. So now, whenever I see him smoking up in his car in the mall parking lot I just wave.
19. I used to work as a military police officer. I was working at the main gate one night and this guy tried to come on base but he didn’t have any ID other than a drivers license so I couldn’t let him on. The guy told me that a general said he could come on but he didn’t have any proof of that and he didn’t know what the generals name was. It was also super late at night and he didn’t seem to have any answers that would help us identify who he was. Long story short, the dude ended up being legit and was coming on base to be awarded a silver star the next day from that general.
20. One night I’m out working, and as I go down the street (fairly nice middle class area surrounded by some high crime neighborhoods) around midnight I see a dude on a bike, no lights on, pulling a lawnmower behind him on a rope.
I immediately flip a 180 and light him up. Recognize the guy as a local homeless dude with some prior burglary/theft arrests. I walk up and just open with “Dude, come on…”
Guy holds his hands out and swears he didn’t steal the lawnmower. Claims someone just gave it to him. I ask who, and he doesn’t know a name. So I demand he tell me where to find said lawnmower owner. The directions he gave were literally “go that way a bit, then right at a stop sign, and take one of those side streets that way. It’s about halfway down a street, at a house that has a pickup and a car in the driveway.”
By this point backup had arrived, so I leave him in the presence of backup, and drive off in search of his mythical donor of lawn equipment. I made a decent guess as to the first turn, then flipped a mental coin as to which of the next three side streets he would have gone down. I pick the second of the three streets, and start down it. Every other fucking house has a truck and car combo…there must have been a dozen houses that matched the description.
Halfway down, I see an average looking house and go “ehh, I’ll try this one”. After all, it’s midnight and this is a wild goose chase. Go up, ring the doorbell…middle aged dude comes to the door. “Hello sir, have you been giving away lawnmowers to random sketchy homeless guys at midnight today?”
Yes. As a matter of fact, he had. Homeowner goes on to complain to me that his wife was upset as his continual inability to get the mower running, and had ordered him with some severity to remove the mower from the house or face the consequences. He pushed it to the curb right as homeless guy rode by, and the latter had asked and received his permission to take it.
I drove back in shock and amazement. Apologized to homeless guy, and sent him on his way. A few months later we ran into each other at a nearby gas station, and he told me it turned out just to need a new spark plug, and that he had gotten it running again, before going on to sell it for $150 to someone.
For years after, whenever I would run into him, he would always make sure to remind me of the money he made from selling that “stolen” lawnmower…LOL
21. That he got deported because he thought they wanted his ethnicity when the jail staff asked for his nationality. I verified his SSN and Birth Record and sure as shit he was telling the truth.
22. During a search of a person I pulled out a bag of a sticky dark substance consistent with heroin. The subject had multiple drug priors and is a known heavy heroin user. He immediately tells me it is burnt sugar and he is pissed someone sold it to him. Long story short when i tested the substance it did not test positive for heroin.
23. I thought they were smuggling drugs and when I asked them to roll down their window they said, I sh*t you not “Don’t give us tickets, we have donuts” I told them to exit the vehicle and found out that in the trunk they actually did have about 24 dozens of donuts, no drugs so I let them go but I had a hard time trying to keep a straight face when I opened it.
24. My department frequently had to deal with this male escort who kept getting released in work release programs. No joke we caught this guy giving out handjobs in broad daylight at stoplights. Anyways I and a few coworkers leave town for a conference, and guess who we fucking find up to his old tricks. Outside of our jurisdiction so we don’t do anything about it besides report him, but we talked to him and he gave some bullshit excuse about how he was flown in on a private jet for some record deal. Yes he had mentioned his hip hop career to us earlier, no I never got his soundcloud link.
Anyways, we sort of forget about him until we get to the Greyhound station and there he fucking is again up to his normal ‘tricks’. He obviously wanted to deflect the conversation from what he was doing, so he offered to give us a ride back to our city in his private jet. We detain him but before we can even call the local station a limo rolls up and the chauffeur walks around with a sign with his name on it. Dude was telling the truth about his record deal.
We definitely upgraded our travel arrangements after apologizing for not believing him. Little shit still gives us regular trouble of course.
25. My partner and I arrested a fella one evening on a warrant. During the search, we found one of those metal pill bottles that go on a person’s key chain; you can buy them at Walgreens and the like (those are sometimes used in an illegal manner). The guy is a known drug user, and inside the container is a crushed white powder. One would assume he is concealing drugs. We take him, and the container, to the station for testing. We start with cocaine…nope. meth, MDMA, X, opiods… all no. (Keep in mind that testing requires a small sample everytime). Finally I just ask him, “what is in the metal container on your keys…” He pauses…then starts losing his mind. “Those are my deceased fathers ashes I keep with me. EVERY ounce better be there…” I slink out of the room and run over to the other officer. STOP! He was not very happy needless to say.
26. In 2009 I stopped a guy for speeding and give the whole introduction. I asked him if he had a legal reason to speed. He said, “I think my kid has H1N1!” My first thought was…. suuuuuuure buddy. I looked in the back seat and saw the kid looked horrible. I didn’t even question it. I told him to get the hell to the hospital. We were only a few miles away from one.
27. Had a call one night for some teenagers trespassing on one of the large properties in the more wealthy part of my patrol area. Get there, partner and I found the kids and ask them what they’re doing. They said they heard a school rumor there was a camel kept on the property….this is in the Southwestern US ain’t no camels here. We tell them to get out of there and they didn’t argue. My partner looks at me and goes “You know I kinda want to see if there is a camel”. So we’re wandering around the property with our flashlights when all of sudden I turn and my flashlight reveils an actual, live, untethered camel just hanging out and chillin! We talked with the property owner, who wanted to press charges on the kids for trespassing but my partner was able to talk him out of it when we started asking if he had the required permits for the Camel and if the city knew about it because if he wanted a report they would. Was an interesting night.
28. Not a cop but I have a very common name and got pulled over for driving across the medium and there was a warrant out for me for rape and assault or something.
As it turns out a guy with the exact same name and birthday born in the same city is this and it took me about 20 mins if pleading to get the officers to realize I did not match the description.
I deal with this dude every once in a while as it turns out our socials are off by one digit.
If I ever see him we are going to have a long talk.
29. I was driving with my fiancé and we went through a road block where they checked registration and shit, and we get to the cops and they ask for our registration. I’m sitting in the passenger seat so I open up the glovebox and right there is a clear, unmarked baggie filled to the brim with catnip. I completely forgot it was there and just froze. Wide-eyed, I turned to look at the cop shining his light through my open window and he’s frozen too, just staring at the baggie with this look on his face like “really?”
I just started immediately professing “omg I swear to god this is catnip, you can take it and smell it or test it or whatever like I swear”. And at this point it’s just so ridiculous that I start cracking up, and the cop takes it and reasonably deduces I’m telling the truth, and he starts laughing and calls his partner over and tells her what happened and they both just cackled away for a minute and sent us on our way
30. Former cop here. I was behind a vehicle that couldn’t stay in the lane, kept swerving, etc. It was 1am, and I think another drunk idiot on the road. Pull him over, guy is a straight up asshole to me. Cursed me out, yelling at me, and I notice his speech is slurred. I get him out to car, and I can smell a fruity smell on his breath and he has to lean against the car for support. I ask him how much he had to drink and he tells me to fuck off. By this point I’m ready to bring him in for a DUI, but I just had a feeling something wasn’t right. I called EMS to come check him, blood sugar was at 40. Not drunk, just a diabetic. If I would have arrested him, he probably would of died before I finished the paperwork. Go with your gut if something doesn’t seem right!