They’ve got a bunch of folding chairs and tables, telecomm equipment, and no company name. Found them using our guest Wifi to access a bunch of scam sites and banks in other countries.
They’ve got a bunch of folding chairs and tables, telecomm equipment, and no company name. Found them using our guest Wifi to access a bunch of scam sites and banks in other countries.
I have called the police 5 times in my life. Once when someone broke into my car, once when someone broke into my home. Twice when someone was illegally dumping trash on the side of the road, and once qhen a scammer intercepted an 18,000 dollar check. In the 3 cases of theft/B&E i was told there was nothing they could do and given a paper record of what happened to give to my insurance. In the cases of illegal dumping(I was following the people and providing liscense plate number) i was told “we dont handle that, call the county and they will come clean it up”
The police, at least in my area, are fucking worthless. They exist solely to give tickets and fines, while do little to nothing to acrually combat crime or enforce law.
Most ridiculous call ive made was an attempted suicide.
A guy had set up in a local coffee shop, and was going to drink a quart of latex paint, which he planned to wash down with a pint of paint thinner, to prove the paint was nontoxic.
So I called and asked them to send police and ems down to help help stop a suicide. The dispatcher said she wasnt sure suicide was against the law. I told her that it was, it still counted as murder in our jurisdiction. She remained dubious and also wasn’t sure that drinking paint would be lethal. I pointed out drinking a pint of paint thinner definitely was.
Finally I changed tack; i said that when this guy went into convulsions, he was sure to make a mess of the floor of the buisness he was in, between the spilled and the vomited paint, and that most assuredly violated destruction of private property laws.
Her entire demeanor changed. She responded brightly with 'oh yeah, you should have led with that, ill have officers and emts at your location within 10 minutes!
And then the paint thinner laughed, the latex paint laughed, the coffee laughed……
Here they’re pretty great with welfare stuff.
Once my neighbour warned me about robots with lasers invading or something, and was talking to someone who didn’t exist.
I called the po-po, who showed up and talked him into going to the emergency department with them.
I bumped into his mum a few weeks later and she thanked me for calling the police. She said he’d been having a psychotic break or something.
The university cops are great where I am but the city cops are very hit and miss. The university cops were my backup for violent patients when I worked the medical center and they actually had pretty decent deescalation skills. At the very least they would just defer to me and standby assist unless I specifically told them to initiate a hold. And when they were doing standbys they wouldn’t verbally threaten or physically impose they’d just stand loosely at my shoulders and be like “hey buddy we’re just here to keep everybody safe.” Vs the city cops are only allowed on the unit long enough to serve involuntary admission paperwork like “hey here’s your copy of the form signed by the magistrate that says these nurses can’t let you off the unit.” Which is good because they’re like 25% decent, 25% matter-of-fact (acceptable), but like 50% are assholes.
Like some patients are super entitled, yelling racial slurs, spitting, etc and I understand it’s difficult to keep your composure if you’re not specifically trained to (although they really should be) but a lot of patients are clearly just not with it. Like either wildly delirious and rambling about alien conspiracies or just straight up visibly developmentally delayed. And I’ve seen officers talking shit to people with like obvious high needs autism, downs, etc and the best I can do is just tell the cops to give them the paperwork in the mousetrap and hurry the patient inside but like. What the fuck.
It’s kind of cute though when you get a new one who just recently got the job to Help People™ so they’re not a bastard yet and this is one of their first experiences with a psych hold and they’re standing there with their body cam on having just unlocked the cuffs and the patient just immediately yanks their pants down and starts screaming about the invisible snakes and spiders on their genitals and the baby cop just 😦
But did he drink the paint?
We were able to stop him. I convinced him to step outside for a cigarette with me, while we continued talking. He was still talking pretty manicaly, which attracted the attention of a cop on foot, who helped me talk him down until ems arrived.
Yeah I hear the “you’ll be glad they exist when you need them” over and over but the 3 times I needed them they completely let me down. Government thugs is all they are.