Police officers have hard jobs. They are called to deal with the craziest situations occur. But sometimes, things happen that shock even the most experienced of officers. These officers on Reddit told the most insane story that they have ever been a part of.
Please note some stories have been edited for clarity.
He Saved Them
“Police officer here.
A mom called 911 to report her 14-year-old daughter missing. The daughter’s friend took the mom to a house in the neighborhood, where she found her daughter’s backpack on the front steps, but there was no answer at the door.
Some officers showed up before me, but I had a terrible feeling, so I showed up too. When I got to scene, there were like six young girls, all of them said they were just visiting a friend and it was no big deal. It didn’t feel right to me.
I made sure the girls involved were separated and taken back to the office to be interviewed. We interviewed the girls and learned they had been lured by a 50-something year old man on the internet who was having relations with them and producing child films.
Ugh, it was like diving deeper and deeper into a rabbit hole and makes me shudder to think we almost left it at that.”
The Cop Knew What Was Happening
“Not a cop, once called police when I was at a small park. There was a young couple fighting near their car, but it was mostly the girl looking down while being berated by the guy. I didn’t like the imbalance, so I kept an eye while I played with my dog. He started saying things that I used to hear in a house I lived in before things got real bad; ‘Where’s MY Respect huh? I’ll show you respect. Maybe you need to know how it hurts.’ So I made the call to the police. Explained nothing went down but it was escalating. They sent a car out.
I stayed far back but watched it go down. Cop arrived and checked in, everything ok here? He talked to her, she waved him off, embarrassed. The dude was gross, all ‘charming.’ ‘Thanks so much officer, of course.’ Officer asked if either of them wanted a ride, and they declined. Cop gets in his car and leaves.
The couple gets in the car, I think he told her to but unsure. I immediately have a bad feeling and start walking closer to the car and yeah; there’s the first punch. He just punches her with everything he has in the side of the head. I got my phone out to call again.
And right then is when the cop pulls right back in. He didn’t go anywhere. He knew what was up. And he got the guy. And I got my weed at the park and went home feeling like an ok citizen.
I don’t know if that is protocol or intuition. But he knew, and he wasn’t going anywhere. Dude was just behind the park gate.”
He’s Lucky
“Responded to a check welfare for a 62 yr old man who hadn’t been heard from in a week. He had some mild mental health issues and numerous medical issues to include severe diabetes. His case worker had been by the house for two days, but he wasn’t answering the door.
I show up and my backup officer was walking down from the front porch saying that no one is answering the door.
I just had a feeling that something wasn’t right. So I spent a half hour walking around the house knocking on all the doors and windows, listening, and peeking in wherever the blinds weren’t drawn to try to see anything. I even went so far as to pull up a ladder from the back of the house and use it to climb up to the 2nd floor windows, so I knock on those too.
Nothing. Eventually I just try all the knobs on the doors. They are all locked, except for the back door.
Now, I’m very cognizant of 4th amendment violations. It’s a huge no no for police to just enter your home without a warrant or probable cause of a crime, of which I have neither. Now, there is a community caretaker exception that police can use for situations just like this, but we have to have some articulate reason for believing someone is in danger. A social worker saying they haven’t seen a guy in two days is NOT good enough. I have no authority, or legal protections for opening this door and going in.
I crack the door open just a smidge, just enough to yell in, ‘police, is anyone inside?’ and stick my ear up to the crack.
I hear a chuff noise coming from a back room. Could’ve been a dog, could’ve been a person, could’ve been a tv.
Still don’t have enough to enter, but I see an opportunity. I crack the door open enough to poke my head inside fully.
‘I’m Sorry i didn’t understand you. This is the police, can you come to the back door please.”Help me.’ Rreeeeaaalllllyyyy freaking faintly. Just above a whisper. Go time.
We find the guy collapsed in a side bedroom. He’s in and out of a diabetic coma. Barely able to maintain consciousness for a few seconds, unable to move. He was hours away from being dead.”
That Could Have Escalated
“Ex-cop here, few years ago I get a call to the only 24-7 restaurant in our jurisdiction. It’s easy to know your way and being the only spot, you get to know the locals and regulars. My partner and I arrived at scene to find old Lenny sloshed and cheerful with a young follower and an upset hostess telling him to leave and never come back. My partner walked inside to get background info from the witnesses inside while I stayed in the front watching Lenny and his young counterpart as they argued about where to go next. After a few minutes, we conclude that Ol’ Lenny ordered one of everything off the menu, waived a handful of cash around, then said ‘I was just joking,’ when they served the first dish. We decided to trespass Lenny and let him go, but if he came back, he was going to jail. Lenny didn’t like answer but accepted it and tried to get in his car. Problem is, Lenny was barely able to walk straight and there was no way I was going to let him on the road. I told Lenny if he got into that car and turned it on, he was going to jail. Lenny really did not like that. He stepped out the car, and just stared at me as he slowly walked to his trunk. All I remember was time slowing down and this intense focus as we never broke eye contact, but we both knew what was going to happen. I pushed down on my level 3 holster, rocked the lever forward, and pulled it out just enough to ease it out fast. Lenny and I stared at each other for what seemed minutes, but probably only lasted seconds, when he said ‘not today.’ And walked away. The next day, Lenny was arrested for pulling a small caliber weapon out of that very trunk and threatening his neighborhood trailer park. Maybe if I didn’t stay focused or wasn’t paying attention, the outcome would have been different. Luckily, I did.”
It Was Everywhere
“I was responding to a disturbance call in a trailer park that turned out to be nothing. As I was leaving I noticed a giant puddle of blood on the ground near a different trailer. Upon further inspection I realized that there was blood all over one of the doors complete with smeared hand prints and blood dripping off the door knob. It looked like a massacre!
I started pounding on the door and this junkie comes out and starts yelling at me for waking her up. I asked her if she was hurt, and she said she wasn’t she then proceeds to go crazy about all the blood. She has no idea where it came from.
I followed the ungodly amount of blood to a trailer about a block down where there is a giant party taking place. I ask the group of guys standing outside where the injured person is, and they all go G-code on me and say they don’t know what I am talking about (while standing in the blood trail). I push past and continue down the road to Oz where at the end of it I find a guy in what used to be an all white outfit that is now dark red attempting to control his massive head bleed on his own.
I later discovered that he had been trying to break into that other trailer when he cut his head on the window that he broke out.”
Why Didn’t She Check?
“My father was a village police man in the UK during the 80s, so this is his story.
Lady bought a house and after many days/weeks getting settled, she turned her attention to the garden. She started digging some flower beds, but as she was working she came across some small bones in the dirt, baby sized bones.
This house used to belong to a doctor, so the lady puts two and two together and assumes he was a child murderer or maybe did some off-the-books abortions back in the day. This lady is shocked and terrified that her new home could be tainted by this horrible past, but she didn’t call the police… Instead, she just avoids the garden. Completely. The whole thing weighs heavily on her mind as the years go by. 5, 10, 15 years (I forget how long exactly but it was at least a decade) until one day she can’t take it anymore and calls the police to report the bones.
My dad goes out to investigate, in to the garden where she shows him roughly where they were. He digs around a little (this was the 80s and apparently they were less concerned with disturbing evidence) and finds not a dead baby, but a small plastic skeleton.
Poor woman had been living with guilt and fear for decades because of a kids toy.”
Where Did He Get The Cushion?
“This was only a few years back.
Driving along a suburban road one night and a guy wearing only his underwear ran up to our cop car and threw a very large sofa cushion at us. As we slowed down to find out why he had thrown said cushion he tried to jump into the back of the car. We got out and had a chat to the poor guy who told us he had used about an 8 ball of poor quality sniff and wanted to get our attention to help him.
Kicker was he had been running around the suburban streets all hopped up for about 30 minutes and no one thought it was odd enough to call us. To be fair it wasn’t the nicest area.”
Waffle House Kerfuffle
“Former LEO…worked a late shift and was driving home and decided to stop for some breakfast at waffle house. I noticed a few people flagging me down as I pulled into the parking lot (which was shared by an auto repair shop)…they point me to the back, so I pull over and turn my spotlight on…
On the backside of the repair shop there was a dumpster, and there was a man laying down beside it behind the fence…I could see his feet. Then another homeless man walked out with a bowl and literally walked right by my car toward Waffle House (he was soaked).
So I walk over to the man laying down, and he’s unresponsive…I called it in and the EMT’s arrive. The guy is dead (I still to this day have no idea how or why). I ask the homeless guy waiting for me next to waffle house what happened, and he said ‘He was out cold, I was pouring water on him to keep him warm…’
Video from the auto shop shows guy walking and collapses next to dumpster (he wasn’t shot or anything so who knows, heart attack, stroke, something)…and for 45 minutes. This homeless man walked over to a water hose beside the waffle house, filled a bowl up and poured water on him because it was slightly cool outside, and he didn’t want him to get too cold (water was cold faucet water).
Literally nothing ever came close to the weirdness of that night in my entire career.”
People Are Stupid
“Not a cop (I’m a paramedic) but I think this fits. My partner and I were at our post which was in the parking lot of a strip mall that had a bunch of stores and one bar which was known to be pretty sketchy. My partner was taking a little nap (it was around 1 am) and I was watching a movie on my phone, waiting for a call. Eventually I notice a few people coming out of the bar and just sort of lingering in the parking lot. A few more people come out, one lights up a smoke, and they all just stand around. I go back to my movie and 20 minutes later I notice there is now a much larger group lingering outside the bar. Nothing strange was happening but I thought it was weird that they’d all been there for a while, so I decided to check it out.
I woke up my sleepy partner to have him pull our rig closer to the group. As we approach with our lights on, the group notices us and starts to break apart. A few people scatter and I see that in the middle of the group there is a person on the ground motionless. My partner and I jump out and ask what’s going on. Somebody in the group goes ‘this guy is wasted, he just stumbled out here and fell asleep on the ground’ I shout to the man on the ground, and he doesn’t respond, I check for a pulse and there is none. I start CPR. While my partner gets our jump bag and notifies dispatch. For a full 30 minutes, people had just stood around looking at this dead guy on the ground, some smoking, none doing anything about it. There wasn’t even a noticeable commotion. Nobody asked if he needed help or called anybody, and they probably never would have.
The guy was cool to the touch by the time we got to him, down for at least 30 minutes, we went through the motions but there was no saving him. We transported, and he was pronounced at the hospital within 15 minutes.
How hard is it to ask someone if they are Ok? Or to dial 911? How was not one single person in that group not alarmed by seeing a man ‘sleeping’ on the ground in a parking lot?
I’ve had similar variations of this scene happen at least 3 times while on duty. People just don’t care.”
How Do You Recover From That
“Three weeks after I started, I was on my way to our off site property control. Just driving through a residential area to avoid the congestion and take a look at my new beat. I drive past a house with smoke pouring out from the eves and two guys watching across the street. They pointed at is as I stopped and said, ‘I think there’s a fire.’ Think was an understatement. This entire house was filled with smoke, windows were black with soot, and still no call. These two guys were just chatting away and not doing anything. I couldn’t see fire, but it was July 10th and a sunny morning. No mistaking a house fire in broad daylight.
So I call it in and try to gain access and yell for any survivors. Keep in mind I have zero fire training, but have half a brain enough to know that if there are any survivors in there I won’t be any help to them, and will just be another body to bring out once fire does arrive. I get into the back yard by jumping over the hood of a minivan and sliding across like a Duke brother because there is so much junk everywhere. This takes a piece of the wooden fence and jambs my radio key button open, so everyone can hear me breathing, yelling for survivors, etc. I have no idea I’ve got an open mic at this time. I lay down on the deck and look through the sliding glass door and there is only about 4 inches up from the floor I can see. I continue to yell for survivors but get no response.
As soon as fire gets there, they make a slow entry because the front door has been barricaded. This is when I knew something wasn’t right. Suspicions were confirmed when fire fighters carted out four children, a mother, and father. The father was the last one taken out and the only survivor. Everyone else, except an infant, had been murdered with a kitchen knife.
Doing CPR on a child that you can see is obviously dead is something that will haunt me forever. I never thought I could take someone’s life until I had to try to help a child that was murdered by his father. I’ve never wanted to choke the life out of someone more. Talking about it helps, but still hurts.”
What An Intense Place To WOrk
“Where I work, no one calls the police. Probably the most extreme was a shots fired call (extremely common) on a certain street that we really don’t go down without backup. We drive through and don’t see anything, then maybe 10 minutes later we get an anonymous call about a shootout inside a vacant house. We find the door wide open, covered in blood. We make entry and find an absolute bloodbath. Blood, needles, and casings everywhere. We recover an AK that had been fired. There was evidence people had been dragged out. We only got the one call about it and no one showed up at a hospital later, shot.”
Good Instincts
“Not in LE anymore, but was for about 12 yrs in a large city. When I was a patrolman, I got a call about someone shooting off fireworks in a strip mall at 2am. These were common calls, so we would usually just go check the area and clear the call. I checked the parking lot and didn’t find anything, but noticed the lights were on at one of the strip mall businesses.
I won’t say what business it was, but it was owned by a pretty prominent local businessman. Anyways, I got out to check and found the front door unlocked, which was suspicious. We had a lot of burglaries in that area, so I asked dispatch to call a rep for the business. I was clearing the building and found the owner and several other people (all really prominent) in a backroom where a poker table was set up.
One of the guys was sitting down and had a pile of coats in his lap which was really weird, and he was acting like he was in pain. I saw blood droplets under his chair and asked him what was wrong. He broke down and moved the coats, then revealed he had a bullet wound in his thigh.
Long story short, these guys had a high stakes poker game every week and someone tried to rob it and things went sideways. The dude robbing it shot this guy in the leg, which some citizen heard and called in a fireworks call. The guys involved in the game weren’t going to call the cops and were arranging to have a doctor come treat him “off the books.” Gambling is illegal in the state I worked in, but we honestly wouldn’t have cared.
We actually caught the guy that did it, but the DA wouldn’t prosecute because the victim / witnesses didn’t want to testify or be involved. The victim recovered fine. One of the guys who I interviewed told me that they were robbed of over $30,000.”
People Are The Worst
“Started my four-to-midnight shift by heading directly to get a coffee. Beautiful summer day, people everywhere. I pull into the parking space and see a dude lying on the ground in front of a park bench.
I jumped out of my cruiser, grabbed my first aid bag, and called it in. The guy was conscious but not really responsive. It sounds like a movie, but we were doing the old ‘blink if you can hear me’ deal. The rescue finally arrived and took him to the hospital. I found out later on that the poor guy had suffered a severe grand mal seizure and was still postictal when I rolled up on him.
The frustrating part was the dozens of people milling about that couldn’t even bother themselves to call 911 nevermind find out of the guy was ok.”
The Poor Kid
“I do mountain bike patrol in a smallish/medium-sized city. Was just riding one morning just after rush hour and spotted a little kid probably 3-4 years old standing on the side of the road with no parents in sight. Stopped and asked him where his parents were, and he just kinda shrugged. Called it in and some dude ran out of some town homes across the street and said the little dude was standing out there for a few hours, and he was watching him to ‘keep an eye on him.’ There were people around and everything, but we never got a call for it.
Long story short, he wandered out of the room him and his mom were staying in nearby and wandered out to the street. Place was a shelter for women, and he was able to get out past the manager and a court police officer. Mom had died from an overdose 3 days prior and when the little guy got hungry he got out of the room and wandered out to the street. No one even went to check on her either despite the smell.”
Zombies Might Be Real
“Elderly couple calls in what they said sounded like shots from the apartment below them. My uncle and his partner arrive on the scene and enter the apartment, weapons drawn (standard protocol for a possible shooting in progress). Right in the entry way is (what’s left) of a middle-aged Italian gentleman who apparently made the decision to end his life by shooting himself in the head with a .45. He’s obviously dead. According to my uncle his face was basically blown in half. Nose missing, one eye gone and the other hanging from what’s left of the socket. My uncles partner goes out to the squad car to radio for the cleanup crew (the guys that come and scoop up the dead guy). My uncle stands at the door making sure no one enters the apartment until they arrive. About 5 minutes pass and my uncle hears what sounds like something moving inside the apartment. He figures the guy probably has a cat or a dog (your pet will eat you if you die, and they are hungry) so he heads back in to shoo it away so it doesn’t further damage the guys body. He opens the door and the dude with his face blown in half is standing there. My uncle reached for his side arm and nearly shot the guy thinking he was a zombie or something. The guy just collapses again. Not a fall into a slump sort of collapsed. Like falls straight back hits with a thud sorta collapsed. My uncle (after regaining his composure) radios his partner to call for EMS, and then he proceeds to check the guys pulse. Nothing. When EMS arrived they said there was no way the guy should have survived the initial shot and that they would have assumed he was dead too based on the amount of damage.
My uncle says in his entire 20-year career which included several shootouts and car chases that he never felt more scared than we he opened the door and saw that guy (who by all rights should have been dead) standing there.”
A What?
“My apartment got broken into a few years ago. It was one of those off campus college apartments. We called the police who came at about 4:30 am. Our neighbors were playing loud music which was pretty typical for them. The cops were making the report when the officer I was talking to asked if our neighbors are always loud. I told him it was only on Saturday and Thursdays and how it didn’t really bother us, but before they left they knocked and pounded until they finally answered. When they opened the door, there was a horse or a donkey in the living room, several studio cameras, and 3 or 4 people who were apparently filming a donkey show. I know those cops were probably expecting some weed maybe a few minors drinking but not a freakin donkey show.”
What A Crazy Job
“Let’s see… there was the dead homeless guy on the sidewalk that people thought ‘oh he’s hammered and passed out.’ He was laying awkwardly, not like the homeless usually sleep. I got out to check on him and realized he was dead. The most absurd part was the people walking around him to go to work/get coffee/etc. as if it was business as usual. Once the commotion started and I taped off the scene, I was then accused of shooting and killing him by a passerby.
There was also the hammered guy in the middle of a Starbucks lot in his car. Passed out. Car running. Blocking traffic. Donge out. Adult videos on his phone. Man juice all over himself. People just driving around him like it was no big deal. Meanwhile, my morning coffee was ruined because of course my partner and I had to walk up and poke our heads in the car to see why it was just sitting there.
I’ve stumbled across people having relations everywhere… the funniest one was a girl who was getting the old ‘Eiffel tower’ from two guys. One guy runs off when I flick the lights and the other guy stayed with her. She walks up to my patrol car, apologizes, then says to me ‘you’re pretty cute, can I have a kiss?’… I replied ‘Uh, you just had a dude’s junk in your mouth’ and she makes this taken aback look like I told her that her mother wears combat boots or something.
This list goes on and on. In ten years I’ve probably forgotten more than I can remember.”
