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Ever had to call the police?

Spanky Deluxe

Spanky Deluxe

macrumors 603
Original poster
Back home in Brighton I've never had to call the police but up here its becoming a bit of a regular occurance. Only half an hour ago I had to call the police because I saw three guys prying someone's parked car's door open, trying to get inside to steal all their stuff. Some people go their whole lives without calling the police once though. Maybe its because I'm a late night person and I witness more crimes!!
 
Cows get out at night and eat the grass 😉 Either myself or someone next to me calls the cops to get them back in. Most of the time when I catch it I pull the paintball gun out and unload the entire tube. Then the owner comes out and fixes the fence and a few weeks later they run threw it again.
 
Yeah.. one time we were witnesses in a domestic dispute (we had some crazy neighbors) and a cop came over to talk to us. From my dad's research days in NC, he has a pilot whale skull on the bookcase (it has a cowboy hat on it now)

We got to explain that we are NOT poachers.

Another time we had to call the cops we were the victims in an altercation. (car V. our parked car BATTERING RAM. NOT GOOD.)
We even had photographic proof, but nothing really happened out of it.. 🙄

there have been a few more...

I live in Houston. Big city. Luckily nothing serious has happened to anyone I know.
 
Ya, there's been a few times.

One time we were involved in a car accident with an elderly gentleman who did not feel it was his fault. (Thankfully no one was hurt). We had to call the police to settle the dispute (they ruled in our favor).

We've also had to call the police several times on our college neighbors (renters) who have late and disorderly parties.
 
katie ta achoo said:
I live in Houston. Big city. Luckily nothing serious has happened to anyone I know.
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In my time at Uni I've known a friend of a friend got stabbed, a handful of people had their houses broken into, my girlfriend's house got broken into, her car window got smashed, my housemate's car window got smashed, heard the neighbours of my girlfriend smashing around things like mad and shouting 'kill him f-ing kill him', my girlfriend's housemate got held up at gun point... hmmm... what else... nope, I think that's it. That's in Nottingham though. Back in Brighton I've never had to call them once.

I called them up on the last day of school because there was a burning car just off of the grounds. Instructed my mate while I was driving (in France) to call the police just a few weeks ago because there was a golden retriever running loose on the motorway (he had a smile on his face though and there weren't too many cars around at least, I'm sure he was ok).

I have to say I do quite enjoy calling the police, you get a wonderful feeling of 'doing the right thing'. For some reason its the first thing I think of when I see crimes in the process while most of my friends don't even think of calling the police at first. It probably comes from watching too much CSI though.
 
I've had to ring the cops a couple of times. Once I saw a guy trying to break into a night-deposit-safe at a bank across the road from work in broad daylight. Cops weren't really interested as he was obviously completely unsuccessful - those things are built like a tank. I also had to ring when I was younger and had my bike and playstation stolen from my parents house. We needed an incident number to claim the insurance.

Nothing too exciting though (thank goodness).
 
Only once. I was walking somewhere and this old guy was yelling and getting violent with his teenage son/grandson. So I called the cop, by the time they got there though it was all over. I had to call the fire brigade once too, there was a car in a paddock that some loser had set on fire. 🙄
 
When I was twelve, two dudes came banging on the door crazy loud at like 3 in the morning. The whole family got freaked out and we had called the cops.

Turns out they had the wrong address. A guy two houses up from us had the same color house before it was painted like a month prior to this, he was kind of shady so I don't know if it was over money or something whack.

But yea, it was a weird night.
 
I have to call the cops at least once a week
right next door to my house is a halfway house and after 6pm the cops leave for the night , the residents tend to start doing weird stuff after that, like prying off the drain pipes from the nearby buildings to sell as scrap metal, going into peoples house looking for cans and pop bottles... occasionally they will have paintball fights in the back of the buildings and break a few windows...
or after welfare wednesday the drunken people who try to sleep on other peoples patios or beat up their boy/girlfriends...
🙁
 
Leareth said:
I have to call the cops at least once a week
right next door to my house is a halfway house and after 6pm the cops leave for the night , the residents tend to start doing weird stuff after that, like prying off the drain pipes from the nearby buildings to sell as scrap metal, going into peoples house looking for cans and pop bottles... occasionally they will have paintball fights in the back of the buildings and break a few windows...
or after welfare wednesday the drunken people who try to sleep on other peoples patios or beat up their boy/girlfriends...
🙁
Click to expand...

Where in Vancouver is this?

I thankfully have never had to call the cops. I've always wanted to though just to see how fast they answer the phone.
 
Last year a crazy, or very drunk, man stepped in front of the car I was riding in, and tried to stop us from going down a fairly busy street at about seven in the morning; we were unsure if he was armed, so we called the cops.

When I was four, someone in my family wasn't complying with my orders to do the right thing, so I called the police since we had a family friend in law enforcement; yeah, that story is a fairly good example of what not to do.

For those of you that are phone operators, I really am sorry for some of the crap you have to wade through.
-Chasen
 
I've called "campus police" once because some guy was tagging in broad daylight. Turns out he was one of the groudskeepers I DIDN'T know... It's the kinda thing where I called because if he weren't a groundskeeper, someone that stupid needs to be slapped. I mean, tagging in broad daylight? Genius.

I have had the cops called on me once, and had it threatened far more than that...
 
I lived in a small town when I was in high school and I knew for a fact that there's only one cop on third shift duty on a reguar day. On night we were having a party at my buddy's house and that one and only cop kept driving by the house looking for anything suspicious. Then he just sat outside and waited for a while. I'm not proud of this, but we called 911 on my friend's cell phone and told them we were in a fender bender on the other side of town and we needed an officer to write up an accident report. The cop left, and so did we.
 
I've called the police a few times and have always been a little disheartened at how long they take to pick up. I run at night so I see muchos crimos. It's sad. 🙁
 
Yes. When I was sexually harassed on BART (train). And I agree w/ mad jew, they take too long to respond. They also didn't really help me much, not that they could have, I guess.
 
This has a long lead into the point, sorry.😱

I used to live opposite a billiards and snooker club. It was a 3 storey building and one day I noticed workers boarding up the windows (on the inside) of the top 2 floors. The following weekend I was walking down the street at 6:30 am (coming home from my night shift) and over the volume of my walkman I coud hear this odd bass noise. I stopped my walkman and I could very clearly hear loud sh*te dance music. I stopped walking and turned round to figure out where it was coming from. I realised it was coming from the billiards place, I was about 300 metres from it (where I lived was about 20 m from the place!).

When I got into my flat all the windows were rattling. As nowhere in the town had a license to be open at that time in the morning I called the police (not emergency but the local station). They sent a car about an hour later just as lots of people were leaving the place. They stopped a couple as they were still drinking beer.

The following week, my shift was off, at about 9pm on Saturday the loud music started up again and went on until 7am again. I called the police station and asked what was being done. They said they's contacted the Council (who hand out licenses). The following Monday the environmental health dept. contact me and asked if they could set up dB metres in my flat to monitor noise levels. I said of course.

The next weekend I heard shouting and loud music at 4 am. I look out of the window just in time to see someone run out of the club and smash a bottle round the head of someone else then another guy came out and started hitting the the guy on the floor with a snooker cue. People then started pouring out of the club and a large ugly brawl started in the street.

So I call the emergecy number. This time 5 police vans and 6 police cars turn up all full of police (I didn't think my town had that many police). I though that this would be the end of it. But no! Every weekend for 2 months there'd be something like this happening. Then one night I hear shouting and I look out to see someone staggering across the road with blood p*ssing out of them. The guy falls to his knees in the road just in time to recieve a running kick to the head from someone who ran out of the club, he's then picked up and thrown into the path of a passing car, that just about manages to stop in time.
I call the police again, this time twice as many police arrive and they go into the club and start bringing people out in hand cuffs and the club gets shut down for good. The next day I rang the police to find out why it had taken so long. The answer I got was that they were running an operation to get some drug dealers.
 
A couple times. The most memorable was the one time I heard this unmistakably feminine voice screaming something along the lines of "NOOO GET AWAY FROM ME SOMEONE HELP!!! YOU *******!! GET OFF!! HELP!!! SOMEONE PLEASE HELP!!!!!!" at 3 in the morning. Was listening to music so didn't hear it so well, but after like 15 minutes of vague screaming in the background, I started to pay some attention...what she was screaming was sort of freaky (some guy trying to rape her? steal something? *shrug), so I called the cops.

The next day (well...after I went to sleep and then woke up), I found out from a neighbor that the whole thing was an argument between a woman and her ex-husband where the ex wanted her dog and she didn't want to give it to him, or something really stupid like that. I went to sleep thinking maybe I helped out a woman in trouble, but I woke up to find out I called 911 for a freaking argument over a ****ing DOG?!? 😡 🙄

Oh well.
 
mad jew said:
I've called the police a few times and have always been a little disheartened at how long they take to pick up.
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I've had quite good experiences when I've called the police. The only time I've dialled 999 (emergency) was the night that I got mugged. I spoke to the operator while my neighbour put the kettle on; the police were at the door before the kettle finished boiling. 😀
 
The only time I've phoned the police personally (did it at work a couple of times when I worked at a cinema), was when I was round visiting some old flatmates. I'd lived in that flat before, and the next door neighbours were drug dealers, and would have massive loud arguments all the time.

I didn't live there any more, but was round visiting, and I wanted to leave, but there was a massive fight between loads of schemies and the next door neighbours going on in the stairwell that I really didn't want to walk through, and didn't seem to be finishing anytime soon. I phoned the local police station instead of 999, and they were round in a few minutes, and broke it up, and so I could go home. 🙂 All good.
 
Go back a couple of years and I was having to do it several times a week. One of the residents in a flat upstairs went down the path of alcoholism. After a while, once he'd spent all his money, he funded his drinking by allowing street drunks to sleep in his apartment. Pretty soon they were followed by the street junkies, and before you know it, the dealers had moved in and were using the flat as a crack house. Other residents on that floor were too scared to come out of their own homes, either during the day or overnight. I lost count of how many arguments I had at the entrance to the buildilng blocking people entry, and I was physically assaulted on one occasion by a couple of crackheads who snuck up behind me. Although they came off worse (a passer-by had to restrain me from literally kicking one of their heads in, which I'm not proud of, but seemed like the only thing to do at the time), the final straw came when a bunch of heavy-looking Africans turned up one night, threw a block of concrete through the building's front door, kicked the door in of the crack flat, dragged one of the dealers out screaming and bundled him into a car. In total this was a period of about eight months, in which the caretaker was constantly cleaning up discarded syringes, the stairwells were full of druggies every night, and you would be constantly awoken by either screaming, arguing, or even someone going cold turkey out in the corridor.

Anyway, finally we got some real action. The Police set up surveillance in a building opposite, arrested the dealers and sent them down. The local council helped us hire some hard-ass security guards to stand on the entrances 24 hours a day, and they arranged ASBOs against all the druggies and street drunks so that if they tried to enter the building, the Police could immediately arrest them. We then got the entrances of the building refurbished with much stronger doors.

You wouldn't believe the difference it's made. The building is now a nice place to live again, although we had to get virtually all the common areas redecorated to repair the damage. The chap who's drinking started it all sold up and moved on. I understand he's living in sheltered housing up in North London now, although whether he's still drinking I don't know.
 
Applespider said:
I've had quite good experiences when I've called the police. The only time I've dialled 999 (emergency) was the night that I got mugged. I spoke to the operator while my neighbour put the kettle on; the police were at the door before the kettle finished boiling. 😀
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You got mugged? You poor thing. 🙁

Yeah, I've had no problems with them getting to me on time. It's just that the actual call takes an age to get connected. I was watching an armed robbery and (stupidly) started calling the police. I felt like an idiot holding the mobile to my ear as the poor bottle shop worker was violently hassled by a man with a shotgun, but thought it the best thing to do at the time. It took over a minute before a person answered. I just would've thought it'd be more prompt. It's been the same each time I've called them, too.
 
i think we are privy to witnessing more crimes in nottingham than the rest of the uk!!!

iv called the police a lot ever since moving to uni here.
 
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