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This is not exactly breaking news, but there are A LOT of really dumb criminals out there.
Why do you think Cops has been on the air for over 30 years? My point exactly…
In this article, people share the dumbest reasons for people getting arrested. I think this is going to be a whole lot of fun!
Let’s dive into these answers from AskReddit users, some of whom are cops and lawyers.
1. Taking a shortcut.
“Someone in my town crashed into a telephone pole and took out the power. The road was closed off while things were sorted out.
One lady decided she couldn’t take the long way home and crashed into the same telephone pole. She was arrested for drunk driving.”
2. Doh!
“When my husband was arrested. He was out on his boat fishing and forgot his life jacket in the truck. Game warden wrote him a ticket, told him he didn’t have to appear in court, and to come to the courthouse on the date listed to pay the ticket. Cool. No big deal.
The day came for my husband to pay the ticket. He was in the area for work so he figured he would pop in instead of driving back out there (about 45 minute drive). He went in to pay the ticket, gave it to the girl so she could process it, and she said, “You can’t pay this. There is a warrant out for your arrest.” My husband was extremely confused and no one would say anything to him about what was going on.
A 60 year old sheriff came over and handcuffed him. While the sheriff was walking him across the road to the jail, he finally explained it to my husband. There was a warrant out because he failed to appear in court.
Remember, the game warden said he didn’t have to appear in court and even checked on the ticket that he did not have to appear. My husband told the sheriff that and the sheriff knew. He also knew this particular game warden. According to the sheriff, this was not the first time this had happened.
I ended up bailing him out and he was on probation for a year.”
3. All kinds of good stuff!
“Oh god, where to start?
The 30 dollars worth of knickknacks someone stole from walmart?
The guy who robbed the gas station down the road from his grandma’s, where the teller recognized his voice and called him out by name?
The “assault with a weapon” where the “weapon” was a frozen poultry? (my personal favorite).
Or the nurse who decided to use her client’s debit card as petty cash?
Probably the last one. Woman was 5 years from retirement and will never work as a nurse again.”
4. You played yourself.
“Not my arrest but someone on my job. Got a call from an individual staying in one of the hotels stating he thought he saw a man with a gun on the third floor. The whole squad rolls over there and clears the hotel, no gunman found.
Turns out the guy who called was just high af and was seeing shit. So the hotel manager asks the guy to leave, he reluctantly does so. An officer and one of the Sgts are there to waiting help escort the man out of the hotel while he gathers his belongings.
This man was about to leave when he lifts up the mattress and grabs his crack pipes and a couple of crack rocks ..right in front of the officer and sgt. Promptly placed under arrest. Congratulations, you played yourself.”
5. Team of bandits.
“Work for a small county.
Last fall we got a group of people coming me down from a nearby city to rob a hemp farm, thinking it was weed growing along the highway. Several of the crack team of bandits where arrested and lodged. The kicker is it was explained explicitly how dumb it was, that you can’t even get high of the stuff, but the very next weekend they came back down and tried to pull it off again.
Only this time the farmer was home and ended up holding them all at gun point till we arrived.”
6. He’s on something…
“I arrested a guy who continually called 911 asking police to bring him weed and a cheeseburger. He then proceeded to eat the foam padding of my roll bars in the back seat.
I’ve never seen someone trip so bad.”
7. There goes the fire alarm.
“My grandma was a lawyer. She had to defend someone who stole from a store in a city in Hungary around midnight. The only reason they got caught was because they used some matches to light up the place, and that set the fire alarm off.
As if that wasn’t enough, a few weeks later in court, my grandma tells the judge to look at the kid, how young he was and that he couldn’t have been strong enough to break open the door or carry something outside and steal it.
At this point the defendant stands up, points at his muscles and shouts “hell yeah I could!“. That’s basically when my grandma gave up. As far as I know he got a few months in prison.”
8. You’re underage!
“Underage “kid” (he was 20, I think), who has been drinking and still has the beer on him, decides he’s hungry. He goes into a mini mart and hides the beer in his pocket so that no one knows he’s been drinking.
Goes to buy his snacks and the clerk notices that this kid has tucked extremely noticeable beers into his pocket. Clerk calls the cops and tells them that the kid was shoplifting beer.
The cops actually believed the kid’s story but arrested him anyway for underage drinking. He spent the night in jail.”
9. A lot of drugs.
“I was a seasonal officer at a beach resort. One day I was stuck in the substation working on a bunch of reports when I hear another seasonal officer and a senior officer get dispatched to a hotel for unknown reasons.
2 hours later and I’m still doing paperwork (in fairness I took a break for lunch) and both of the officers come in with arms full of large brown paper evidence bags, like the 2 feet tall ones you out groceries in. They start pulling out the most varied amount of drugs I’ve seen ever.
Something like 2 large vacuum bags of good weed (not the dry shit) 2 pages of lsd tabs A gallon bag of shrooms And a bunch more.
Apparently this 19 year old had come to the beach to deal. He had paid for a few nights at this hotel. Well he missed his checkout time and the hotel needed the room so the housekeeper let herself. She undid the covers and found this buffet of drugs. The kid ended up showing up while the officers were searching his hotel room and they got him.”
10. Bad move.
“I knew a guy in high school who got arrested for impersonating a police officer and pulling over a real life off-duty cop who also happened to know him from high school and found him pretty easily because of that.”
11. He should’ve returned it.
“There was a news story in Denmark recently.
A guy had stolen the customer hand sanitizer from a pharmercy after he picked up his prescription drugs. Because of his prescription they easily identified him. Police called him and asked him to return it.
He refused so they had to pay him a visit, seize the hand sanitizer and also arrest him.”
12. You can’t do that.
“My dad once got arrested because he didnt believe the cop in civies was a real cop.
So he slapped him. Turns out he really was a real cop…”
13. Off to jail you go!
“Someone I went to school with took MDMA and then decided to go for a drive and the police tried to pull him over and he tried to escape ran like 8 red lights and crashed into a prison of all places.”
14. A story from South Africa.
“In the 1980s I was a detective in Cape Town. One day while driving in Woodstock we saw a group of people chasing a man, so we assisted. Turned out he was suspected of stealing from a passenger in a third class train carriage (those are very crowded with many passenger’s standing close together).
In his pocket he had a pay envelope fron a local fish packing place, containing no money but a piece of carton in which was written, “ha ha, lekker gevang” (Afrikaans for LOL caught you good).The people giving chase insisted that he had pick pocketed someone on the train and jumped out at Woodstock station.
Long story short we traced the owner of the pay envelope {his name and employee number were on tbe envelope) who said that after being pickpocketed twice before and losing a week’s wages, he hid his money in his sock and made a decoy with the top of a pack of 30s cigarettes on which he wrote the Afrikaans taunt.
The culprit was convicted of theft of an envelope valued at 15 cents and ended up with a criminal record. . Can’t recall what the sentence was, unfortunately.”
Wise up out there, people.
You’re making the rest of us look bad.
Do you have any stories about people you know getting arrested for really dumb reasons?
If so, please tell us about it in the comments!
