The Funniest Cop Stories Ever

by Tom Philbin

  I Don’t Want to Know

  This old timer Bob Fahey told me about a call he went on back in the mid ‘60s. Boy, does it show how different things were. He was doing a four-to-twelve when he and his partner get a call for a domestic dispute. He gets there, and the husband is tanked and starting all kinds of trouble but nothing violent. Fahey and his partner tell the guy to go sleep it off somewhere and don’t come back tonight. They leave, and about two hours later, they get another call. They go back and see that the husband had returned and is still smashed. They tell the guy again to go sleep it off.

  “If we have to come back here,” one of them says, “we will handle it ourselves.”

  They leave again and sure enough, about forty-five minutes later they get a third call. They show up, and they say that’s it. They put the guy in cuffs, but he’s so wasted they’re afraid to put him in the car because he might puke all over everything. So they escort him to the car, and put him in the trunk and take off, intending to drop him someplace safe. They are on the expressway, but they are slowed down because of a traffic jam. There is a car broken down in the middle lane, and when they get there, they are shocked: It’s the chief’s car.

  This chief is a real old timer. Irish guy with white hair who came on in the ‘40s. He has a flat tire and flags down Fahey.

  “Officer, I was coming back from a wedding with my wife, and we got a flat tire. I need a jack—I don’t have one in my car.”

  “I’d rather not open the trunk, sir.”

  “What? Did you hear what I said? Open your trunk!”

  “Sir, I am afraid I can’t do that.”

  The chief is getting pretty pissed. “Officer, I am not asking you, I am telling you. Give me the keys, and I’ll do it myself!”

  The chief grabs the keys and opens the trunk. He stares at the contents for a few seconds, closes the trunk, and yells for his wife to come over. His wife goes to the trunk, and the chief opens it and shows her what’s in it. “See, this is why I drink!”

  He shuts the trunk, gives the keys back, and Fahey starts to tell him what’s going on.

  “I don’t want to know,” the chief says. “Just get out of here and make sure you send me a car with a jack in it!”

  COLLAR OF THE CENTURY

  There was one cop named Malone who was always kissing ass to try to get into the detective squad. He was always up there in the squad room trying to get his gold shield. He usually exaggerated what he did too. If he collared a jaywalker, he would make it sound like he was lucky to escape with his life. So one day this guy comes into the station house and says to Malone, “You know all those push-in robberies that are in the papers? I did them!”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  Excited, Malone brings him upstairs to the detectives’ room and tells them that he’s got the guy who did the robberies in the neighborhood. The detectives know this guy. He’s lonely and a little nutty, and he confesses to a crime every week for the attention. No one lets on about this to Malone, but one of them comes over to the “perp” and says, “You did these robberies, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And did you also have something to do with the homicides in the pizza joint last week? And the three rapes over by the park?”

  “Yes.”

  Now Malone starts to think he’s collared the criminal of the century, but the next line tells him everyone is playing a joke on him.

  “And how about Son of Sam? You were his accomplice, right?”

  “Absolutely!”

  Malone gets a look on his face like he’s a total fool. Everyone laughs and he storms out of the room. The last thing he heard was one of the cops saying, “And you killed Kennedy, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I sure did.” And now even Malone was laughing.

  MÉNAGE À TROIS

  Me and my partner were in the Seven-Three, and we get flagged down by a crowd of people around a bus. A woman tells us there’s a guy under the bus. I look in under the bus and spot a big guy who seems okay. “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “Romeo’s trying to kill me.”

  “Okay, why don’t you come out from under the bus, and we’ll talk about it.”

  He rolls out and turns violent. Me and my partner start fighting with the guy. My partner lands a good shot to his nose, and it starts to bleed. He stops fighting instantly and starts wailing, “Oh no! Oh no. Look what you did to this pretty face!”

  He starts fighting again, and with some other cops who’ve arrived we succeed in subduing him. Finally, two of us cuff him, and he announces in a kind of surprised, high, sexy voice, “Oh my goodness! A ménage à trois!”

  America’s Most Wanted

  New York City is so congested that the police department tries to avoid high-speed chases. So as not to alert the public you’re going after someone, you tell Central that you’re “observing someone,” not that you are going seventy miles an hour to do it.

  Once two cops were involved in a chase and got in an accident. The sergeant, who needed the info for his report, asks them, “What happened?”

  “We swerved to avoid a dog, and at the last second we hit a parked car.”

  “Okay, I’ll write it up.”

  Two days later, there is another accident involving two completely different cops, and again the sergeant asked, “So what happened?”

  “Same thing as the other day,” one cop says, “a dog came out of nowhere and we swerved to miss him and hit a parked car.”

  The sergeant is getting pissed. That night there’s yet another accident, and at roll call he goes into a mini tirade, saying that they lost three cars in two days and telling everyone you got to be careful. Then he starts going into the conditions report for the precinct telling us what to be on alert for: robbers in the area, rapists, you name it. Then a Chinese cop we nicknamed “G,” one of the funniest guys I ever met, says in his thick accent, “Hey, Sarge, you rooking for rapists, robbers, murderer, terrorist. Never mind them. You should be rooking for the dog. He the most dangerous person in the city!”

  GOOD & WACKY

  There was this one cop I knew who was really burnt out. He had been in a couple of shootouts, served in the worst area of the city. He had seen a lot—maybe too much—and he just wanted off the job. Like that character in M*A*S*H who dressed like a woman, he did various wacky things like taking cars out with very little gas in them and running them around until they ran out of gas. Then he’d walk back to the precinct, and the sergeant or somebody would say to him, “Where’s your car?”

  “Ran out of gas.”

  The police department doesn’t know if he’s faking or not, they have to take everything seriously. So they take the cars away from him and put him on a foot post. The first day, he goes to a house where a woman has complained about vandalism to her mailbox, and he starts to take the report. While he’s doing that, he asks the lady, “Can I use your bathroom?”

  “Sure,” she says. “No problem.”

  So he goes into the bathroom, and she waits a few minutes and then she hears the shower going. A few minutes later he comes out of the bathroom wet, totally nude except for a towel around his waist with his gun belt holding it up, and his hat on.

  Freaking out, she calls the precinct, gets the sergeant, and tells him that the officer took a shower in her house. The sergeant rushes over and says to the cop, “What are you doing?”

  The cop looks back at the sergeant like he’s the one with a couple of screws loose and says, “She said I could use the bathroom.”

  So he gets dressed, and the sergeant takes him back to the station house. He is too whacked to put on the street, so he’s parked at a desk in the complaint room for a month. Then it’s time for him to qualify with his weapon, something all cops have to do.

  He goes to the range, aims the revolver, and it doesn’t fire, so the instructor says, “Draw and present.”

  The guy opens the chamber and hands the gun to the instructor, who sees the
re is candy where the bullets should be. Pink in one chamber, white in the next, then pink, then white.

  The instructor says, “You know you got Good & Plentys in here?”

  “Ah, [Bleep]! The kids were playing with my gun again!”

  That was his ticket out.

  WHY SHE ISN’T MARRIED

  I was once in plainclothes, and I stopped to look in a store window. There was a homeless black guy about sixty going through a trash basket on the corner, and standing near him was a heavyset middle-aged woman with heavy makeup, all dressed up and very snobbish looking. She is on a cell phone, and the homeless guy pauses in his excavation and says, “Excuse me, Miss, could you spare some change?”

  She keeps talking, acting like this homeless guy doesn’t exist. He repeats the question when she hangs up, and instead of answering it, she starts on a tirade about capitalism. “You wouldn’t have to panhandle if you got a job, etc., etc.”

  When she’s finished, the homeless guy eyes her up and down and says, “Now I know you’re not married.”

  “Why? Because I’m not wearing a ring?”

  “No. Because you’re ugly.”

  Close Call

  We get a call from a woman who says there’s a dispute at a certain address and that the super is threatening a tenant with a gun. She doesn’t give us a callback number so we can’t verify the call, but we have to treat every complaint seriously. We call for backup, go to the super’s basement apartment, and knock on the door.

  “Who is it?” a man answers.

  “Police! Open up!”

  “Okay. One minute.”

  Then we hear a mechanical ka-chuk that sounds exactly like a shell being racked into a shotgun. As he goes to open the door, we kick it down and start roughing him up and cuffing him. “Where’s the [bleeping] gun? Where’s the gun?”

  “Wait a minute. What gun? I have no gun!”

  We look around his little apartment. He’s got pictures of American scenes, American heroes, the flag. We can’t find a gun. “We heard a gun. Sorry.”

  He is a little shaken, but he says, “No problem. No problem.”

  He walks us to the door, and as we start to leave, he pulls the string controlling the light. We hear a ka-chuk—which sounds just like a shotgun being racked.

  A SERIOUS MALADY

  A motor vehicle fatality occurred, and me and my partner Frank responded. It’s a bad scene, very bad. Turns out that one of the two drivers, a female, has been decapitated. She is visible, and I quickly cover her up while Frank went over and pushed the crowd back. A few minutes later, he comes walking toward me, his back to the crowd, and he’s got a big grin on his face. Frank is normally a pretty serious kind of guy, so I wonder what’s up. He says, “When I was pushing the crowd back this young girl comes up to this young guy who’s apparently her boyfriend and says, “What’s going on, Tony?”

  “A woman in the car was decaffeinated.”

  I had to turn away so the crowd couldn’t see me busting a gut.

  “[BLEEP] YOU! [BLEEP] YOU!”

  In his book Soul of a Cop, hero cop Paul Ragonese tells the story of a woman who came into the Twenty-Third precinct and told the cops that her boyfriend was holding their eight-year-old boy hostage in his apartment. Uniformed cops immediately went to the apartment and demanded that the guy open up.

  The response, in a Spanish accent, was “[Bleep] you!” The detectives tried to convince the guy to open the door, and all they got was the same “[Bleep] you! [Bleep] you!” So they called ESU [Emergency Service Unit].

  The situation played out for three hours, during which time crowds had gathered, a helicopter hovered overhead, and the media was coming out of the woodwork.

  After three hours, all the cops had gotten when they asked the guy to come out was “[Bleep] you!”

  Finally, they decided to take down the door and try to pull the kid out. Ragonese and his partner used sledgehammers on the door, and then other cops armed with shotguns rushed in yelling, “Freeze, police!” They were met with another “[Bleep] you” coming from behind a closed bedroom door.

  Fed up, the cops yelled for the guy to come out—and again were told “[Bleep] you.”

  They took the other door down and discovered that the guy was gone. Staring at them was an innocent little dark brown, yellow-billed Mynah bird that again told them “[Bleep] you! [Bleep] you!” in a Spanish accent. Turns out the boyfriend had left the apartment hours earlier and the boy was home. Soon after, one of the cops told the complainant that the best thing she could do was to get rid of the bird.

  THREE STARRING LING GI

  I had a Chinese partner named Ling Gi who was a great guy and a very good cop. He had been a transit cop, and he rode the A line, which was the toughest in the city. I was involved in more funny incidents with “G,” as we called him, than you could imagine. Here are three of the many stories that kept me in stitches.

  One day we’re driving along on Northern Boulevard, and I see an old lady waving us down. I pull over and G starts yelling at me in this thick Chinese accent.

  “Why you pur over?” he says. “Why you pur over?”

  “She’s waving us down.”

  “She just going to ask you a stupid question.”

  “How do you know that? We got to check it out.” So I ease up to her and stop.

  “How come,” she says, “the buses are running late?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” I replied.

  “Well, can you give me a ride?”

  And G says, “This is poreece car. Not taxi.”

  We drive on two more blocks during which he says nothing. Then he blurts out.

  “Pur over. You don’t drive no more. I drive.”

  “Why?”

  So we switch seats and he starts driving. “So,” I said, “what if somebody waves you down?”

  “We wave back!”

  “What if you get a CCRB [civilian complaint]?”

  “What,” he says, “I think she wave at me just to say herro. So I wave back. That’s community poreecing. I don’t know anything. I’m a stupid Chinaman.” And he gives me a little wave.

  There are a lot of double parkers in Flushing, which is heavily Asian. One day we stopped so Ling Gi could write a ticket for a double-parked cab driven by a Chinese guy. He says, “Hey, I’m Chinese, you’re Chinese. Give me a break.”

  Ling Gi puts his hand up. “Wo—wo—wo,” he says very rapid fire and kind of loud, “I’m Chinese, you Chinese. I’m supposed to give you a break? You my friend? Every Chinaman supposed to know every other Chinaman? Give every other Chinaman a break? Why don’t you come over and sreep with my wife? Would that be okay? Good enough? Who you? I don’t know you! And now you get two tickets.”

  Me and G were in plainclothes detail giving peddlers summonses. Stores complain about them because they don’t pay taxes or rent and it’s illegal—dishonest competition.

  We stopped for lunch in a Chinese restaurant, and there was an old couple at one of the tables. At one point Ling Gi says, “I got to wash my hands,” and starts for the bathroom. His route takes him right by the old couple and the woman says, “Waiter, can you get us some water?”

  G stops, smiles, and says, “Oh. You think I’m waiter? All Chinese people the same, right? All waiters! Ching chong, ching chong! How about you? You old, you ready to play shuferboard. Everybody do the same thing? We got shuferboard in back room. C’mon, ret’s go?”

  He waits for an answer, which he doesn’t get, then heads away toward the bathroom—or to play shuffleboard alone.

  TOP FIVE COP PRANKS

  1. Loosening the nut on a urinal water pipe at the staion house. This results in the officer standing at the urinal getting a mini bath with his clothes on.

  2. Smearing black ink on the holes in the black phone receiver used by the desk officer, so when he answers the phone, ink transfers to his ear, and he spends a lot of time wondering why people are looking at his ear.

  3.
Gluing the zipper shut on the riot helmet bag so it can’t be opened and either has to be ripped open or the glue removed out from between the zipper teeth, a truly labor-intensive job.

  4. Placing mice in the patrol car. Particularly effective with female officers.

  5. Placing baby powder in the patrol car A/C vents. When the driver starts the car with the A/C on full blast, he or she turns white.

  No Parking in Alley

  We had one guy, let’s call him Knoll, who would give his mother a summons for a traffic infraction. I mean he would even ticket another cop, and he did. He was probably psychotic or something—he issued over a hundred summonses a month. When other cops approached him and told him to knock it off, he didn’t listen, so we decided it was time to do the nasty on him.

  One night he comes in and goes to his locker as usual, and there is a problem. It’s not there. The locker is six feet high and two feet wide, and it can’t walk away on its own. “Where’s my locker?” Knoll announces to a crowd. A lot of guys had showed up just to see his reaction. No one laughed or responded except Brown, a very funny guy, says, “Maybe it was stolen. You have valuables in it? Maybe a couple of cases of summonses?” This gets a big laugh.

  “[Bleep] you,” Knoll says.

  “What are you getting out of joint for?” Brown says. “Just report it missing to the detective squad.” Another laugh.

  Knoll stomps out of the locker room, goes into the captain’s office, and starts complaining. The captain goes through the motions but does nothing. He knows Knoll is a psycho, and doesn’t want a lot of other cops pissed at him. So Knoll himself searches all over the precinct for the locker, and he finally finds it. It is two stories down in the alley, all bent and broken; it had been thrown out the window. To add insult to injury, somebody had taped three summonses to it and had written under the infraction part, “No parking in alley.”