Friday's Police Entertainment

After weeks of a blogging writer's block, I was finally provided material by the lovely residents across the street from work. Please keep in mind the office is NOT in a good part of town. Still, I admit I was pretty excited to hear my cubicle neighbor say he heard there was police activity across the street, so I ran upstairs to watch the drama from the 2nd floor window.

"Police activity" would probably be the understatement of the century. They blocked off the street and even our parking lot. There were no less than 50 police and off-duty police cars including two vans full of more than a dozen SWAT people. SWAT had full on helmets, AK-whatever huge guns, those shields, and some other weapon like things I couldn't identify but guessed were used to bust into places. I have NEVER seen so much law enforcement in once place and so well equipped with weaponry.

The odd thing was that everyone seemed a little . . . well . . . nonchalant. On the one hand, they had big guns but on the other hand, nobody seemed in a big hurry. One family with kids was hanging out watching from the stairwell for a good fifteen minutes before they were asked to leave. SWAT entered (easily, it seemed) an apartment and then just stayed in there for a good thirty minutes or more.

We could NOT figure out what was happening, but we certainly made up some good stories while watching. Someone suggested the there must be a dead body because they busted out the police tape and blue latex gloves. I said that they probably wouldn't need those kind of guns if the body inside were dead. My friend countered that it could be a zombie and I couldn't really argue with that.

At any rate, we were all captivated and waiting for something really great. Then SWAT finally came out of the apartment. With an older, larger woman. In a purple mumu. "What?!" We all said in disgust. They needed THAT kind of circus for a crazy mumu lady? I found a short blurb later explaining that a mentally unstable woman was taken into custody after allegedly stabbing her boyfriend. As the boyfriend is stable (in the physical sense, I make no assessment on his mental state) the most the lady can be charged with is aggravated assault.

Either the police expected much more out of this woman (a bomb? a hostage?) or else they had nothing to do yesterday and took advantage of the cool weather to do SWAT drill in direct view of our office. My coworker suggested our CEO hired SWAT for our Friday entertainment. I guess I like that idea better than thinking our PD felt the need for almost 100 government employees to take down a lady in a mumu.