Tag Archives: Police officer

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Fugitives And Scandinavian Furniture

Did you read the story about Christopher Dorner, the man who had a beef with LAPD so he wrote a manifesto and then ultimately killed his lawyer’s daughter, her fiance and two sheriffs who had nothing at all to do with his problem, because he was trying to prove that he wasn’t a liar by becoming a killer, as if he was in some sort of Quentin Tarantino movie?  Djorner Unchained (the J is silent.)

"Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris?"

“Do you know what they call a Quarter Pounder with cheese in Paris?” “No I don’t. McDonalds hasn’t even been invented yet.” “Oops, my bad.”

I’m not going to go into my opinions and feelings about that situation here. I have some strong ones but they aren’t especially funny. However, I will say that it made for some tense times around the Fathead household. It was almost as much fun as the time Hubs was green lit when I was pregnant with my daughter.

greenlight

Hubs’s Green Light announcement. Gangsters don’t use Evite.

Hubs insisted I wear an automatic assault rifle strapped to my thigh under my clothes when I dropped the kids off to school and everything. Let me tell you, those things chafe. And have you ever tried pulling one out of skinny jeans in a timely manner without ripping your fancy underwear and shooting the PTA president? It’s not as sexy as you might think.

Okay the part about the assault rifle wasn’t exactly true, but what I’m about to tell you did actually happen…outside of my mind…in real life.

I’m typically very calm in a crisis. However I do obsessively redecorate and reorganize to manage the stress. For instance in the past few weeks I’ve redone three rooms in our house. Hubs can’t find the remotes, the kids can’t find their toothbrushes, but they know better than to stop me.

So it really comes as no surprise that in the middle of the whole manhunt I ran into Christopher Dorner in the Returns section of my local Ikea while returning a cabinet that I’d been planning on turning into a fantastic faux-denza/media cabinet.

Okay, in retrospect it wasn’t actually Christopher Dorner — just some dude sitting with Tisha Campbell-Martin (the actress from that Damon Wayans show, My Wife and Kids) who really looked like Christopher Dorner, but considering that I had already parked next to a gray Nissan Titan, the exact same truck that Christopher Dorner had been driving, and my head had been on a swivel looking for Dorner because, as I mentioned, it isn’t uncommon for people to want to kill Hubs and I’m just narcissistic enough to think that everything revolves around me, it took me a moment before I realized that it wasn’t him. My first thought was, “Sh!t, he found me,” followed by, “Maybe he just wants to furnish his hide-out with some inexpensive Scandinavian furniture,” and finally, “Is that the chick from Martin and My Wife and Kids??? I love her!”

Doesn't she look like someone who would want to hang out with me?

Doesn’t she look like someone who would want to hang out with me?

It was a tense minute or two. I had to go deep undercover and sit right across from them on one of the pleather couches, casually humming Public Enemy’s Fight the Power as if to say, “Yeah, the Man always brings this sistah down too,” before I figured out that it was just some random dude.

Frankly I was a little disappointed when I figured out that I hadn’t single-handedly located Christopher Dorner, after I’d spent so much time meticulously planning the conversation I would have with him to make him realize the error of his ways and turn himself in. I actually spend a lot of time imagining conversations like that. Almost as much time as I spend mentally choreographing my kick-ass fight moves, which is embarrassing to admit, but I feel like we’re close and I can pretty much tell you anything.

Anyway, the dude was reading Dorner’s manifesto and Tisha leaned over, looked at Dorner’s picture, then looked at her friend and said, “Don’t smile.” See? Because the pictures of Dorner were all photos of him smiling and even a sitcom star could see that the dude was totally Dorner’s doppelgänger.

And you all thought I was overreacting. Tisha totally gets me…or she would if we hung out. Call me, Tisha.

Me and Tisha hunting fugitives and returning furniture. Don't mess with us.

Me and Tisha hunting fugitives and returning furniture. Don’t mess with us.

Then it struck me that the police had already shot two Asian ladies delivering papers (yep, that’s embarrassing), so maybe sitting across from a dude who looked waaaaay more like Christopher Dorner than any Asian lady was actually pretty dangerous. I could get caught in the middle of a messy take down. I wanted to give the dude a respectful fist bump and say, “Hey man, stay safe out there,” but Tisha’s number was called and they went up to return their shelving unit and I chickened out.

Then it started to hail as if God was saying, “you blew your chance, Sucka!”

And that is the story of how I almost cornered Christopher Dorner and became Tisha Campbell-Martin’s best friend in Ikea. I swear it is all true, including the biblical hail. In fact, I haven’t been back to Ikea since the incident because I know it will just be a let down.

Me and Tisha with our own Graphic Novel. The possibilities are endless!

Me and Tisha with our own Graphic Novel. The possibilities are endless!

Post Note: All kidding aside, my most sincere condolences go out to the families of those who lost their lives during this senseless tragedy. You have been in my prayers. And to those police officers who continue to risk their lives to protect and serve, thank you (respectful fist bump).

**********

Photo Credits:

Sony Pictures

Hubs and the Los Angeles Association of Gangs (or LAAG)

Mylifetime.com (and some low tech photo editing)

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Hollywood Armchair Detective Part II

Welcome back to the second half of your Armchair Detective course from Hollywood University. I hope you enjoyed your break, looking cool in the quad, drinking in the campus pub and running up Mom and Dad’s “this is strictly for emergencies” credit card. If you’re a transfer student and missed the first part of the course, please feel free to take notes from Hollywood Armchair Detective Part I.

Otherwise it’s time to get back down to business. Crime waits for no one.

  • Long, salon-styled hair should be worn down and will absolutely not contaminate a crime scene. I might leave giant tumble weeds of hair everywhere I go, but crime scene investigators have super follicles that never release their grip on their over-processed charges.  And when you think about it, who would want to put their hair up in a bun or unattractive shower cap thingy when they took the time to blow dry and style their hair? The fact that they do their hair at all is especially impressive when you think about their exhausting work schedules and the amount of personal time they spend solving crime, as well as being shot at, kidnapped and buried alive. Sometimes I don’t even take a shower and I can’t remember the last time I was buried alive.

Crime scenes are a dime a dozen but hair like this takes work. (image via dreamstime)

  • The obvious suspect is never the guilty party. If there’s a guy covered in blood, standing over the body of a person he hated, with a knife in his hand, you can rest assured that he didn’t do it. More likely, he was returning home from his job as a sous chef, when he slipped, fell, rolled in the blood and then stood over the corpse of his enemy, trying to remember if he filed his taxes. However, if one of your suspects has a really good agent and has been seen on television or in commercials, they are most certainly your killer.

Not your guy. However, the nice neighbor was on Southland and in a Doritos commercial, so she's definitely guilty. (image via dreamstime)

  • When in a stand-off, an experienced police officer will let a volatile criminal wave a gun around without shooting them. In fact, said officer will even give up his/her own weapon in the interest of a peaceful resolution.  And if for some reason the criminal has to be killed because they were about to shoot the detective or Little Orphan Annie, the detective will cry and lament over the lost life. You see, police officers love all gangsters, pedophiles and sociopathic killers and are optimistic about our justice system and its ability to rehabilitate criminals. They trust that criminals won’t get off because of clever attorneys or be paroled early due to a lax parole board. This unbridled optimism is impressive but perhaps not practical when you think of all the poor lab technicians who will be shot at, kidnapped and buried alive by the sociopaths at a later date.

"I really appreciate you not shooting me. Of course now I'm going to shank a guard, escape and bury a lab technician." (image via dreamstime)

Higher ranked officers do all of the grunt work. It’s quite common for an entire task force to be made of Sergeants, Lieutenants, Captains and Commanders. They interview suspects, canvas the neighborhood, kick down doors, get the coffee, wax the police car. They even train new recruits. And then apparently the new recruits are shoved into a closet until they earn a rank prestigious enough to be seen on the city streets or they are promoted right to Sergeant or they spend their time cleaning the toilets. I’m not entirely sure what happens to them but the important thing to remember here is that the upper echelon are not slackers. So the next time you want to file a loud music complaint or fight a traffic ticket, ask for the Chief. He’ll love taking your report.

Maybe higher ranked officers do all the work because they take such nice pictures (image via screenrant)

Officers can run around with their finger on the trigger of their gun without accidentally shooting off their toe. Probably because they don’t have a round in the chamber. Why be prepared to shoot your weapon when it would rob everyone of hearing that really cool racking sound and seeing you look like LL Cool J in SWAT? And you don’t really need to be ready to shoot your weapon at all, since you’re just going to give it up when the first criminal asks you to anyway.

If you look at this picture and listen carefully you can hear a firearms instructor cry. (image via dreamstime)

Congratulations! You’ve officially earned your MAD (Masters in Armchair Detectivery). Feel free to begin solving mysteries with the feeling of self-importance that comes from earning a degree about which nobody cares and that will never earn you any money.

I know that feeling well.