I see where you’re going with this so I’ll come clean:
Upon finding an unlocked business the first thing I do is loot the place making sure I find something nice for my wifes birthday. Then I stroke my seed into the office files, plant some drugs in the owners desk, and drag a minority in who I’ve beaten unconscious with my baton and lay him in the middle of the building. Later on after the K9 unit has gone in and bitten him several times he get’s arrested for the “break in” (there was no unlocked door. I kicked it in).:rolleyes:
In reality rattling door knobs doesn’t really happen that often, and finding an unlocked one even less. In the case of an unlocked door where we don’t have a keyholder, the door is closed and the incident is noted in the log. Extra patrols are done in the area until morning. Entrance is only made if there is a crime in progress.
IANALEO, but I do have a friend who was. He would tell me some hilarious stories of the antics he and his cop buddies would pull off when things got slow (he worked in a small town in Ohio… not a lot of crime there). Anyway, he and his buddies would walk around and kick each other in the shins as hard as they could. You could avoid it if you managed to make eye contact with the shin-kicker first. They’d also play bumper cars with their cruisers…not really at fast enough speeds to cause any real damage.
So, an unlocked door, in the middle of the day, is not an invitation for someone to enter your place of business? What kind of business are you running?
Say you left your business unlocked and there was a theft, and you subsequently found out a cop had noticed it before the theft but did nothing- would you be pissed at the officer?
I work in a software company. The front door is unlocked for the convenience of the employees, not because we want random people coming in to visit. If we wanted people to just come in off the street, we’d have a sign that indicated our hours and said something like ‘Open - Come In’.
I can’t see why you think I would be. While I might be pissed at myself for forgetting to lock the door, and the person who stole things, I can’t see how that in any way translates to being mad at an uninvited cop, unless the burglar saw said uninvited cop open and shut the door and that’s how he knew it was unlocked. A door is not an invitation for anyone who passes by to attempt to get into it unless it bears a sign indicating exactly that.
Are you talking about a business or your own personal home? Because most people lock up their businesses when they are not present, that being pretty much the minimum threshold for common sense. So if you truly don’t want the cops to check out your unoccupied business in your absence, you need to lock the door.
The front door to the software company that employs you is unlocked 24/7, regardless of whether there is anyone on the premises or not? If your response is that it is occupied 24/7, would you expect it to remain unlocked in the event no one was there? Because that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of.
Plus an unlocked door is an invitation to crime, like leaving a twenty dollar bill on the dashboard of an unlocked car. A cop checking for open doors is basically eliminating potential crime, which is part of the job.
Well of course they can “pull” it off if you mean having a quick one off the wrist.
As for rogering cheerleaders in the back of a UK cop car, I guess it’s possible but again our cheerful bobby would never even dream of such a foul deed.
My uncle was telling me that when he worked the “projects” you wouldn’t believe what some of these folks thought the cops had the power to do. He told me that one couple came up to him and asked if he could marry them. To which he said “Sure! Place your hand over my badge and repeat after me…”
Then there’s the whores and the drug dealers you can always harass.
Great story. I loved the list of charges in the last paragraph. How veddy veddy British!
My dad was a NPS park ranger on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the early '60s, with both tourist-service and law-enforcement duties. His favorite story was about the time when there was a rash of reports of stolen license plates. The NPS realized that it was never the same state’s plates twice; they knew there was a collector out there. They wrote to the Alaska BMV and had a set of plates sent from there. They put the plates on a ranger’s civilian car, parked it in relatively isolated parking lot, and staked it out. Within hours, a guy furtively approached the car and took off the plates. They busted him, got a search warrant for his house, and found every previously-stolen plate hanging in his garage. Sweet!
For a very funny movie about what some particularly bored cops do, see Super Troopers.
Seems to me you’re deliberately not getting this. “Checking doors” is a time-honored tradition among cops, mostly in small towns. As the manager of a business on Main Street in my hometown, I’m pretty damn grateful that the local police do check doors, almost nightly. If your business is normally open beyond the usual business hours, the police know that (they’re pretty observant folks, actually.) If your business is open during very late hours, the doors are normally unlocked and there’s no on-premises security, then it would be completely within the responsibilities of patrol officers to check in and make sure everything is OK. They wouldn’t “clear the building,” of course, but it’s entirely within their scope of protection to walk in and make sure someone’s not systematically murdering your employees. If you have a problem with that, you might want to start locking your doors so the police don’t feel compelled to offer that level of protection.
Full disclosure: My father was a small-town policeman for 30 years, my brother is a police officer in the Kansas City area, and a nephew of mine is a police officer in southern California.
The jurisdiction I retired from was quite large, and we still checked doors from time to time. On day shift we also went on foot and passed through businesses when they were open.
