An electronic, repetitive, alarm-like noise emanated from the sewer, presumably from the object left behind.

A phone call is made.

“911, state your emergency”

“Ah, some people just drove by and threw something in the sewer, and it’s making a noise. I think you should take a look.”

Locational details given, a promise of a patrol car given.

Twenty minutes later, a second call.

“911, state your emergency”

“Ah, this is the second call. I think maybe you guys missed the point the first time.”

“State your emergency.”

“I’m calling to report suspicious behavior. A suspicious car with suspicious people in it drove down the street, stopped, and deposited a suspicious package, what appears to be a bomb in the sewer, and drove off quickly. It might not be a bomb, but I’m sure not going near it.”

“Oh. Can you describe the suspects?”

Precise, Joe Friday like description of suspects and suspect’s vehicle provided in a crisp, efficient manner.

“We’ll have someone there right away.”

Fifteen minutes pass. The police station is a ten minute walk away. The “bomb” is still making noises.

But we are far enough away that it really does not matter to us. It may only matter to the day care facility ten feet from the location of the suspicious device. So we go back to grilling our hot dogs, annoyed, but figuring there was not much more to do.

Five more minutes pass. A patrol car with a young police officer pulls up.

He is directed to the sewer. He can hear the funny noises. He approaches slowly. He stands back from the sewer and glances in with his flash light. He comes away and says “I don’t think it’s a bomb, because, well, it looks like it’s not, but, well, oh, here’s my Lieutenant. Let’s see what he says.”

The Lieutenant pulls in with his special Lieutenant car. He is an older guy, with more experience and less hair. He has seen plenty in his career. He has heard sounds emanating from sewers before. He walks right over and looks in.

By this time a third patrol car has arrived with two officers. The Lieutenant directs them to remove the sewer grate, and one of them reaches inside and removes the device.

It is a half dozen disk-shaped objects attached to wires. Most of them are beeping. Anti-theft gadgets removed from shoplifted merchandise.

Note to the assholes in the black caddy: Don’t you be dumping your stupid-ass stolen shit in my sewer on my street. Follow up note to the assholes in the black caddy: We shall meet again, because I shop where you steal. One of these day’s I’ll see your distinctive car and your distinctive ass at Target or Best Buy or somewhere and I’ll have a little conversation with the security people in said store. That will not be a good day for you.

The last time someone dumped stolen shit on our street is was a big giant six wheeler owned by Kirby Puckett’s cousin. They drove it down our street in the middle of the night and stopped on a dime. Unfortunately, the dime was in our free-standing 8-unit mailbox.

What are we, the city dump?

__________________________

Reposted from GLB apropos our current discussion on Police Response Times.

I am not going to make a complex argument or present piles of data. Rather, I’m just going to show you what a couple of minutes of google searching got me. I asked the question, “how long are response times” by police in emergency situations. The answer is: In urban areas with well funded police forces and an upper SES population, under five minutes. In more rural areas that are still affluent between five and 15 minutes. In urban areas that are less affluent, about 15 minutes but as low as 8 minutes, and in rural areas that are not high SES, I’m not sure for police response times but for ambulance response times, just under 20 minutes. These numbers are sometimes averages, sometimes quartiles or some other statistic, representing 80 or 90% of the calls.

In the case discussed earlier (see link above as well as this story) the police response was 21 minutes, and the site of the emergency (a knife-wielding intruder who was eventually killed by the woman who lived in the home being invaded) was less than 10 miles from the town police department, and about 20 miles or so from the Oklahoma City Police. I assume that State Trooper and Sheriff patrols were less than 20, probably less than 10 minutes away. The reason for a 20 minute plus response time in this case is unclear, and it is not addressed in any of the reporting that I’ve seen. (I’m asking around among the reporters who covered this to see if it is a question that has been brought up.)

Response times need to be improved, but there is no reason to assume that most people live in unprotected areas where the police will always arrive far too late to do any good. There are reports here and there of response times getting longer, but if you hear that more often than the alternatives of response times not changing or improving, please consider that this may be a reporting bias. In Minneapolis, high priority calls were responded to on average (I’m not sure how the average is calculated) in 8 minutes in 2003 and 8 minutes in 2012. During the interim, response times went up, then down again.

Now, here’s an interesting fact for you, which I’m pretty sure is true. As I look through response time data, every time I can see a comparison between fire and police, the fire departments beat the pants off the cops. In the same period I just mentioned for Minneapolis, between 80 and 90 percent of the time the fire department arrived at their calls in less than 5 minutes. The fire department is quicker than the police. That means the police can be quicker than they are, right?

Discuss.

_____________

*ADDED: I’ve already been told that I’ve created a straw man by noting that the “response time is long, arm yourselves” meme. I didn’t bother documenting that this meme exists because it is so obvious and ubiquitous, but since I’m being called out on it, here is the result of a a couple of minutes of googling and linking:

GAMBLING WITH YOUR LIFE: Is 911 an acceptable option?
Do police stop crime?
The Second Amendment in Action
For those who already have guns but want more straw men in their lives.
GUNS LOWER CRIME AND SAVE LIVES
And so on and so forth.

Sources:
Minneapolis Police Response Time
Minneapolis Fire Response Time
Albermale County, Virginia (Affluent-ish suburb/rural) 10-14 minutes
Milwaukee: Urban, underfunded, times have been getting longer, ranging from 13 minutes to 30 minute, average about 18 minutes.
Some other data from around the country.
Orange County, California (the 1% live here): response times near 3 1/2 minutes up to 7 1/2 minutes.

See also this funny story about how to decrease response time

… and this story about an incident at my place.