It is beyond scary to think that one day you might be suspected of a crime you never committed and might get arrested. Though it sounds like the plotline of a sci-fi novel, it’s actually happening in real life.
Police officers and regular citizens took to a viral online thread to share their stories about mistaken identities and the authorities realizing that they had the wrong people. It is low-key terrifying. Scroll down to read their stories.
#41
Dispatcher here. I got 2 stories.
1, I get a call from another county not so close to us asking about a stolen license plate or car (I can't remember which). I ran what they had and it came back stolen and reported with our agency. The officer says they are out with the car and the registered owner and they swear they've never reported anything stolen and have never been to our county. Long story short, we entered it with a typo because the dispatcher wrote out the entry log first (handwritten) and then went to the NCIC terminal and entered it based on their log entry. They couldn't read their own handwriting and replaced a U and a V in the tag. What's worse is that we 2nd and 3rd party check all entries. So that's another experienced dispatcher and the shift supervisor checking off on this entry. Of course no one got into trouble for this.
2, the story goes that we received a warrant confirmation request from another agency and we confirmed the warrant based on the request. Turns out, the other agency stopped out with a kid and ran them by name. Their name was similar to someone with a warrant in our county. When their dispatcher sent the confirmation request, they used the info from our warrant entry to ask if we had a warrant on that person. Well, of course we do, what kind of stupid question is that? For those wondering, you are supposed to send the request using the info your officer gives you. If they did that, we probably would have spotted the error. So this kid that's never been to our county and has never been in trouble his entire life was picked up on a warrant on Friday that wasn't his and held in that jail until Monday because it was a No Bond warrant and had to wait to see a judge. Kid's father finds out who confirmed the warrant on our side and starts harassing her on facebook. That was fun.
1, I get a call from another county not so close to us asking about a stolen license plate or car (I can't remember which). I ran what they had and it came back stolen and reported with our agency. The officer says they are out with the car and the registered owner and they swear they've never reported anything stolen and have never been to our county. Long story short, we entered it with a typo because the dispatcher wrote out the entry log first (handwritten) and then went to the NCIC terminal and entered it based on their log entry. They couldn't read their own handwriting and replaced a U and a V in the tag. What's worse is that we 2nd and 3rd party check all entries. So that's another experienced dispatcher and the shift supervisor checking off on this entry. Of course no one got into trouble for this.
2, the story goes that we received a warrant confirmation request from another agency and we confirmed the warrant based on the request. Turns out, the other agency stopped out with a kid and ran them by name. Their name was similar to someone with a warrant in our county. When their dispatcher sent the confirmation request, they used the info from our warrant entry to ask if we had a warrant on that person. Well, of course we do, what kind of stupid question is that? For those wondering, you are supposed to send the request using the info your officer gives you. If they did that, we probably would have spotted the error. So this kid that's never been to our county and has never been in trouble his entire life was picked up on a warrant on Friday that wasn't his and held in that jail until Monday because it was a No Bond warrant and had to wait to see a judge. Kid's father finds out who confirmed the warrant on our side and starts harassing her on facebook. That was fun.
Report
1point