Betwixt April 20 and 27, 2008 the coppers stationed at the Ponoka detachment of the Aristocratic Canadian Bestrided Constabulary were kept diligent opposing crime and iniquity wherever they noticed it. Twenty- three lawbreakers were snatched and berthed in Ponoka cells this hebdomad. (Sorry. My WordPerfect ‘spell check’ and ‘thesaurus’ are a little wonky today).
Police responded to a 911 report of employee theft which occurred the previous day (but oddly enough this tale has nothing to do with this particular misuse of 911). The employee kept the fact that he was working his final shift at the bar a secret and thereby didn’t raise any undue suspicion when he requested additional monies to cover an unusually high number of VLT payouts. His final shift ended and that surplus VLT cash disappeared. His room at the hotel was as empty as his pockets were full. Police learned that money had a tendency to disappear when he worked ... usually at a rate of $40 at a time (not coincidentally the going price for a single rock of crack cocaine). Police learned that the suspect’s mother had recently died as a result of a car accident and that the suspect had indicated that he needed money to get there for the funeral. Police later learned, from his mother, that her son is a pathological liar. Soon after police learned that he also had a problem with shortterm memory loss as he had borrowed money from a number of different benefactors since February for at least three other instances of his poor mother’s unfortunate deaths by various mechanisms. A warrant of arrest is being sought for this traveling flim flam’r. So far, we’ve ruled out his mom’s place as a hideout.
Police attended at a local car dealership’s lot to investigate the attempted theft of a customer’s truck. The truck had been left there the night before. In the morning the employees discovered some rather obvious signs of the trespassing upon that truck. The culprit had successfully defeated the vehicle’s door lock. So far, so good. Next he tried to punch the ignition switch to start it. That didn’t work, so he cracked the steering column open to expose the wiring. His technique to start it that way didn’t work either. He was losing the advantage of working in darkness and so he made one last attempt at an old school “hot wire”. He just couldn’t find the right wires to cross and he really tried. He basically ripped out the dashboard to get at them all but in the end only succeeded in causing about $2,000 worth of damage. Despite this wretched scoundrel’s efforts, nothing he tried would get that truck to start ... not coincidentally, that was the very same reason the owner had it towed there in the first place.
A young woman arrived at a local nightclub to continue celebrating her brother’s birthday; a celebration that had begun some hours earlier in another bar. When she was refused service at the nightclub, she and her brother left in a snit. Now if they had simply left in a snit, this would be the end of it but they also left in a car. The fact that she was too drunk to be served any more liquor didn’t appear to weigh in on her decision to drive. Drive she did. Right into a power pole in the parking lot. That prompted the first call to 911. As a member was en route, a second caller reported that she had backed away from the pole then drove into it again. She piled into it a third time while the caller was still on line with the operator. Seconds before the first police car arrived, the woman managed to maneuver around the pole that kept getting in her way and plowed into the side of a parked truck nearby. That is where she was found.
Her brother (who was celebrating his birthday and did not want his outstanding warrants to interfere with that) had pushed his sister’s seat forward by way of the power seat switch. He failed to consider that it would be easier to exit the rear seat of the two door car via the empty front passenger seat and instead squished his plus size sister into the steering wheel. The member stood at the open driver’s door and ordered the drunken woman to turn off the vehicle. Her liquor saturated brain interpreted that to mean “take foot off brake, shift into reverse and drive over the nice policeman caught between you and the open door”. I interpreted that to mean, “jump into the smallish space between her top half, the steering wheel and the roof to grab the hand brake”. Both siblings were arrested. Him for his warrants and her for impaired driving. In the end she invoked her Constitutional Right to keep her exhalations free from the scrutiny of a neo-fascist governments oppressive breath analysis device (only the way she said it, it sounded more like, ‘go pluck your elf’).
If you have information about any unsolved crime or ongoing criminal enterprise, call the Ponoka RCMP at 783-4472. You can also call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS or now leave tips anonymously on-line at www.tipsubmit.com . If this is the kind of environment that you would like to work in, we are hiring. Check us out at www.rcmp-grc.gc.ca or call 1-877-RCMP-GRC for information about the application process.