41 Facts About Law Enforcement Officers Everyone Should Know

In 1995, a retired New Orleans police officer named Antoinette Renee Frank committed an armed robbery murdering a uniformed policeman and two employees of a restaurant in the process. One employee hid in the freezer and was spared; the officer returned to "investigate" the crime, and was identified by the survivor as the shooter.

2. Two undercover agents repeatedly tried to buy marijuana at the Lagunitas Brewing Company taproom but were unable to make any busts as the generous patron's kept trying to give them the drugs for free.

3. After a Florida Highway Patrol Officer named Donna Jane Watts ticketed a Miami cop for driving in excess of 120MPH on his way to an off-duty job, she was relentlessly harassed by other officers, including finding out that her driver's license info had been accessed by 88 officers from 25 agencies over three months.

4. Norwegian police banned a team of Finnish divers from a cave in 2014 after 2 people died. In secret, the divers pulled their 2 dead friends to the surface and fulfilled a promise to a widow of one man. The illegal rescue took 27 divers and 101 hours in frigid water, using about 1-ton of equipment.

5. In 2011, the LA Sheriff's department discovered an inmate was an informant for the FBI reporting on jail brutality, and subsequently hid him from searching federal officers for 18 days while secretly interrogating him, faking jail records to do so.

Japanese police started wearing white gloves since the Beatles’ visit in 1966 when the police chief decided to add a layer of propriety between police officers' hands and crowds of mostly young women.

7. A Texas sheriff was duped into buying money copying box. Irate that the box did not work, he confronted the seller, who convinced the sheriff he had been operating it incorrectly and gave him some money for the trouble. The sheriff was later arrested because the money he had been given was fake.

8. In 2017, undercover officers from two different precincts in Detroit tried to arrest each other in a drug sting. Both precincts had undercover officers as drug dealers/buyers and didn't know about each other. When they tried to deal with each other drugs, guns were drawn and a fight started as both claimed to be police.

9. Australia's first cops were all criminals. Their first police force was made up of 12 of the best-behaved convicts.

10. San Diego County Inspectors, through the use of 'Secret Shoppers', found that Target overcharges customers on 10.3% of the items they ring up; Brookstone: 10.6%; Sears: 15.7%.

In 1988, a retired police officer found Cyril Smith, British MP with 144 accusations of child molestation and abuse, in a home with a sex offender and two drunk teenage boys. The officer was threatened to be prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act by the UK government. Nothing happened.

12. New York police officers used to carry an 11-inch club during the day, and a 26-inch club at night when things were more dangerous. This is the origin of the term nightstick.

13. Thai cops that break the rules are punished by having to wear pink Hello Kitty armbands while not being allowed to disclose what they've done to "earn" it, leaving their offense to the imagination.

14. A Hiroshima policeman went to Nagasaki to teach other police officers to duck and cover in the days between the bombings. Not a single officer died in the Nagasaki blast.

15. An LA homicide detective named Steve Hodel believes his deceased father killed the Black Dahlia, after finding a picture of him with Elizabeth Short. He later discovered his father had been one of the prime suspects at the time of the murder.

After Swiss police accused Libyan leader Gaddafi's family of criminal activity in Switzerland, Gaddafi submitted a proposal to the U.N to abolish Switzerland and divide it between France, Germany, and Italy.

17. A police detective named Robert Cunningham offered to split a lottery ticket with a waitress named Phyllis Penzo at his favorite restaurant in Yonkers, NY in place of a tip. The ticket was a winner worth $6 million, which he split with her without hesitation. The event was made into a movie, “It Could Happen to You.”

18. In 2005, a Kentucky sheriff deputy named Andy McDowell had 2 sons die in separate car accidents on the same night. He drove by the second crash after leaving the first one not knowing he had another son in the second crash.

19. Australian police were able to indict a suspected ringleader named Shannon McCoole of a child porn site by matching a freckle on his finger with one in images of child abuse.

20. In 2004, French police discovered an underground cinema that had been built in secret beneath the Paris catacombs. When they returned to it three days later, they found a note reading “Do not try to find us.”

Cops arrested a 99-year-old woman named Annie so she could cross it off her bucket list.

22. An NYPD ex-cop named Adrian Schoolcraft secretly recorded corrupt activities for 17 months in 2008, leading to a huge scandal and 4 separate investigations into NYPD. He recorded illegal arrests, superiors giving illegal orders, multiple rape reports getting downgraded to trespassing and more.

23. The movie Starsky & Hutch(2004) was based on two real-life NYC cops, Lou Telano and John Sepe, who went undercover as Hasidic Jews, gay lovers, and female nurses in the 1960s and 1970s.

24. US police detectives have worn suits for more than 100 years. Dressing formally is "psychological armor"; it "establishes a barrier between them and the messiness" of police work, says a psychologist.

25. In 2011, Lee County, Alabama sheriff's office told people who had fallen behind on child support that they had won tickets to the Alabama/Auburn football game. They then arrested the offenders when they came to collect their free tickets.