50 Interesting Facts about Law Enforcement Officers

In the late 1970s, a police officer in South Africa named André Stander robbed almost 30 banks. Sometimes he’d carry out a crime during his lunch break and then return to the scene as an investigating officer. He was caught but escaped, formed a gang and robbed more banks. He was eventually killed in Florida.

2. In 1950, White House Police officer Leslie Coffelt was fatally shot while protecting President Truman in an assassination attempt. He managed to kill his attacker with a headshot from 30 feet away before dying.

3. Starting in 2010, Washington DC police ran a fake hip-hop studio to attract criminals and record proof of their illicit deals. “Manic Enterprises” made 70 arrests, snagged $7.2 million in cocaine, and confiscated 161 illegal weapons. Cops shut it down after they heard a gang planned on robbing the studio.

4. A police constable named Steve Hutton on 2 separate occasions, barked at fleeing criminals to trick them into thinking he had a police dog with him. It worked.

5. William H. West was the only police officer to arrest a sitting President. He arrested President Ulysses S. Grant for speeding on his horse in 1872, for which the President paid a $20 bond. 

In 2015, the Dutch police caught cannabis growers because their house was the only one in the street without snow on the roof.

7. Indian police officers aren't allowed to handcuff prisoners unless they are at extreme risk of escaping. Indian Supreme Court has ruled that handcuffing is against the dignity of an unconvicted prisoner and thus violates his fundamental rights. So policemen in India just hold hands instead.

8. In 2000, an Atlanta area sheriff named Sidney Dorsey ordered a hit on a rival (Derwin Brown) that defeated him in an election. The hit was carried out by two deputies who were promised promotions.

9. 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.

10. 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.

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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

15. 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.

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.

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

18. 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%.

19. 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.

20. 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.

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.

22. 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.

23. 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.

24. 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.

25. 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.”