Not everything about a ride along is mega exciting

Sadly, the title of this post is true.  The majority of my evening was incredibly exciting, but there were a few parts that were less than thrilling.  But because I am a blogger that is committed to telling you any and everything about the ride along experience, I am obligated to include the ho hum bits as well.

After transporting a prisoner (coming up later this week!), Randy and I went to the scene of a car that was supposedly parked in a handicapped spot.  The truth is that a car was parked in a handicap spot.  But it had a handicap license plate so it wasn't parked illegally.  Boooorrring!!!  Then we had to fill out paperwork about this.  How much of a waste of time is this!?  Definitely cut into my adventure time.

We also had to go respond to a "noise disturbance".  Okay, background story here.  Sioux City used to just have one public high school and it was in the shape of a castle.  After the school was shut down, it sat vacant for a few years and then was converted into apartments.  The building isn't in the greatest neighborhood but it is fairly nice inside.  Anyways, someone in the building repeatedly calls the police to report any freaking little thing that annoys them!  How do I know this for sure?  Because Randy pulled up the history on this particular address and it listed things like "Juvenile" at 6:30pm on a Tuesday, or "Noise Disturbance" at 10:00 on a Saturday.  These are not actual crimes.  In fact, they are just incidents that occur as a result of living near society.  And the reporter never leaves their information so the police can't talk to them to find out what the real problems are.  All in all, it's very inconvenient for the police and a general waste of time. 

But despite how pointless the call was, Randy and I went anyways.  Turns out a small group of ladies was sitting outside chatting and laughing and trying to cool down on a nice night.  Something totally legal and normal.  It annoyed me that anyone would report their fun just to be an annoying neighbor but Randy handled it well by talking to the women and making them giggle.

Randy and I also spent a little bit of time driving around neighborhoods looking for people doing sketchy things.  The worst we found were some people who were hanging around a park after closing time.  Real huge threat to society right there.

Even though these incidents were kinda dull, I'm still glad that they happened because I got to see regular, standard issue police work.  Which I guess is kinda important.  That whole, "patrolling your neighborhood in order to prevent creepos from doing sketchy shiz" thing.  Thanks for that, police!

Lesson learned: Police work isn't also nail-biting stuff.  But it is always important.  Even if important just means saying hi to citizens and asking them to drink a beer for you (something Randy totally did).