Identity Crisis

Identification is key in cracking many cases as if police cannot identify the suspect then how on earth are we to find them. Ideally we would love to arrest every suspect at the scene of the crime, as this is as good as red handed, but sometimes arresting someone on the scene of the crime can have it's issues too.

I recall one such incident when we received a call as soon as we paraded at the start of a night shift that a member of the public was at a party and had been assaulted. This was all the details we needed as the person was apparently still in the party. Off we went with blues and twos ago. I think the whole shift must have turned out as we had at least 3 police cars running in a row.

When we turned up at the address we all jumped out of our cars to be met by a man dressed as a one of the Teletubbies. One of my colleagues, who is not renound for being kindest of heart said to me "I would love to punch Tinky Winky in the face too,so don't blame the guy"

After talking to Tinky Winky it turns out he had an argument with a guy over a girl, well it wasn't as simple as that, he had an argument with a Penguin over Tinkerbell and then Superman, another guy at the party, got involved and it ended with Tinky Winky having ten bells kicked out him by the Penguin and Superman. At this point I had to pinch myself to stop from laughing.

So we waded in turned the music off and kicked all of the characters out of fantasy land and onto the front lawn. This was the point at which we tried to ID the suspect as Tinky Winky had been taken away to safety by another unit.

Mixed in the plethora of icons in front of us were 3 penguins, 3 best friends who thought it funny to hire the same outfit, and 2 Supermen, obvious popular outfit. "Right, let's nick them all then and we'll sort ID out later, teach 'em to all come dressed the same" said the most experienced of the shift. At this point they were all arrested which posed an issue due to the suits being oversized and handcuff not big enough.

Well the custody suite loved us. Booking penguins and supermen in was not an everyday occurrence and as I'm sure you could guess a vast amount of, very fitting, very unfunny puns started being used like "We'll give you cell 19 it's as cold as ice, just how you like it" and "Don't worry we haven't put kryptonite in your food"

It turned out that after speaking to Tinky Winky that he hadn't even been invited to this party, he just saw people nearby dressed in fancy dress, donned his own, Yes OWN Tinky Winky outfit and tagged along. He said he wouldn't recognise the person again as he had his head on throughout! I don't really need to say much more than that and i'm sure you will agree that catching people at the scene isn't always as easy as it sounds!