21 Jan 2012

Suspects in Gardens

It's only human that when thinking of police officers jumping garden fences the first thing that springs to mind is the scene from Hot Fuzz. Even police officers think of it! This is why most of the time you will find that we opt for the safer method of lifting up fence panels. Saves the force shelling out for broken panels!

Sometimes though these Suspects in gardens or garden hopping jobs aren't all they are cracked up to be. I recall one in particular which was in one of our local streets that has two terraces of houses that back onto one another so their gardens are parallel. We had a call from one of the neighbours saying that they witnessed a male in a dark hoody walking along the wall that ran down the middle of the gardens of both terraces, looking in gardens with a torch. The male eventually stopped at one house and jumped into the garden and the neighbour could hear him trying to break into the shed.

Well to say we had lots of shed burglaries over the recent weeks was an understatement and we thought this was it! We would catch the man responsible!! We scrambled the helicopter, firearms officers, dog units and us. Obviously we were there first as we were local anyway. We put on a containment and gradually worked towards the target address one by one. We got to at least one garden away in every direction when a colleague decided to knock on the target address and see if the residents could let us into their garden. When my colleague knocked we were met with a spotty faced teen with parents looking over his shoulder asking "What's the matter officers"

We asked to be let into the garden over fears their shed may have a suspect inside when the young boy piped up saying "hang on I was in the garden about 20 minutes ago" to which the worlds biggest light bulb then sparked the answer to the whole situation. The result? The young man was out in the garden looking for his lost rabbit with a torch. It apparently liked to garden hop between neighbours and so when the neighbour saw him he was getting back into his own garden and found the bunny in the shed. Case closed and a good use of all the resources. Safe to say the helicopter never arrived, too much weather!

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