So Much For Follow-Through

I work in a Swiss city police dispatch department. It’s a Sunday morning, around 6:30 am when I start my shift, when someone rings our doorbell. Whenever someone does that, our observation screen switches to the camera at the front door. The guys from the night shift recognize him from ringing about an hour before, demanding that we find him a hotel room. This time, he’s here asking for his car keys, which we don’t have.

I tell the guys from the night shift to leave and I take over. I ask the visitor to come in and send a couple of officers out to talk to him since he’s clearly inebriated. Meanwhile, I do some digging in our systems to figure out if we even have his keys; we confiscate them in the case of drunk driving, for example, and tell people to come pick them up once they’re sober. I can’t find him in our records, unfortunately. However, we have the ability to look at entries of another police organization. As I said, I work for city police, but there’s also cantonal police, which is akin to state troopers in the US. 

I find an entry in their records about our visitor, but it’s not at all what I imagined happened. Turns out that he was on his way from his home to a campsite around twenty minutes out from our city where he has a permanent spot. His license plate was scanned on the way over and our colleagues received an alert because it was registered that the owner of the vehicle was missing and possibly suicidal. Once they arrived at the campsite and found him, he told the officers that he wasn’t suicidal but that he had been drinking before driving over, and also after arriving. Because he also claimed to have been drinking after arriving, they had to bring him to the hospital to extract some blood for analysis and to make sure he really wasn’t suicidal. So far, pretty much standard operating procedure.

Once they were done with everything, however, at around 11:30 pm, the officers were radioed to head out to another case. Instead of driving the suspect home (remember, they got him there from his campsite a mere twenty minutes away), they dropped him off in front of a hotel in the city. Now, to be fair, this is a hotel where you can randomly pop in and ask for a room and they’ll let you stay if they have a vacancy, even in the middle of the night.

You can already guess that that wasn’t the case and the hotel was completely occupied. But by that point, the officers had already driven off. So this poor fellow was left stranded in our city, still somewhat drunk and without a cellphone, and wandered around for hours until 6:30 am when I finally managed to get him some help.

I organized a taxi for him to get him home while cursing my colleagues for not making sure the suspect was safe.