So Stupid It Should Be Criminal

Way back in the early 1990s, there was an incident at a statewide police convention located in my city. The convention was hosted at a big hotel downtown and had big banners, placed everywhere outside and inside the hotel, welcoming police from all across the state to this convention.

On that day, some guy decided it would be a great idea to rob a hotel. Guess which hotel he picked to rob? Guess how many police cars, uniformed officers, and literal huge signs saying police were in that location at that time, which he ignored as he walked up to the front desk to demand money?

As it happened, he also did this right as a group of cops were walking out of a nearby elevator. They saw him apparently trying to rob the front desk at gunpoint (with the gun concealed under his coat so they could only see the outline of it) and immediately dogpiled and subdued him. When they got him handcuffed, they found that he didn’t even have a real gun. He was just making a gun shape with his hand under his jacket.

Amazingly, this was not an isolated scenario. A guy once tried to rob a retired police chief at gunpoint at a different statewide police convention on the other side of the country. Unsurprisingly, he didn’t get away with it, either.

We’re probably all much safer with geniuses like these behind bars before they try anything else that might have more dangerous results for those around them.