An unemployed man in Russia managed to live out his dream of being a traffic policeman by putting on a fake police uniform and going on patrols with actual traffic inspectors for two months.

Tired of sitting around all day, Viktor, a 48-year-old unemployed man from Russia’s Stavropol Region, bought himself a realistic-looking police uniform and joined the ranks of law enforcement officers in the village of Pyatigorsky. Relying on his traffic inspector attire, great acting skills, and enviable self-confidence, the man patrolled the streets of Pyatigorsky, actively stopping negligent drivers and educating them on various traffic rules. It is unclear why Viktor chose this specific profession, or whether he actually took any bribes from motorists during his voluntary service, but his career was short-lived. Two months after joining the ranks of the Stavropol traffic police, his cover was blown.

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Police in Santa Marta, Colombia, recently attracted criticism for publishing a wanted poster of alleged cartel members with no actual photos or names.

On January 2nd, the Santa Marta police department published a poster of 12 of the most wanted criminals in the Colombian town, asking the general public for help in apprehending the alleged criminals, who were all members of the “Los Pachenca” drug cartel. All 12 individuals were also suspects in a series of criminal acts committed in Santa Marta in recent months, so it made sense to ask locals for assistance in catching them as soon as possible. The only problem was that the published poster only mentioned the suspects’ nicknames instead of their actual names and the same generic graphic where their photos should have been…

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An elderly Japanese man was recently arrested after calling a police precinct 2,060 times in nine days to yell at the staff there and call them “tax thieves” and “big stupid a-holes”.

Between September 30th and October 8th, the 67-year-old man from Saitama Prefecture called the Prefectural Police Headquarters a total of 2060 times to yell at the staff there and tell them that they should all be fired. That’s an average of one call for every six minutes and a total talk time of around 27 hours over the nine-day interval. Eventually, police raided the man’s house and arrested him on the ground of obstructing police business. He admitted to the charges and said: “I knew the police would come for me someday”.

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A gang in the Indian state of Bihar somehow managed to run a fake police station out of a hotel for eight months before finally being caught by the actual police.

Cases of fraudsters impersonating police officers and soldiers are not uncommon in India, a country where the fear of and the respect for those in uniform are widespread, but a gang in the town of Banka, Bihar state, took the scam to a whole other level by setting up a fake police station just 500 meters from a real one. Apparently, the scammers operated their fake station out of a local hotel, where they posed as actual officers wearing realistic uniforms, badges and even firearms. They are believed to have scammed hundreds of people, having requested bribes for registering complaints, helping them secure social housing or jobs in the police, or otherwise solving their problems.

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At 91 years of age, LC “Buckshot” Smith may just be the world’s oldest serving police officer, but he says he has no plans to retire just yet.

Buckshot doesn’t move around as fast as he used to, but that hasn’t been stopping him from patrolling the street of his home town, Camden, in Arkansas, four days a week. After serving for 46 years as a deputy, he retired, but he couldn’t stay away from the job for more than five months. He doesn’t hunt, doesn’t fish, all he ever enjoyed doing was being a police officer, so he went back to work in his 80s, as a rookie cop. He loves serving his community and only plans to retire for good “when the good Lord tells him to”.

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A couple of police officers in Russia were convicted for busting a drug den that they had created themselves in order to boost their performance rating.

Senior detective Ivan Mantrov and Yury Titov, the head of a police station in the Russian city of Kostroma, allegedly convinced three locals to produce the illegal synthetic drug desomorphine, aka “crocodile”, in an apartment, even offering to supply the necessary ingredients, which are thought to have been sourced from the police’s evidence stores. The two officers convinced the victims – known drug users already under investigation in another case – to set up the drug then by promising to help them get off on bail.

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A North Carolina man who allegedly joined a police chase and later handcuffed the suspect at gunpoint was eventually arrested for impersonating a police officer.

On the night of October 5, police in Wilson, North Carolina, got some unexpected help during a high-speed car chase. At about 11 pm, they stopped a car in search of a murder suspect, but as they approached the vehicle, the driver sped off. The officers got in their patrol car and pursued the suspect’s car, but about 2 miles into the car chase, something really strange happened. A black Ford Taurus with blue lights turned on sped past the patrol car, got in front of the suspect’s car, and slowed down, forcing the car behind to stop.

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Police stations all around Thailand are sending their chubbiest officers to a weight-loss camp as part of a nation-wide program aptly called “Belly Destruction”.

After the success of a two-week pilot program, police stations in Thailand have begun sending their fattest officers to the Central Police Training Center in the city of Pak Chong, to take part in intense physical activity designed to adjust the size of their bellies. Each station will periodically send two to three overweight policemen to the center, where they will work out, ride bicycles and adopt a healthy, protein-rich diet to shed as much extra weight as possible. The Belly Destruction program started gaining attention after photos of overweight police officers taking part in the daily exercise routine went viral online.

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Police in the Taiwanese city of Taipei were accused of wasting taxpayers’ money on solving stupid cases, after local media revealed that they recently conducted DNA tests worth hundreds of dollars to find out who drank a student’s $2 yogurt bottle.

Sharing a fridge with roommates in college usually means accepting that, from time to time, some of your treats will mysteriously disappear. It’s like a tradition, but for one Taiwanese woman sharing a house with five other women studying at the Chinese Culture University in Taipei, it was a serious crime that had to be solved at any cost. Last month, the unnamed woman came home to find one of her yogurt bottles empty in the garbage bin. None of her housemates had asked her permission to drink the yogurt, so she fished the empty bottle from the trash, convened an emergency house meeting and asked the other five women which one of them had stolen her yogurt. When none of them owned up to the crime, the infuriated woman took the empty yogurt bottle to the police and demanded that they carry out an official investigation and bring the criminal to justice.

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A 21-year-old Indonesian man who used a custom-made fake police uniform and a realistic gun to pose as a police officer and get women to go out with him was recently arrested by real policemen. He still has a scheduled date, only this time it will be with a court judge.

Ari Septian Pratama, a 21-year-old man from the South Sumatran city of Palembang, in Indonesia, reportedly pretended to be a cop for about a month, before his arrest by actual police officers. The young pretender confessed to adopting the alias “Dr. Julian Saputra”, and having a realistic police uniform custom tailored. To appear more believable, Pratama also wore a realistic toy gun and police badge, and even went around telling people that he was the son of Southeast Sulawesi’s regional police chief and that he was a doctor of police forensics. Apparently, he did it all to impress women and get them to go out with him.

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When driving at night, there’s nothing quite as annoying as being blinded by the full-beam headlights of another vehicle. Recognizing this problem, the police department recently started punishing offenders by making them stare at their own headlights for a full minute. Hopefully, this will make them see the error of their ways.

On November 1st, Shenzen police took to Weibo, China’s most popular social network to warn drivers that anyone caught using their car’s headlights on the full beam illegally would be fined 300 yuan ($44),  lose points on their license and be made to recite regulations on the proper use of headlights. But what really drew people’s attention was the introduction of a new and unconventional punishment – making offenders stare into the high-beam headlights for 60 seconds, while sitting on a specially-designed chair.

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Andy Pope, a Police Community Support Officer for West Midlands Police, in the UK, has come to be known as memory cop, thanks to his incredible photographic memory, which has helped him successfully identify over 850 suspects in the last four years.

Every day,  PCSO Pope arrives at work half an hour early, logs on to his computer, and browses the pictures of suspects in the day’s internal police briefing. He has been doing it even since he joined the West Midlands Police, in 2008, and as his brain stores more faces year-on-year, his record of recognizing bad guys keeps getting better. His exceptional identification skills have made him somewhat of a secret weapon, and when detectives exhaust all other possible options trying to put a name to a suspect’s face, they turn to him.

 

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In a bid to better control unruly crowds that gather during protests, police in northern India have decided to replace their modern arsenal with rudimentary weapons like slingshots and chili powder balls. The decision was made after they realised that these “non-lethal” options might prove to be more effective than water cannons or tear gas.

“It is much better than firing plastic bullets that can cause bad injuries,” said Anil Kumar Rao, the Inspector General of Police in the state of Haryana’s Hisar district. “It will be used only in emergency cases so that we can manage minimum collateral damage.”

Police officers are currently being trained in the use of these “specially designed” locally made slingshots, learning to fire plastic balls filled with chili powder as accurately as possible. And if chili doesn’t prove effective enough, they plan to switch to marbles.

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Thoroughly exasperated by her son’s misbehavior, a mother from Columbus, Georgia, came up with an innovative method to teach him a lesson. She teamed up with the local police force to stage an arrest of her fifth-grade son, hoping to scare him into behaving well at school.

33-year-old Chiquita Hill said that her son Sean’s teacher complained about him being “rude and disrespectful, not listening, talking back, and not doing his school work,” for the umpteenth time. She was running out of options and desperately looking for a solution, because she was scared that Sean’s behavior could escalate into serious disrespect for authority as an adult. That’s when she got the idea for a fake arrest.

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Joel Zwicky is one of those rare creative souls who manage to bring a touch of originality into everything they do. A former photographer and musician, Joel has worked as a patrol officer at the Green Bay Police Department, in Wisconsin, for the past decade. Unlike regular officers, however, Joel prefers patrolling the streets on his super-cool skateboard.

“I kind of had the idea, like, two years ago, just because I like to skate and I was trying to figure out how I can do it more at work so that I can – you know, if you do what you love, you don’t work a day in your life,” Joel said in an interview with ABC News. The 40-year-old floated the idea to his department, but no one would take him seriously.

But earlier this year, when the department’s chief was looking for new initiatives to engage more with the community, Joel suggested the idea again. “And I said, ‘You know chief, I had this crazy idea in the back of my head what would you do if I brought my board to work and started skating it?’ And he said, ‘Can’t hurt. Just don’t get hurt please.’ So that’s kind of how it started,” Joel explained.

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