I was freshly 21, still living at home. My parents and sister went on vacation, I decided to stay home, wasn’t really interested in their vacation.

I had a couple friends over one night, sat around the fire pit, drank a few beers, etc. nothing too crazy, and it went off without incident.

Then like 2 days later 2 detectives showed up at my door. One from my town, one from the next town over.

My first thought was that this was the weirdest, most delayed noise complaints I’d ever heard of (up until that point in my life anyway, as fate would have it I now work in 911 dispatch and nothing surprises me anymore, if someone called in a complaint about a party that happened 2 years ago that probably wouldn’t even be the dumbest call I got that hour)

That turned out to not be the case.

Instead they were asking about a second cousin or some such relative of mine. He’d apparently been breaking into cars and they were trying to find him.

I’ve never met the guy, we don’t really associate with that side of the family, but I know them by reputation, they’re a bunch of lowlife assholes. My extended family is fairly large, and our last name is kind of unique. Someone else they had asked in their investigation basically said “I don’t know where he is, but there’s some [my last names] that live in [my neighborhood]”

They asked if they could come in to make sure he wasn’t there and we weren’t holding stolen property for him

I thought about telling them to pound sand and to come back with a warrant, but I was about to go to work and I didn’t particularly want them to come back when I wasn’t there and shoot my dog. My family is also about the most boring, law-abiding bunch you can imagine so I begrudgingly let them in and walked them through the house.

The one detective was really giving me the third degree over everything, the other one was pretty chill. I don’t think it was a good cop/bad cop act, now that I work on the police side of things, that’s just kind of those two officers personalities.

Couldn’t reach my parents or sister on the phone while this was going on. My mom was pretty livid about it (rightfully so) and called and gave the two of them an earful when they were back home.

The cooler cop (happened to me the one from the neighboring town) was pretty apologetic about it. Said that he could tell right away that we weren’t involved. We’re not exactly unfamiliar faces around that town, we’re probably there more than the town we lived in, and despite the other branch’s bullshit we have a pretty decent reputation. My mom worked at the elementary school there and my dad worked in their wastewater treatment plant, and apologized for the other cop being a dick.

Other cop was kind of a dismissive dick about it.

Not sure if they ever caught up with him about that, but at one point I found his Instagram and at least one of his pictures was clearly taken on the front stairs of the county courthouse.

There’s a few things you could potentially take away from this. There’s an ACAB angle for sure, cool cop didn’t exactly do anything to keep the other guy from being a dick. There’s also an angle of picking your battles, it was a lot easier for me to just cooperate than to try to bang on about my rights, ask for a warrant, etc.

Overall though, this was just kind of an interesting footnote to my day.