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tonight on america's dumbest criminals is this any way to tell your girlfriend
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that you really want to work things out have you ever underestimated the crime fighting force of meter maids as this
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bank robber did sit stay and watch america's dumbest criminals [Music] [Applause]
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wow [Music] now welcome your host for america's dumbest criminals daniel butler and
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debbie allen everywhere i go people ask me one question they do yes they do is it why
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do you always torment your sweet little co-host no i've never been asked that
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well what's your question everybody asked me wow they what's a wild night
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for debbie allen you've got to be kidding me no they do but come on give us an answer come on
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you remember okay it would be three hours alone in a bookstore whoa okay i've been telling them nude shuffleboard
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i'm sorry that's it please really or triple coupon night at the grocery store
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wow i assume you're asking this because of a story coming up a little bit later about
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a group of women who threw a very wild party no it just seemed like a good way to embarrass you
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that worked yeah but speaking of embarrassing you've got every reason to roll your eyes at
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the guys in our first story they thought they'd erased every trace of their trail
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but their attempt left an indelible image here's this week's unforgettable
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chapter of caught on camera [Music] what happened was on november 24th 1997 we had a bank robbery at the orange
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county federal credit union it was late in the afternoon business was about ready to close when
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four armed subjects came into the bank and basically terrorized everybody they got a substantial amount of currency
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they escaped from the location and got into a waiting ford explorer this vehicle was tracked by our
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helicopter approximately 25 miles away into an uh suburban area of los angeles in the city of paramount
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officers closed in on the area while the vehicle was followed into the garage area of this rather large apartment
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complex and it appears that they were in the middle of what is called a vehicle switch where
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they'll switch the money and suspects from one car to another when the officers got on scene they found both
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vehicles but none of the suspects we found a large a waste basket full of water where the money had been dunked
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apparently in an attempt to try to avoid any type of dye bombs or other devices that might be in there we immediately
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surrounded the place with a number of armed officers with shotguns and dogs and went on to do a basically an
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apartment to apartment search and lo and behold one of our officers notices a couple coming out of the
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complex and what attracted his attention to him was the gentleman who was with them was
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a rather large guy wearing a too small coat jacket a red football type jersey some baggy pants and some pink fuzzy
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woman's bedroom slippers even for california this is kind of a real fashion risk that he's taking he
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basically questioned him and uh stories didn't match they were detained and it
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was when we switched him from one car to another that we knew we had our people when the officers found approximately
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twenty thousand dollars in cash stuffed under the back seat of the car they of course said we had the wrong suspects
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and the young lady who was with them uh accused us of planting twenty thousand dollars in the back seat which is
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something the typical officer carries around with him every day just to throw down and incriminate innocent people
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and luckily our officers are really in tune with the styles and we're able to pick the up on
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this rather quickly they're going to get a lot of time for this i like that a real fashion risk
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when our next story the crime's the same bank robbery but what happens is a whole
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nother matter this guy doesn't just encounter a department of detectives new
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this man comes under the scrupulous scrutiny of someone who is easily and wrongly underestimated
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the meter maid [Music] back about a year ago we had a bank robbery that caught our attention because it was kind
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of unusual i'm a member of the johnson county sheriff's office and sometime
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last year i assisted the cleveland police department in an investigation of a bank robbery they had there in a city
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i was making my rounds and i came upon this expired meter and i thought something was strange about this because
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the truck sitting beside it was running not only did he leave his truck running he forgot to feed the
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meter so while he's inside robbing the bank the meter maid comes along and i
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thought to myself before issuing the ticket that someone could possibly steal this truck because it's abandoned and
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running at the time so after 12 minutes of waiting i went ahead and issued it the citation then
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proceeded to go inside the bank and when i went inside the back door waiting on the elevator several ladies walked
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outside the bank that was employees there saying that the bank had just been robbed
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i put two and two together and realized that the ticket that i had wrote to the truck in the front that was
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running could have been the robbers i waited for the first officer on the scene to present the ticket to him with
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the license plate number so he was able to check the license plate on there and then we ran it down was able to find his
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residence and go out there and when he come home he was waiting on it i went to the suspect's house and i waited to see
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if he would return and several hours later he did could happen when i apprehended him he had money
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voting out of all his pockets i think robert i know what you're talking about what are you
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talking about man and i advised him of his rights and that he was under arrest for bank robbery
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he said what bank what robbery quit harassing me man what's this right here that's my welfare money man what about
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this that's a dang ticket that mentormate gave me at that time he was placed into custody and thanks to the
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good works of the media made the subject was apprehended even though he was arrested for robbing
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the bank he still had to pay my parking fine what a dumb criminal she said personally
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don't mess with that woman hey maybe in school you read the victor hugo novel
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les miserables french whoa we're getting a little eyebrow here aren't you well our next
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story updates that plot with a piece of pizza a two-time offender makes the huge
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mistake of pilfering some pepperoni and is about to pay dearly for it see how a petty theft can add up to huge
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consequences [Music] what this man did had everyone talking normal people of good will
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don't pick on kids i mean he's a 27 year old six foot five man and he's picking
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on a seven-year-old child my book that's a mean-spirited boy he was a repeat offender who grabbed a
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slice of pizza from a little girl even though he had 30 bucks in his pocket under california's tough three strikes
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law that slice of pizza could cost him 25 years to life behind bars it just seems to me that for what would
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be a misdemeanor if a person with no record did it that uh to send somebody to 25 years to life
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because of his record under any circumstances is excessive maybe so but to take that kind of risk
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that must have been some kind of pizza [Music] [Applause] in norman oklahoma it is illegal to read
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comic books while driving an automobile [Music] the lady in our next story didn't think
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there was anything comical when an officer in chesapeake virginia pulled her over after all she was just
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following a law that she knew by heart see what we mean in tonight's installment of america's dumbest excuses
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one day i'm monitoring uh traffic watching a stop sign and uh i see this lady she just blows
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the stop sign goes right through the stop sign right around the corner so i pull in after activate the lights
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pull her over and everything and i go up and i asked her i said man you know the
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reason why i stopped and she was like nah and i have no idea that's what you
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you ran right through that stop sign blew that stop time she said it's right
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on red i said right on red i said man first of all that only applies to traffic lights
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and second of all you still have to come to complete stop so i'm sitting there
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arguing with her and i find it's just yeah i see it's pointless but she keeps
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she keeps arguing a point she's like it's right on red i can she's like i've
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been doing this for 20 years i said man you've been driving through stop signs
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for 20 years and she's like yeah i gave her a ticket but i have a feeling she's
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still turning right on red you follow that turn right on red rule don't you daniel
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yeah no if i see a police car around i usually just sit petrified assuming i look guilty even though i haven't done
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anything but our next crook did something all right it brings together some of the most obtuse elements i could
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imagine a jilted lover a house on fire and professional wrestling follow closely
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yo fellas up here if burning passion causes you to set your lover's house aflame
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get off the roof first when a former wrestler exploded a few molotov cocktails to set fire to his
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ex-girlfriend's house she almost became a hunka hunk of burn in love luckily she was smart enough to be out
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of the house but he may have been in one too many headlocks in the end he saw the error of his ways
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okay sometimes it doesn't take much to outsmart a criminal other times however
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we have to take our hats off to the law enforcement officers who come up with the amazing stories to get suspects to
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come clean here's one that would even pass a white glove test we had received a call to a uh
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a burglary at a gas station located at 6th and main when we arrived at the gas station it was quite obvious that
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whoever committed the offense was a former employee because they had shimmied in got inside and found the
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money where it had been hidden underneath some shop towels in the back of the gas
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station so only somebody with intimate knowledge of the premises would have been able to find that
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we also found a pair of cotton work gloves laying on the floor that hadn't been there the night before
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when we picked up the gloves and looked at them they they just literally wreaked
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just like a garbage container or a trash dumpster when we were talking to the manager of
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the the service station we asked him if there had been any disgruntled employees
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or customers or what have you he told us that he had just let a guy go that had left his gas station gotten a
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job working on the sanitation trucks here in stillwater well putting two and two together we got the former employee
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to drop by after his tour of duty with the sanitation department we laid the gloves out in front of him
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in a plastic bag he continually denied the allegations that we were making at him
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for burglary and running out of every idea that i could think of to try to get this guy to crack
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i finally said i've got fingerprints and the individual said well that's impossible i was wearing
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gloves at the time and i said that's okay i got fingerprints on the inside of your cloth
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gloves that you dropped at the scene bruce looked him right square in the eye and with the most sincere expression
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he'd ever given anybody he said we're going to take those gloves we're going to send them to the fbi and
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they could turn them inside out and remove fingerprints off the glove they're going to put fingerprint dust on
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them raise your fingerprints turn the gloves inside out and photograph those fingerprints
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my new uh spectro gas chromatograph method he believed it which has nothing to do with
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fingerprinting by the way and the guy literally rolled over and started telling us the the whole story
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about how he broke in how he took the money and had all of the cash in his apartment
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still all in all pretty dumb [Music] here's daniel with adc headlines [Applause]
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a man attempted to steal a 600 pound safe from an insurance office he discovered much too late that it's
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unwise to stand on a staircase below such a large unwieldy object and i'm gonna spare you the wily
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coyote-like details but suffice it to say that the man understood the gravity of the situation much too late
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[Applause] now something for people who believe that star trek is based on a real
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captain's log burglars in larch barons maryland tried to cut their way into a safe using a
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laser tag gun okay truth is stranger than science fiction folks a man stole a car but being in an
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unfamiliar neighborhood he lost his bearings and stopped someone to ask directions ah but the odds were against
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him the person he happened to select was the car's owner oh yeah the police who responded were
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very helpful in getting the thief where he needed to go and that closes the file on adc
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headlines news rips from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper debbie we're off to ogden utah to hear about a
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guy who is so desperate to make a drug deal that he's willing to ignore blatant
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warning signs that he's dealing with police once again why do you think we call him dopes
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i was working undercover me and my partner were out doing undercover narcotics buys
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i made a transaction over the cb radio with a truck driver i walked over to his truck and climbed
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in i was wearing a body wire transmitting device on the dashboard of his truck is sitting a real fancy radar
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detector the kind that has the lights that go up and down to measure for the meter
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and as we're sat there making this negotiation i'm watching the meter and it is just
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bouncing up and down to my voice so i'm kind of panicking the guy who looks around he says there must be some
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cops around here so i tell him yeah the cops are always driving through here but as the deal progressed he was really
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worried about that watching that and so was i and he kept looking around for the cops
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the cops have got to be around here somewhere close i told him yeah the plot cops are around here closer than you
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think and then we completed the transaction i arrested him hey you're under arrest
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police officers see i told you they were closer than you thought hey in the segment we call i'm where
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you're who we like to honor those criminals who've distinguished themselves in forms of
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self-capture that go beyond the call of duty now this man in orem utah learns the hard way
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that when you blurt out the truth you hurt your alibi [Music] i'd got a call of a
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guy trying to pass a fraudulent prescription so i went up to arrest him and he ran from us so after a short chase we
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caught him and took him to jail the case went to court and he decided that he was going to act as
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his own attorney and i was up on the stand testifying he was cross-examining me and as i was
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telling my story as to what had happened all this time he'd been saying that we
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had the wrong guy he wasn't involved or anything like this he wasn't even there
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as i was telling the story as to what had happened he suddenly blurted out well that's not the way i remember it
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i remember looking over the judge and he was sniffering the county attorney was laughing
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and it pretty much made our case for us because he had just admitted that he was
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there that was a real dumb thing to do he not only made a dumb criminal but he made a
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dumb attorney too [Applause] [Music] well as promised we've come to the wild women
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portion of our show and i can't think of anyone more appropriate to introduce it
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than you do oh yeah right me a wild woman child i don't compare with the naked truth
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hiding behind a badge in this story and as the title says we're not making this
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one up [Music] oftentimes officers get called on loud party calls another officer and i
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responded to a home one night that was quite unusual and we walked up to the door knocked as
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we normally do we were greeted by a young lady invited us into the house and we then faced about a half a dozen
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middle-aged women sitting around listening to music one of the women asked first of all
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why we were there and why there were two of us and we responded that we always have two officers on the lab party call
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and one lady spoke up and said well officer we we don't bite and then another woman spoke up real quick and
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said speak for yourself susan and uh we started looking at each other thinking something's not right here
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uh then one of the ladies asked what kind of music we wanted to dance to we noticed a
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little old boat so i can pull up outside and this very well-built tight uniform cop got out of the car and
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seen us and dove underneath the car and started climbing away and they looked out and they seen the cops are out there
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and then they looked at us they said well aren't you the stripper and we said uh
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no you guys aren't the real strippers [Laughter] we said it was okay you know but ask
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them how much they're charging the stripper but we don't know the end of the story
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did they dance for him or not you know you know what happened to those officers happens to me all the time you
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know dozens yeah you're right and if you folks at home were thinking we were about out of time you're right
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too if you think we'll be back with more stories next week get right again we've
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got a smart audience if you've got a lead on a story or you just can't wait
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till next week for more state-of-the-art stupidity visit our website at www.dumbcrimes.com
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we want to thank you for joining us tonight and offer our special thanks to the police officers who helped make the
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show possible they're doing more than just doing a job when they go to work each day and we appreciate them for it
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you're absolutely right and now as always we hope that we've all learned
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from others mistakes but if you haven't we just might see you next week on america's dumbest criminal goodbye
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[Applause] [Music] you