What happened when a cop realized, oh, I think we caught the wrong guy?

Oh, I've got two.

From 25 years ago when I was a cop.

One on one side of the badge and one from the other.

The first, I got assigned a warrant service to pick up a wanted felon.

Mr. Robertson was six foot tall, 250 pounds, bushy red beard, and lived at, let's say,

1, 2, 3 Elm Street. Pretty distinctive dude.

So I rolled up to 1, 2, 3 Elm Street, and sure enough, there mowing his lawn in the front yard

is the man himself, 6 foot, 250 pounds, red hair, red beard. I made contact with him.

Uh, hey, Mr. Robertson, uh, you got warrants and it's time to go to jail. Hook him up, take him to

jail, and in central booking, I get his property of him, and while filling out the inventory,

I happened to notice this guy is Mr. Robinson, not Robertson. Sure enough, the wanted guy was

this guy's landlord and his twin brother from another mother, doppelganger. When I'd said

Robertson, Robinson didn't

even twig the fact that I hadn't said his name. He just heard the familiar sounding name as his own

one. We had to walk the whole thing back and reactivate the warrant, then kicked him loose with a handshake

and an apology. The one from the other side had just gotten off duty at 2 a.m. and was driving home still in my uniform. There wasn't any

other traffic on the road, so I wasn't really surprised when a police car turned in behind me and started

following me. I figured he was trolling for drunks, and I was the only thing moving on the road,

so he was just going to follow me a little to observe my driving, and he'd realize pretty quick

that I was sober and peel off. Instead, another patrol car joined him, and another, and another.

Then all four lit me up and spread out behind me, blocking the road in a full felony stop.

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