Square Galaxy

I found this recent BYU police beat amusing:

Nov. 10: Students in Foreign Language Student Residence called in a fire in their apartment. One student ran the automatic cleaning cycle on the oven without realizing that another had left a rag in the oven. The apartment received only minor smoke damage.

Do you know how to say, “Don’t turn on the oven clean cycle, I left a rag in the oven!” in Chinese?  I doubt that these foreign language learners did either.

I just read the most recent BYU police beat, and found it more rediculous than usual.  For example, the next time you decide to play hop-scotch on a Provo sidewalk, you may be vandalizing:

Oct. 25: Police discovered the name of a Web site written in chalk on the sidewalk in Provo. This is considered graffiti.

I wish sometimes the police would arrest a vending machine.  Not only are the costs of the inclosed junk food so high that they rob the poor, but I’ve frequently had vending machines eat my coins without giving me the food.  Inspite of these vending machine crimes (against me!) apparently there have been some other vending machine crimes:

Oct. 27: Four vending machines were broken into in the Richards Building. The offenders pried open the machines and removed the coin boxes. Accounting is being done to determine how much money was stolen. This is part of a string of vending machine burglaries and is currently under investigation.

And since when was pushing at a basketball game a criminal offense?  Usually it just warrents a fowl:

Oct. 24: A BYU student and a visitor had a heated verbal exchange during a pick-up basketball game in the Richards Building. At one point, one of them pushed the other.

As a bonus, I read about someone who had a GPS stolen out of his car:

Oct. 26: A student reported a stolen Garmin GPS that was taken from a parked car with a smashed window. The stolen property was valued at $900.

$900 for a GPS?!?  That student did get robbed–by the store that charged him $900 for a GPS!  (They usually run $150-$300).

I saw this police beat under the heading, Disorderly Conduct:

Oct. 11: A University of New Mexico football player, unhappy with the outcome of the game, had to be restrained by his coach and fellow players and helped onto the bus after kicking a door.

Has this kid never lost before, or was he happy with the outcomes of those games?  Seriously, if you are going to go to Provo to play a top-10 football team, there is one outcome that should be expected more than others: BYU wins.  I know this must be a less-desireable outcome for New Mexico—it might even make a few unhappy.  

But most people don’t have to be restrained when they are unhappy.  Most people don’t go kicking doors.

Ever since fall semester started, I’ve been waiting for a new police beat to be posted. While there are no jaw dropping stories, I did find one story slightly ammusing.

Sept. 12: A custodian reported screaming near the MCKB at 4 a.m. The screams were later discovered to have come from a female student sprayed by a sidewalk sprinkler.

I’m guessing there was more going on than a girl walking along and getting sprayed by a sprinkler, because most of the time, you see a sprinkler before walking through it, especially if you are walking along at 4am.

Then there was this story with which I have a question:

Sept. 11: BYU police received a phone call complaining of a band playing music too loudly at 10:30 p.m. in the Foreign Language Housing. The police arrived and the band was quiet.

Did the police arrive to find a quiet band? Or did the band quiet down when the police arrived? Perhaps the band was too loud and they quited down for the benefit of neighbors. Or, there could have been some cranky neighbors. If you are living in student housing, you have to realize that you are going to hear some noise. That is just student life. Just because you hear un-invited sounds doesn’t mean that it is too loud.

I like reading the BYU Police Beats, but this one from June 2 got by me until I finally read it today. I kind of have a hard time believing it.

You’ve heard the one about the woman who locked herself inside her car with a dead battery and phoned for help to get out of the car, right? Well, it really happened in Orem Friday. The woman called police on her cell phone after her car battery died and efforts to unlock the doors to let herself out proved futile.

“Occasionally, a mother or father will accidentally lock their small child or children inside the car and urgent help is needed; however, we don’t often get these kind of calls for assistance,” Lt. Doug Edwards said in a news release. “I’m just glad she had a cell phone to call for help.”

Police arrived and tried to assist the woman, but she couldn’t understand the officers outside the vehicle. Using hand gestures, the woman instructed them to call her on her cell phone. After getting the woman on the phone, police instructed the woman how she could manually operate the lock mechanism on the inside door panel to free herself, police said.

“I’d hate to think that people could actually put themselves in jeopardy because they didn’t remember or understand that car door locks will work manually,” Edwards said.