Police standoffs... Cardboard cutout and empty shed! LOL

[Joanne98]

MONTGOMERY TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP) ―

Full-Size Cardboard Cutout Causes NJ Bank Standoff

A standoff at a New Jersey bank is over after police learned a "person" seen inside was actually a full-size cardboard figure.

Officers went to the PNC Bank in Montgomery Township on Thursday night after an alarm went off. They saw what they thought was at least one person through the windows of the bank, which had its blinds drawn.

The area was sealed off and three nearby apartment buildings were evacuated as a precaution. Meanwhile, authorities used bullhorns and made telephone calls in a bid to make contact with whoever might be in the bank.

After repeatedly failing to get a response, a SWAT team entered the building and discovered the cardboard figure.

It was not immediately clear what set off the bank alarm.

http://cbs2.com/watercooler/new.jersey.bank.2.875695.html

Police find no one in shed after 3-hour standoff

SALT LAKE CITY – Salt Lake City police were in a three-hour standoff outside a shed behind a Salt Lake City home before finding out there was nobody inside. The standoff started Thursday after police got a report from a woman living inside the house that she thought she saw her roommate's estranged boyfriend enter the shed with a gun.

Officers secured the area, but after clearing the house and sending K-9 dogs to the shed, they found it was locked and there was no one there.

Some neighbors had been evacuated and police shut down a portion of a city street near the house.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090109/ap_on_fe_st/odd_standoff_no_one_home

[Bluzmann57]

1. Let me see if I have this correct

A woman thinks she sees a man with a gun entering a shed while armed, calls police, the police act as if the woman may know what she was talking about and follow procedure. And then when nobody is in the shed, that's funny? I think the woman who reported the alleged man in the shed should be charged. Or at least scolded pubicly. It ain't funny. The police were doing their job. I wonder about people who laugh when police are misled.

[Joanne98]

2. Did they have to evacuate the neighbors?

And YES it's funny!

[Bluzmann57]

4. If they thought there was going to be shooting going on

Yes they did have to evacuate the neighborhood. And if you think stuff like that is funny, let's hope you never need any police assistance. They may go "overboard" to save you from an imaginary predator or something.

[Joanne98]

8. I never need any police assistance. It's to dangerous.

[louis-t]

3. When I was 14, My grandmother thought she saw me

fall through the ice (we lived on a lake). She screamed, all my relatives thought their kid had fallen through the ice. What I saw, after slipping on the ice and falling on my ass was: crazy people breaking down a doorwall, the slider screen went tumbling off in one direction and people were falling out onto an elevated patio, yelling and tripping over each other. Wasn't too funny then, but it makes me smile now, 40 years later.

[L0oniX]

5. I am surprised they didn't tazer or shoot the cardboard.

[BlooInBloo]

6. They respect cardboard more than they respect people.

[surrealAmerican]

7. What makes you think they didn't?