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A New York woman was reportedly arrested last weekend after calling police to report a child locked in her car. The problem? There was no child inside—only her keys. Shontay Wright was arrested and charged with two misdemeanors after the incident in which she faked the emergency in order to merit a faster response time to access her car. Who needs AAA when you’ve got the police?
On June 1, Wright discovered she’d locked the keys inside her vehicle while it was parked in her driveway at home. Rather than call a friend, a locksmith, or literally anyone else remotely qualified to unlock her car and retrieve the keys, the 36-year old rang up the Schenectady Police department and reported that she’d locked a child inside her car.
As you might imagine, the police were quickly able to determine that there was not a child locked in a vehicle, just an impatient citizen short on common sense waiting outside. That’s one way to get help fast but, as it turns out, it’s also a quick way to rack up a couple of misdemeanors. Wright was charged with one count of falsely reporting an incident and one count of resisting arrest.
It’d be easy to kick back and laugh at this situation as an oddity, but the reality is that people call the police all the time for things that aren’t actual emergencies. Just this week, someone in a Louisiana town called the police to report that Taco Bell had run out of both hard- and soft-shell tacos. The injustice! Another example took place earlier in the year when a five-year-old boy called 911 to ask police to bring him some McDonald’s. At least he can be excused for not knowing better.
While the food-related stories are funny, several states are making false 911 calls a serious crime because of the amount of time, money, and emergency resources they can waste.
