Have you ever witnessed a police car chase or some other type of crime?

My only experience was sitting at a red light as a car whizzed past me from behind going at least 70mph being chased by a cop. It was pretty crazy, neat, and kind of scary at the same time.

I could have been hit by either car if something went wrong!

I’ve never seen a police chase. The closest I’ve come to witnessing a crime is seeing what I can only imagine to have been some kind of drug deal (well, I’ve witnessed low level drug deals, but this was kind of surreal). I was driving around New Orleans, and drove around a block because I had missed a turn. Before going around I watched a car pull over in front of me. A young woman got in with a suitcase. The car drove around the block at the same time I did, then pulled over at the same spot and the woman got out without the suitcase. I’m pretty sure whatever that was about was not legal, but who knows.

Yeah…I’ve seen lots of car chases. There are a bunch in Columbus. Particularly on the highways downtown.

I’ve witnessed an armed robbery. Sadly it was me that was being robbed

I’ve seen car chases, I’ve seen cops chasing a guy on foot on the street in my hometown and on the subway platforms where I live now. I don’t freak out or anything, but move out of the way, ASAP.

I’ve seen cops come to the first high school I attended during my sophomore year and break up gang rumbles on the grounds. I transferred to another, safer high school the next year. Gang rumbles with chains and knives and whatnot? Blood. Lots of it. I would run away. I didn’t want to be around because I was sure someone had a gun. I never understood people who wanted to watch these things like it was sport.

And when I was 5, I saw a guy breaking into our flat through the bathroom window one night as I got up to use the loo; I had enough wits about me to hit him on the head with a small cast iron skillet and screamed for my guardian to call the cops. The guy turned out to be a “friend” of her ex-bf.

No, only on TV, luckily!

Back in 1989 I witnessed a siege where the Police shot dead the guy involved. The guy turned out to be an ex cop. I had picked it up on a Police scanner as the story broke and was only a kilometre or so away, I got there as the bulk of the Police themselves arrived. I still have the full recording.

I don’t know what the crime was, but we were on the interstate in Virginia, traveling at a normal rate of speed when this car sped by us going at least 100 mph with 10 police cars zooming behind him – lights on and sirens blazing. We were only visiting the area and our exit was before the chase ended, I’m guessing because we never saw them again. We watched the news that night to see what it could have been, but there was nothing. It was exciting for my kids, but kind of scary at the same time.

I witnessed a murder of a man who was beat to death from my dorm room last year. I called 911 and left my information, but no one ever called back. I couldn’t really see anyone closely enough to provide detailed descriptions of any of the 7 to 9 men involved because I was on the 6th floor, and it was 4:30 in the morning and quite dark, but it was still pretty frightening to see it actually occur. I still live in the same building, and I can still see the blood stain. It was especially scary because I had gotten home about 15–20 minutes before it happened, so I very well could have been out there when it happened. When I first heard the commotion, but I looked out my window and saw what was going on, and I kinda froze up for a minute. It took me a second to regain my bearings and get my phone to dial 911.

I was on lockdown in my home on two different occasions – once while police combed the street and a helicopter beamed a searchlight from above (not sure if they ever caught who they were looking for) and at a different residence while the K9 unit searched yards. In that situation, a car (presumably stolen) was speeding down the street, failed to negotiate the curve, and hit a tree in a front yard. About four men managed to crawl out of the seriously beat up car and scatter. Fun!

@TitsMcGhee reminds me that there was a crime outside my apartment building once, a man was shot on the sidewalk right next to the building. He lived in the building, but I didn’t know him. He lived, I slept through the whole thing, but my wife heard it. She got up and was trying to see what was going on. We ended up getting up and watching the police and ambulances show up. The going theory according to a neighbor who did know the victim was that it was related to some drug dealing, but we never heard much more about it.

I haven’t actually witnessed a crime occurring, but once when I was living in a dormitory I looked out the window to see about seven police cars pulled into the adjacent parking lot all with their lights on. (They were arresting a guy, not just hanging out.)

@inkvisitor : I had a dream like that once.

Yeah. One time a friend and I were on our way into Sacramento. We were on the freeway and suddenly a ton of police cars were passing us. After a few flew by, we started counting the rest. The number after the last police car went by was somewhere in the 40s or 50s.

We had no idea what was going on at the time, but when we got home we heard on the news that there are had been a shoot out somewhere in town and a man had shot a police officer. Our assumption was that they were responding to the scene. The man was still on the loose somewhere in that neighborhood and I guess they were going to hunt for him.

Neither of us were scared. There was no fear-for-our-lives thing going on. We were both pretty interested and joking about chasing after them to see what was up. We wouldn’t go that far of course, but both of us were very curious.

Oh, here’s another one, not a crime but a funny situation with lots of police activity. I was working at a summer camp, it was very late at night when a helicopter overhead started shining its searchlight down on us. We were wondering what was up and a few minutes later a lot of police cars and trucks started streaming past us on the dirt road through the camp. Turns out a wild horse had gotten loose and they were trying to find it. They weren’t real bright. We had to go find a bunch of campers out doing wilderness survival to make sure they wouldn’t get trampled on by a spooked horse. Then we found tracks leading into the camp, and another set leading out. The police didn’t think the horse had left the camp.

@Allie That is insane! I would think anything over 10 police cars would be crazy enough, wow.

When I went to visit my friend, we were sitting on the sidewalk, and there were a whole bunch of cop cars around us. Well, we didn’t know what was going on, and half of them weren’t regular cops. The were FBI. I will never forget being grabbed off the side walk by force. I was scared. But they were doing a raid on that Najibullah Zazi

I was walking up the flight of stairs to my buddies aspartment once and on the opposite staircase I saw a SWAT team going up. Pretty sure they weren’t SWAT though, I think they were undercover NARCs or something, they had kevlar vests over plain clothes but they had MP5’s with silencers and one had a benelli shotgun.
Something was definately going on in an apartment there….about a week before that my friend told me he was walking out to his car, and there was a U-Haul truck parked, the back door started coming up he looked inside and there were two guys, and all this surveillance equipment, and they shut it real fast when he was spotted.

1) Witnessed an armed robbery in a convenience store in Miami.

2) Witnessed shoplifting incidents in several stores back in the days when I hung out with a friend who was a PI.

3) Witnessed my mom being pinned down behind the dumpster at Howard Johnson’s in Coral Gables during a drug bust.

4) Witnessed several car chases down the street where we used to live – for some reason bad guys would turn off at the entrance to our development and just keep turning left, right, left, until they always ended up on our street. They typically ran off the road into the soft dirt of a sorghum field trying to make a sharp turn.

5) Wanted to stop for a snack at a Burger King when I realized there was a huge flock of cop cars there. Turns out a bipolar guy had gone off his meds and taken everyone hostage. I later met his parents in a local restaurant.

6) Found a dead guy when I was on my way to the airport.

7) Saw a guy hit and killed by a car on Ben White Boulevard in Austin. We were stuck in the resulting traffic jam for 2 hours.

8) Found body parts in black plastic garbage bags floating in a canal in the Goulds area, south of Miami.

9) Saw a number of busts for drugs and prostitution in the apartment building I lived in after college in Miami.

10) Saw the police in Venezuela capture a burglar and beat him to a pulp while I was stuck in a traffic jam on the Autopista in Caracas.

11) Saw the arrest of a gangbanger for having shot and killed another gangbanger at our local convenience store.

12) Discovered a house on fire with a handicapped guy still inside. Called 911 and helped a meter reader get the guy out. By the time we did that loads of cop cars were there as well as the firetruck, because the house was a center for drug dealing and fencing stolen goods, the handicapped guy was a disabled veteran who had been held in isolation by his “girl friend,” and he set the fire to call attention to his plight.

I think I need to move to a better part of town, and find some new friends who aren’t in law enforcement.

@Darwin That’s why I’ve always hated South Florida.

@gussnarp – About half of those events occurred where I live now, in South Texas.

@gussnarp: Yeah, everyone in my building was a little spooked for awhile, but, from what I saw, that was not random. The people who beat that guy definitely had a reason for doing so, and it was definitely personal. Not sure if it was drugs or gangs or something else, but it definitely wasn’t some random occurrence.

Oh, and my mom was also once taking her early morning walk (around 5:00 am) in our predominantly Orthodox-Jewish neighborhood and saw trucks full of SWAT team men in all black silently pulling up to a house, ready to enter it. We never figured out what was happening (not usually something you want to stick around and watch), and it never appeared in the papers. We kinda assumed it was a meth lab, being in MO and all. Who knows, really.

I forgot about the time my mother found a dead guy on our drive way. That was in Houston.

I witnessed a bank robbery from outside of the bank, which was inside of the store I worked at, which felt very surreal. I witnessed two armed bank robbers being chased through the grocery store by police, where I used to work. They put the store on lock down and police swarmed in from every entrance. That was also surreal. Then, at the same place of employment, I witnessed a criminal run into the stockroom, who was being chased by police. He ran into a produce cooler and started throwing vegetables at the police, so they had to taze him.

The reason so much happened at that specific location is because the store was right off of our MAX line – which is our citie’s lightrail. Sometimes it was impossible to have a boring day.

Yep, I was out looking for a job, and just happened to be at the Arby’s where this man was caught. Talk about scary.

Prison yard riot…
Pretty much like what you see on TV without the tear gas odor…

@brinibear – That guy certainly likes his tatoos.

@Darwin yes he does. I originally saw him on one of those lockup shows