Any criminal that can be fooled by a police trick used by watching a Simpsons episode kind of deserves to be caught. Well in all honesty they deserve to be caught anyway but for being this foolish they need to be led into one of the cells and told it’s a receiving room. Disguise the bars and the floor and tell them exactly what these officers in Yorkshire, England did. They’ve won champagne, several delectable treats and so on and so forth. Those that would actually believe this would be doing the world a favor by just walking into the cell and saving everyone the trouble.
I don’t believe that this is how it went down, but the idea, taken from a Simpsons episode, worked beautifully. On the show the cops offered a boat giveaway like it says on the sign. The cops in Yorkshire came up with a different approach, something that they knew would appeal to some folks. Perhaps I’m simply being too cynical but it’s hard to believe that anyone would be so foolish as to believe that they’ve won something like this and then go to collect. Especially criminals that know they’re on the wanted list, you would think that they’d be paranoid enough to realize a trick when they saw it. That is unfortunately why I don’t fully believe this story. I do believe it could happen, but criminals that are on the wanted list, at least in my experience, know better than to accept anything that’s given for free and are suspicious of anything that doesn’t follow their normal routine.
You can call it being paranoid or just having a heightened sense of awareness, but it seems more likely that someone who knows they’re in some kind of trouble wouldn’t bother with such a thing as a free lunch. In fact those I’ve known in the past that were frequent visitors to county or to prison knew better than to trust pretty much anyone that decided to help them. In this case it was paranoia but it also helped a few of them out when they were being looked at for crimes they hadn’t committed. No one ever offered them a free meal, but there cops that did attempt to trap them in a lie.
I am still sitting here wondering what could possibly be going through a person’s mind when they know they’re wanted by the cops, they should be on alert, and yet they’re dumb enough to believe that someone wants to give them something for free. This kind of gag seems like it would work on a TV show like The Simpsons, but not in real life. Just when you think that you’ve seen every last little bit of moronic effort that humanity can produce it seems that someone else somewhere in the world says “hold my beer”, which is the new saying for “you ain’t seen nothin’ yet”.
