New York City Police Department

Called them to report jewelry I had taken from my apartment by a cleaner two months prior as I’d been waiting and hoping it would turn up. They sent three cops to come investigate. Slow day on the beat apparently.
Asked some REALLY SERIOUS questions about the ‘grand larceny’ which I know is just due diligence but really I already knew it was the cleaner. As they’re taking the police report they call in two MORE cops, one of whom I guess was the sergeant so he could make sure they did everything right.
So now I’ve got five cops in my apartment so I think they must be taking this really seriously and I ask them to be honest with me – does anything ever come of these cases (otherwise why send five cops?). To me, if the jewelry is gone, it’s long gone. They said well you never know and since you have pictures of the jewelry that is REALLY helpful and we might be able to track them down.
Give them all the info. They said they would be in touch to get the photos of the jewelry. I hear from a detective a couple days later who is talking the talk and acting like he is really gonna get these suckers. Along with the cleaners, they had to take the info of my dog walker and my super and ended up grilling me about them and asking barely any questions about the guy who I suspected in the first place.
Detective calls back, told me that so far he talked to everyone EXCEPT the guy I suspected. Promised to follow up, yada yada. Nothing. Write him a few weeks later. Short email — please call me. Called him, voicemail tag, he doesn’t remember my case. He looks it up and tells me usually nothing comes of these things and people watch crime shows all the time so they know how to get away with these things. I asked him if he talked to the guy I suspected. Yeah, he said he didn’t do it (no sh*t). I asked him what about the photos of the jewelry you wanted to see… oh yeah, send those through when you get a chance and we’ll make a poster or something.
Thanks bud. I’m so glad my 33% tax rate is paying you to be super not helpful.

Easily the worst police station I’ve ever been to. I was kept in my cell for almost eight hours. Seriously! I had very little clothes on (just my socks and a Richard Nixon mask), and got terrible goose bumps. When I asked them to turn up the heat, the officers would only say, «anything you want, Mr. Nixon.» It was not funny. They kept asking me to show them a photo ID. I told them I left it in my wallet, which was in my pants, at Madison Square Garden. Of course they didn’t believe me, and wouldn’t let me go get it. So stupid.

No one wants to have to go to a police station.
Even fewer of us (less than no one?) want to go to a police station when on vacation alone in a city we’ve never been to before.
So when I found myself, on my second day in NYC, without a driver’s license and missing $ 15 and a MetroCard, I was depressed at the thought of having to file a police report.
But apparently that’s required by Delta if you want to even think about getting on a plane to go home.
Dialing 311 to request the NYPD local non-​emergency number was of no help, as I got redirected to 911, which put me through to the main NYPD dispatch desk, where a guy insisted I go to the nearest police station, which happened to be the 20^th Precinct.
Unfortunately 82^nd and Columbus, near where I was staying, was about half a city away from where the actual pickpocketing occured (in the 5^th Precinct, for those keeping score at home), but thanks to a couple helpful folks (the only reason this whole incident rates above zilch on the star-​meter), I was able to get a police report filed in about an hour.
The woman who took notes from me did ask me such inane questions as whether we have rap music in Texas, but she was otherwise pleasant. I was shocked to learn later that it was recorded as a ‘baggy pants’ issue rather than a pickpocketing, but I understand that I had no solid proof and they need to keep their crime stats down.
A detective or desk jockey or some other non-​crime-​fighting-​at-​the-​moment guy gave a pair of German supposed police officers a tour of the station while I filed my report, and I was stunned to see how easy it was to access the station if you played the tourist part. Still, it was kind of him.
If you have a serious crime to report, make sure they get your story down exactly as you tell it. Don’t be afraid to ask to get the report revised if you don’t feel the story is correct.
They may call you for follow-​up, but this seems innocuous. In my case, I was already back home and had to explain that my license had spontaneously reappareared in my bag.
The officer on the phone grilled me for a while about the missing cash and seemed determined to convince me that it was my fault, but at that point I was just relieved that nothing worse had happened, so I took the gruffness in stride.
They may think I’m a flake, but I don’t care. I think they’re grumpy.