Off the I-15

It started a couple of days ago, at about 4 p.m., with a call to the newsroom from a concerned citizen who had just seen several undercover police cars speed by with lights ablaze and thought we might want a heads-up. I turned up our newly-rehabilitated police scanner and listened intently for a sign of what excitement might be afoot. Was it a drug lab? An explosion? An alien abduction?

A few minutes later, a report came across the airwaves. A woman was at Wal-Mart “throwing chairs,” the dispatcher said.

“Were they her chairs or the store’s chairs?” on of my newsroom associates wanted to know.

A good question, and if I had been a little less pressed for time, I might have gone over to check the situation out. Despite the appealing thought of getting a photo capturing the irate customer in the act of launching furniture, I figured that she would probably be disarmed and possibly in handcuffs by the time I made it over to the store, so I didn’t bother to make the trip.

Looking through the printout of police logs the next day, I noticed there was a report of an incident at Wal-Mart’s address at about 4 p.m. So how did “woman throwing chairs” get translated into police-speak? The call was listed as a “suspicious circumstance.”

I’m not sure how I was supposed to decode that one.

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