1. WEIRD CASES
In a recent incident in Detroit, a police officer in a car cruised slowly by a prostitute at the
roadside, flashed his police badge and shouted “get off the street”. But things were not as
they seemed. In a drama soon to be explained to a criminal court in Wayne County, the judge
will hear how the police officer was really a criminal and the prostitute was really a police
officer.
In Southwest Detroit, following complaints about prostitutes on the street, the local police
department’s boldly titled Morality Unit went out on a sting operation. A female officer
dressed as a sex worker was on the street about 5pm and was talking to a potential client – or
potential convict as he was in her eyes. Then William Quirindango drove up, identified himself
as a police officer and challenged the prostitute. Hearing that, her prospective client ran away
very fast. ‘Officer’ Quirindango continued to hassle the prostitute repeatedly barking at her the
news that he was a police officer. The prostitute then revealed that she was in fact a police
detective on an undercover operation, at which point Quirindango evidently remembered
some other urgent cop business he had to attend to and sped off.
Quirindango was not far into his next phantom mission, though, when he was caught by real
officers. He denied he had done anything wrong but the police found in his car a Detroit
Police Department (DPD) badge, items of police uniform including hats with PDP logos, and a
loaded .40-calibre Glock handgun. He was taken into custody and will stand trial for the
offences of impersonating a police officer and unlawful possession of a police badge and
uniform.
Mistaken identity in a legal context has caused problems in other countries. In 2008 in
Scotland, 30 police officers raided The Arches nightclub in Glasgow. They discovered a
“mass orgy”. Inside the club, all 30 of the officers stormed over to an area behind a partition
where they found many men engaged as a group in gay sex. The officers attempted to make
arrests but when the orgy participants saw the men in police uniforms waving truncheons and
handcuffs, they assumed it was all part of the orgy and enthusiastically tried to incorporate the
officers into the recreational mêlée. It took a while for the officers effectively to communicate
their true purpose.
The legal theatre of the absurd has, though, a precedent of even more prodigious confusion.
On the office wall of the late broadcaster and oral historian Studs Terkel was an enlarged and
framed clipping taken from a Bangkok newspaper report from the early 1970s. It recorded a
battle between police and a gang of bandits in southern Thailand in which a man was killed.
In the news report a police spokesman is quoted as saying that the deadly battle began
“when the bandit gang, disguised as policeman, challenged a group of policemen, disguised
as bandits.”
Gary Slapper is Professor of Law at The Open University. His new book Weird Cases is
published by Wildy, Simmonds & Hill.
These articles were published by The Times Online as part of the weekly column written by
Gary Slapper