America's Dumbest Criminals - Season 3, Episode 15 - Meter-Maid Rescue - Full Episode | Forensic Files

tonight on america's dumbest criminals is this any way to tell your girlfriend that you really want to work things out
have you ever underestimated the crime fighting force of meter maids as this bank robber did
sit stay and watch america's dumbest criminals [Music] [Applause] wow [Music] now welcome your host for america's
dumbest criminals daniel butler and debbie allen everywhere i go people ask me one
question they do yes they do is it why do you always torment your sweet little co-host no i've never been asked that
well what's your question everybody asked me wow they what's a wild night for debbie allen you've got to be
kidding me no they do but come on give us an answer come on you remember okay it would be three hours alone in a
bookstore whoa okay i've been telling them nude shuffleboard i'm sorry that's it please really
or triple coupon night at the grocery store wow i assume you're asking this because of a
story coming up a little bit later about a group of women who threw a very wild party no it just seemed like a good way
to embarrass you that worked yeah but speaking of embarrassing you've got every reason to roll your eyes at
the guys in our first story they thought they'd erased every trace of their trail
but their attempt left an indelible image here's this week's unforgettable chapter of caught on camera
[Music] what happened was on november 24th 1997 we had a bank robbery at the orange
county federal credit union it was late in the afternoon business was about ready to close when
four armed subjects came into the bank and basically terrorized everybody they got a substantial amount of currency
they escaped from the location and got into a waiting ford explorer this vehicle was tracked by our
helicopter approximately 25 miles away into an uh suburban area of los angeles in the city of paramount
officers closed in on the area while the vehicle was followed into the garage area of this rather large apartment
complex and it appears that they were in the middle of what is called a vehicle switch where
they'll switch the money and suspects from one car to another when the officers got on scene they found both
vehicles but none of the suspects we found a large a waste basket full of water where the money had been dunked
apparently in an attempt to try to avoid any type of dye bombs or other devices that might be in there we immediately
surrounded the place with a number of armed officers with shotguns and dogs and went on to do a basically an
apartment to apartment search and lo and behold one of our officers notices a couple coming out of the
complex and what attracted his attention to him was the gentleman who was with them was
a rather large guy wearing a too small coat jacket a red football type jersey some baggy pants and some pink fuzzy
woman's bedroom slippers even for california this is kind of a real fashion risk that he's taking he
basically questioned him and uh stories didn't match they were detained and it was when we switched him from one car to
another that we knew we had our people when the officers found approximately twenty thousand dollars in cash stuffed
under the back seat of the car they of course said we had the wrong suspects and the young lady who was with them uh
accused us of planting twenty thousand dollars in the back seat which is something the typical officer carries
around with him every day just to throw down and incriminate innocent people and luckily
our officers are really in tune with the styles and we're able to pick the up on
this rather quickly they're going to get a lot of time for this i like that a real fashion risk
when our next story the crime's the same bank robbery but what happens is a whole
nother matter this guy doesn't just encounter a department of detectives new this man comes under the scrupulous
scrutiny of someone who is easily and wrongly underestimated the meter maid [Music]
back about a year ago we had a bank robbery that caught our attention because it was kind
of unusual i'm a member of the johnson county sheriff's office and sometime last year i assisted the cleveland
police department in an investigation of a bank robbery they had there in a city
i was making my rounds and i came upon this expired meter and i thought something was strange about this because
the truck sitting beside it was running not only did he leave his truck running he forgot to feed the
meter so while he's inside robbing the bank the meter maid comes along and i thought to myself before issuing the
ticket that someone could possibly steal this truck because it's abandoned and running at the time
so after 12 minutes of waiting i went ahead and issued it the citation then proceeded to go inside the bank and when
i went inside the back door waiting on the elevator several ladies walked outside the bank that was employees
there saying that the bank had just been robbed i put two and two together and realized that the ticket that i had
wrote to the truck in the front that was running could have been the robbers i waited for the first officer on the
scene to present the ticket to him with the license plate number so he was able to check the license plate on there and
then we ran it down was able to find his residence and go out there and when he come home he was waiting on it i went to
the suspect's house and i waited to see if he would return and several hours later he did
could happen when i apprehended him he had money voting out of all his pockets i think robert i know
what you're talking about what are you talking about man and i advised him of his rights and that he was under arrest
for bank robbery he said what bank what robbery quit harassing me man what's this right here
that's my welfare money man what about this that's a dang ticket that mentormate gave me at that time he was
placed into custody and thanks to the good works of the media made the subject was apprehended
even though he was arrested for robbing the bank he still had to pay my parking fine what a dumb criminal
she said personally don't mess with that woman hey maybe in school you read the victor hugo novel
les miserables french whoa we're getting a little eyebrow here aren't you well our next
story updates that plot with a piece of pizza a two-time offender makes the huge
mistake of pilfering some pepperoni and is about to pay dearly for it see how a petty theft can add up to huge
consequences [Music] what this man did had everyone talking normal people of good will
don't pick on kids i mean he's a 27 year old six foot five man and he's picking on a seven-year-old child
my book that's a mean-spirited boy he was a repeat offender who grabbed a slice of pizza from a little girl even
though he had 30 bucks in his pocket under california's tough three strikes law that slice of pizza could cost him
25 years to life behind bars it just seems to me that for what would be a misdemeanor
if a person with no record did it that uh to send somebody to 25 years to life because of his record
under any circumstances is excessive maybe so but to take that kind of risk that must have been some kind of pizza
[Music] [Applause] in norman oklahoma it is illegal to read comic books while driving an automobile
[Music] the lady in our next story didn't think there was anything comical when an
officer in chesapeake virginia pulled her over after all she was just following a law that she knew by heart
see what we mean in tonight's installment of america's dumbest excuses one day i'm monitoring uh
traffic watching a stop sign and uh i see this lady she just blows the stop sign goes right through the
stop sign right around the corner so i pull in after activate the lights pull her over and everything and i go up
and i asked her i said man you know the reason why i stopped and she was like nah and i have no idea
that's what you you ran right through that stop sign blew that stop time she said it's right
on red i said right on red i said man first of all that only applies to traffic lights
and second of all you still have to come to complete stop so i'm sitting there arguing with her and i find it's just
yeah i see it's pointless but she keeps she keeps arguing a point she's like it's right on red i can she's like i've
been doing this for 20 years i said man you've been driving through stop signs for 20 years and she's like yeah i gave
her a ticket but i have a feeling she's still turning right on red you follow that turn right on red rule
don't you daniel yeah no if i see a police car around i usually just sit petrified assuming i
look guilty even though i haven't done anything but our next crook did something all right it brings together
some of the most obtuse elements i could imagine a jilted lover a house on fire and professional wrestling
follow closely yo fellas up here if burning passion causes you to set your lover's house aflame
get off the roof first when a former wrestler exploded a few molotov cocktails to set fire to his
ex-girlfriend's house she almost became a hunka hunk of burn in love luckily she was smart enough to be out
of the house but he may have been in one too many headlocks in the end he saw the error of his ways
okay sometimes it doesn't take much to outsmart a criminal other times however we have to take our hats off to the law
enforcement officers who come up with the amazing stories to get suspects to come clean here's one that would even
pass a white glove test we had received a call to a uh a burglary at a gas station located at 6th and main when
we arrived at the gas station it was quite obvious that whoever committed the offense was
a former employee because they had shimmied in got inside and found the money where it had been hidden
underneath some shop towels in the back of the gas station so only somebody with intimate
knowledge of the premises would have been able to find that we also found a pair of cotton work
gloves laying on the floor that hadn't been there the night before when we picked up the gloves and looked
at them they they just literally wreaked just like a garbage container or a trash dumpster
when we were talking to the manager of the the service station we asked him if there had been any disgruntled employees
or customers or what have you he told us that he had just let a guy go that had left his gas station gotten a
job working on the sanitation trucks here in stillwater well putting two and two together we got the former employee
to drop by after his tour of duty with the sanitation department we laid the gloves out in front of him
in a plastic bag he continually denied the allegations that we were making at him
for burglary and running out of every idea that i could think of to try to get this guy to crack
i finally said i've got fingerprints and the individual said well that's impossible i was wearing
gloves at the time and i said that's okay i got fingerprints on the inside of your cloth
gloves that you dropped at the scene bruce looked him right square in the eye and with the most sincere expression
he'd ever given anybody he said we're going to take those gloves we're going to send them to the fbi and
they could turn them inside out and remove fingerprints off the glove they're going to put fingerprint dust on
them raise your fingerprints turn the gloves inside out and photograph those fingerprints
my new uh spectro gas chromatograph method he believed it which has nothing to do with
fingerprinting by the way and the guy literally rolled over and started telling us the the whole story
about how he broke in how he took the money and had all of the cash in his apartment
still all in all pretty dumb [Music] here's daniel with adc headlines [Applause]
a man attempted to steal a 600 pound safe from an insurance office he discovered much too late that it's
unwise to stand on a staircase below such a large unwieldy object and i'm gonna spare you the wily
coyote-like details but suffice it to say that the man understood the gravity of the situation much too late
[Applause] now something for people who believe that star trek is based on a real
captain's log burglars in larch barons maryland tried to cut their way into a safe using a
laser tag gun okay truth is stranger than science fiction folks a man stole a car but being in an
unfamiliar neighborhood he lost his bearings and stopped someone to ask directions ah but the odds were against
him the person he happened to select was the car's owner oh yeah the police who responded were
very helpful in getting the thief where he needed to go and that closes the file on adc
headlines news rips from somewhere near the back of your local newspaper debbie we're off to ogden utah to hear about a
guy who is so desperate to make a drug deal that he's willing to ignore blatant warning signs that he's dealing with
police once again why do you think we call him dopes i was working undercover me and my
partner were out doing undercover narcotics buys i made a transaction over the cb radio
with a truck driver i walked over to his truck and climbed in i was wearing a body wire
transmitting device on the dashboard of his truck is sitting a real fancy radar detector the kind that has the lights
that go up and down to measure for the meter and as we're sat there making this negotiation
i'm watching the meter and it is just bouncing up and down to my voice so i'm kind of panicking the guy who
looks around he says there must be some cops around here so i tell him yeah the cops are always
driving through here but as the deal progressed he was really worried about that watching that and so
was i and he kept looking around for the cops the cops have got to be around here
somewhere close i told him yeah the plot cops are around here closer than you think
and then we completed the transaction i arrested him hey you're under arrest police officers
see i told you they were closer than you thought hey in the segment we call i'm where
you're who we like to honor those criminals who've distinguished themselves in forms of
self-capture that go beyond the call of duty now this man in orem utah learns the hard way
that when you blurt out the truth you hurt your alibi [Music] i'd got a call of a
guy trying to pass a fraudulent prescription so i went up to arrest him and he ran from us so after a short chase we
caught him and took him to jail the case went to court and he decided that he was going to act as
his own attorney and i was up on the stand testifying he was cross-examining me and as i was
telling my story as to what had happened all this time he'd been saying that we had the wrong guy he wasn't involved or
anything like this he wasn't even there as i was telling the story as to what had happened he suddenly blurted out
well that's not the way i remember it i remember looking over the judge and he was sniffering the county attorney was
laughing and it pretty much made our case for us because he had just admitted that he was
there that was a real dumb thing to do he not only made a dumb criminal but he made a
dumb attorney too [Applause] [Music] well as promised we've come to the wild women
portion of our show and i can't think of anyone more appropriate to introduce it
than you do oh yeah right me a wild woman child i don't compare with the naked truth
hiding behind a badge in this story and as the title says we're not making this one up
[Music] oftentimes officers get called on loud party calls another officer and i
responded to a home one night that was quite unusual and we walked up to the door knocked as
we normally do we were greeted by a young lady invited us into the house and we then faced about a half a dozen
middle-aged women sitting around listening to music one of the women asked first of all
why we were there and why there were two of us and we responded that we always have two officers on the lab party call
and one lady spoke up and said well officer we we don't bite and then another woman spoke up real quick and
said speak for yourself susan and uh we started looking at each other thinking something's not right here
uh then one of the ladies asked what kind of music we wanted to dance to we noticed a
little old boat so i can pull up outside and this very well-built tight uniform cop got out of the car and
seen us and dove underneath the car and started climbing away and they looked out and they seen the cops are out there
and then they looked at us they said well aren't you the stripper and we said uh
no you guys aren't the real strippers [Laughter] we said it was okay you know but ask
them how much they're charging the stripper but we don't know the end of the story
did they dance for him or not you know you know what happened to those officers happens to me all the time you
know dozens yeah you're right and if you folks at home were thinking we were about out of time you're right
too if you think we'll be back with more stories next week get right again we've
got a smart audience if you've got a lead on a story or you just can't wait till next week for more state-of-the-art
stupidity visit our website at www.dumbcrimes.com we want to thank you for joining us
tonight and offer our special thanks to the police officers who helped make the show possible they're doing more than
just doing a job when they go to work each day and we appreciate them for it you're absolutely right and now as
always we hope that we've all learned from others mistakes but if you haven't we just might see you next week on
america's dumbest criminal goodbye [Applause] [Music] you

In this episode of “America’s Dumbest Criminals,” we’ll witness a guy choosing a strange way to make up with his girlfriend, the underestimated crime-fighting force of meter-maids and much more.

Crime is no laughing matter, except when the criminals are bumbling fools. Hosted by Debbie Alan and Daniel Butler, this show looks at lawbreakers through a humorous lens.

Brief Summary

A meter maid helps catch bank robbers, and a pizza theft leads to severe legal consequences.

Key points

America's Dumbest Criminals. A comedic take on the most foolish criminals caught on camera.
Bank Robbery Gone Wrong. A bank robber's fashion choice leads to his capture.
Meter Maid Saves the Day. A meter maid's citation leads to the arrest of a bank robber.
Pizza Theft Consequences. A man faces life in prison for stealing a slice of pizza.
Dumb Criminal Admits Guilt. A criminal's blunder during cross-examination seals his fate.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

Wow, they do!

Debbie Allen responding to audience questions.

1:15WatchMar 3, 2022

Tension

40/ 100Low tension

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