How about making it look like they dialed 911, getting them raided without a call going over the police radio, and having them all arrested?

Let me preface this by saying that making a false 911 call is a serious crime, and doing so should not be taken lightly... unless of course you had no other choice, tried everything else, and are willing to suffer the consequences should you get caught.

My parents scraped every little bit they had together to buy a two-family house on a small quiet dead end road to have a safe place to raise their children. We had 14 houses of great neighbors, and one house of very nasty neighbors, the Dicksons. A whole family of dirtbags that rented an apartment in the house just before ours. Their 16 year old son, Junior, was friends with the overgrown child of a tenant we had when we bought our house. The tenant was in his 40’s and hung out with the teenagers next door. One of the first interactions we had with anyone in that family was when my mother caught Junior rummaging through our things in our private basement.

My father tried getting them to quiet down, but they got louder. He tried talking to the father to control his son, but his son was “a man now”, so the father had and desired no control in the house. They would have loud drinking parties with his son’s teenage friends clearly not old enough to drink and clear drug use of what kind we wouldn’t know until after the raid…

The police came several times, but it seemed the Dicksons lived with a police scanner in every room, so things got eerily quiet when a call came over the radio with their address. The father would claim not to know anything about the problem and would talk to “the boys”. The police were bothered by this, but couldn’t force their way into the apartment without a warrant or probable cause and nothing incriminating was ever left out in the open.

A neighbor’s child once called 911 accidentally and the police had to check the house for possible victims. Apparently a 911 call is probable cause for entry even if you answer the door and say everyone is ok. The police also didn’t dispatch cars to 911 calls or domestic abuse calls over the radio. The dispatcher would contact the officer with their Nextel phones or you’d hear the dispatcher telling the officer to call into the station. The public would not hear the person’s address for privacy purposes or possibly to not alert an aggressor.

This gave me the perfect opportunity as a nerdy 14 year-old. I knew all about phone systems and with the tips about the “privacy” policy the police had in place for 911 calls, I got to work. My mother and I took a bunch of pictures of the morons in the yard with kids drinking beer, and some glass pipes clearly not used for legal purposes, and got them developed.

The next Thursday night I went to work, like some super agent spy or something. I had it all planned out for a while beforehand. One night I connected two long thin wires to their phone box and left the ends in a bush where our yards met…

The wire ends were left in the bush until Friday night came along. I walked over, threw the envelope of pictures on the front stairs, twisted the wire connections to a cheap phone we had and dialed 911. Now the 911 operator would see the call as coming from the Dicksons’ phone line. I remember making it sound like I was crying and saying something stupid about a little girl, to which there were no girls at any of these parties. Then I twisted the wires together which is the equivalent of leaving the phone off the hook.

Soon thereafter the police showed up. Not one or two cars, but six local cars (which might have been all of them), two cars from the next town over, two staties, a fire truck, an ambulance, and then a couple unmarked or off-duty showed up. Nothing happened on the scanner until after they were already all on the scene. Both parents were arrested, the house was ransacked trying to find the girl, but instead finding strung out kids hiding in closets, a larger amount of drugs than any of us expected, and satisfaction. Junior was arrested for resisting and assaulting police officers. The street was completely impassible for anyone including the police trying to leave while for the next hour or two as the parents of the other kids came to claim their little delinquents. A couple of them had warrants and were also arrested on sight. I was scared out of my mind for what felt like weeks afterward.

My uncle had helped me with some of the planning including the tip about twisting the wires together afterward so 911 wouldn’t be able to call back. My father realized what I did rather quickly and I confessed as soon as he gave me that “Holy shit what did you do look”. He told me how horrible it was what I did, but that they deserved it and he hoped I would talk to him before trying anything like that again. When the police all finally left around 4 hours later, he went and plucked out the phone wires. He was laughing like a mad scientist telling my mother what happened when she came home from work. After several criminal charges and a nice article in the newspaper, the landlord finally kicked out his “perfect” tenants. We had almost 20 years of peaceful neighbors after that.