The custody sergeant turned to me. "I think Mr. DiCaprio here might be under the influence of drugs or other substances, and to ensure we haven't missed any drugs on his person, I authorise a strip-search of the prisoner at this time". He took a quick glance at the whiteboard behind him. "Please use cell M5 to do the search".

I turned on the blues on the car, before doing a 3-point turn and pointing the car the right way.

In a story you just couldn’t make up even if you tried, a junior Sussex police officer sent a plain-clothes copper on a wild goose-chase around town, literally chasing his own shadow for 20 minutes.

"What the fuuuuuuuuu...", Simon wails, as his torch is spinning away into the darkness, creating a rapidly changing, ghoulish shadow-play on the walls, as the light from his torch is blocked by all sorts of rubbish on the floor.

It's the classic CC/BCC error. The Met Police wanted to send out an innocent survey to recent victims of crime, only the big list of email addresses was pasted into the wrong box so everyone saw everyone else's email address. Outrage naturally followed.

26-year-old Leigh Van Bryan and his friend Emily Bunting were cuffed and stuffed into jail cells upon landing in Los Angeles, thanks to joking about plans to "destroy America" in a simple tweet to a friend before leaving.

Note: Due to the nature of this post, it might not make the best lunchtime reading. Unless you have a strong stomach; in that case, carry on!

As the bike shop owner was reading out the description, we were going through a red light, sirens blaring. Kim suddenly made a squeaking sound, and pointed at the intersection we had just gone through. I slammed on the brakes, and looked. True enough, there he was. Bright red T-shirt with a white logo on the front, and a bike that was gleaming in the bright midday August sun.

If you want to know the time, don't bother asking a policeman any more. Figures released by London's Met Police show that officers built up £35,000 in phone bills simply from calling the speaking clock service to find out if it's dinner time yet.

"You know what we're going to have to do, don't you?", Kim said to me, as she shoved her notebook back into her stab-vest. I nodded, curtly. It looked like the rest of the shift was going to be a race against the wits of a 14-year-old.

"We've had a report of a group of six youths fighting with knives in Guy Street Park, descriptions to follow," the familiar voice of the CAD operator crackles on the radio. "We have one IC3 male, around five foot five, wearing a black hoodie and a red baseball cap". The CAD operator is relaying from the 999 call in progress. "We also have an IC3 male, skinny, around six feet tall, wearing a dark track-suit with a large NIKE logo, and an IC1 male wearing jeans and a red sweater. Several knives have been seen. More descriptions to follow."

Helping free the injured and clearing up accidents is only half the problem of car crashes on our motorways -- the police and traffic officers also have to catalogue the scene to work out what happened and who's going to pay for the mess. New 3D laser scanners should hopefully cut motorway closure times by capturing the scene in minutes, speeding up the laborious process dramatically.

There was glass everywhere. I could feel it sticking into my shoulders where it had gotten caught under my Met-Vest. It was gnawing into my sides. My eye felt... Odd... but there wasn't time to find out whether I'd been hit by a shard of glass there as well.

Stats obtained through a freedom of information request show that two police officers were sacked because of their Facebook interactions, while seven quit and around 150 were the subject of investigations due to their social network contact over the last four years.

"Uhmm, I don't really know how to put this, officer. Last night, I was walking up the street with my Xbox 360, and then a ninja came and punched me in the face. He stole my Xbox!"