Daniel Neman
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
LAWRENCE, Kan. — There are so many other things the Lawrence, Kan., police could have been doing instead.
They could have been apprehending out-of-season snipe hunters. They could have been bringing food to doughnut shops as an ironic joke. They could even have been staring wistfully into space.
Instead, they got called to what the Lawrence Police Department’s Twitter feed called, “the great parking lot standoff of 2019.”
Wednesday, two Lawrence officers were called to what was described as “road rage in progress.” When they got to the location, they discovered that a woman wanted to drive her car out of a parking lot while a man wanted to drive his car into the lot.
There was only room for one car at a time. And so the two cars sat, facing each other, and each one refused to budge. By the time the police arrived, the standoff had been going on for at least 20 minutes.
Because the parking lot was private property, the police could do nothing official to mediate the situation. Meanwhile, someone handling the police Twitter feed decided to tell the rest of the story on Thursday, to great comic effect.
First, the tweeter decided to amp up the humor by calling the drivers Chad and Karen. Then he or she pointed out an easy solution to the problem.
Logic, however, has no part of this story. So the police tweeter sprang into action again.
So if Chad was having no part of it, perhaps Karen would be more reasonable. But at this point, that did not seem likely, either.
Efforts to get either one of the drivers — although “drivers” would imply that they were actually driving — to listen to reason were, predictably, doomed to failure.
The police asked Chad to move, and he said, “Nope, I didn’t call you guys, she did. I’ll sit here all night if I have to.” So they tried asking Karen to move.
According to the Twitter feed, she said something along the lines of, "“WHY WON’T YOU JUST MAKE HIM MOVE UGH THE POLICE SUCK.”
The tweeted reply was:
The police left the scene and so, eventually, did Karen and Chad. Meanwhile, the Lawrence Police Twitter feed picked up 19,000 likes for its thread about the incident.
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