It is like the start of a bad joke: A drunk guy walks into a police station.
Then he reports his car stolen.
Athens Police Chief Tom Pyle said that scenario happens fairly often, though the car usually isn’t stolen. The Athens Police Department has a protocol in place for incidents like that.
“It’s unwritten,” Pyle said. “The unwritten protocol is if someone walks in the door who’s inebriated and tries to report a stolen car, we have them call all the wreckers. While they’re doing that we have our officers patrol where they claim they parked to see if they can find the car.”
Usually, the officers can find the car, he said. Occasionally the car actually has been stolen, but Pyle said that is less common. Sometimes the car has been towed, and sometimes the owner finds it the next morning.
Pyle said people often park their cars while sober, then can't remember the location where they left them. They only remember seeing a certain location and believe it is where they parked, Pyle said.
In one incident, Pyle said an intoxicated man reported his car stolen from Court Street in front of the Hocking Valley Bank.
“What he’d actually done was parked on College Street by Ginger (Asian Kitchen) and came out and saw Hocking Valley Bank right across the street and thought, ‘That’s where I parked,’ ” Pyle said. “As he got drunk, he just kept remembering Hocking Valley Bank. He just said, ‘I parked next to Hocking Bank.’ “
Ivy O’Shaughnessy, a freshman studying games and animation, said no one she knows at Ohio University has gotten too drunk to remember where they parked their car, but that it happened to a friend in her hometown of Georgetown, Kentucky.
Her friend there parked about a mile away from a prom after-party, she said. He hoped parking so far away would prevent him from trying to drive home drunk, but she said he tried to find his car anyway.
“He was walking around aimlessly for, like, an hour at one in the morning until someone found him,” she said.
Her friends here usually drink at their houses, she said. When they do go to the bars, they go in groups so that one of them will be sober enough to find the car — and drive it — at the end of the night.
Ohio University Police Department Lt. Tim Ryan said he didn’t think people losing their cars due to intoxication was too much of a problem on campus. More often, he said, sober people forget where they’ve parked or the cars people call about are actually stolen.
“People lose their cars,” he said. “For sure. ‘I don’t remember where I parked’ is not super common, but it certainly does happen.”
Ryan said he doesn’t consider it a problem for another key reason.
“I think if you’re drunk and you’ve lost your car, that’s probably a good thing,” he said. “If you’re drunk, you shouldn’t be driving anyway.”
That is why when intoxicated people report stolen cars to APD, the officers often won't return the vehicle immediately, Pyle said.
“We would find it and then we’d say, okay, here it is, now you need to go sleep it off, go home with a friend or whatever,” he said.
