A "suspicious call" went out to Cheyenne Police last week when a concerned neighbor saw strangers wandering around a residence on Stetson Drive early in the morning.
They knew the homeowners were out of town, and with several vehicles parked nearby, they sounded the alarm.
At about 8:15 a.m. Thursday, an officer was dispatched to investigate, but before the situation could turn into a neighborhood whodunit, CPD received an update.
"RP just called back to cancel. These subjects were hired to install Christmas lights," a dispatcher announced over the radio.
Cheyenne Police Department spokesperson Alex Farkas confirmed the incident was real and that the neighbor had called back after learning who the strangers were and what they were doing.
Farkas praised the callers for looking out for neighborhood safety and reporting something that seemed out of the ordinary.
"That's exactly the kind of awareness and communication we encourage," she said.
False Alarm!
Listen to dispatch long enough, and you're likely to have a newfound respect for officers, who never know quite what they're walking into when they respond to calls.
City records show a burglar alarm once summoned Green River police to a home while the owners were on vacation. The culprit turned out to be a family friend who was entrusted with feeding the pets but entered the wrong security code.
Just days later, officers investigated another residential burglar alarm after a basement motion detector went off.
The house was secure. Police suspected pets inside might have triggered the alarm.
In Casper, a man who couldn't find his passport called 911 four times in one night in 2019.
When officers arrived at his hotel, they explained that 911 was for emergencies and left. One minute later, the man called again, demanding they search his room.
By 2:30 a.m., he had another emergency: He couldn't find his cellphone.
Police returned and arrested him, according to a sworn affidavit.
Another time, Casper dispatchers reported receiving nearly 50 prank or accidental 911 calls in a single morning, likely from a young child, they wrote.
The communications center warned parents that even old cellphones without active service can still dial 911 — and those calls are competing with real emergencies.
Gunshots Or Fireworks?
Allen Thompson, a former Sheridan County sheriff who now serves as executive director of the Wyoming Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police, has spent decades responding to the strange and unexpected.
One call that still makes him laugh came around 4 a.m., when someone reported an elk had escaped from a refuge in Sheridan and was wandering the streets.
Thompson and his partner went looking for the runaway animal. Instead, they came over a hill and encountered the largest deer Thompson had ever seen standing in the road.
Another common mystery, Thompson said, involves people losing track of their cars and reporting them stolen, only to remember that a cousin had permission to borrow the vehicle or that a spouse had moved it.
Then there are the self-appointed firearms experts who call 911 around the Fourth of July, convinced the explosions they're hearing are gunshots.
"No, I know it's definitely 9-millimeter. They're definitely shooting a 9-millimeter," Thompson recalls hearing on the other end.
Thompson points out that no matter how implausible a call seems, they have to prepare for the worst when they get suspicious calls.
Occasionally, the call that sounds completely impossible turns out to be true.
Thompson remembers driving about 45 minutes into a remote part of Sheridan County after a woman reported that a stranger had climbed into her parked vehicle and started the engine.
“And I'm driving out there. I've got 45 minutes to think about how that did not happen. Nobody walked to her house and started her vehicle. And if they did, why didn't they drive away in it?" he said.
Then, sure enough, there really was a stranger in the back seat, "drunker than a skunk."
The man had crashed his own vehicle in a field, stumbled through a barbed-wire fence and climbed into the woman's car to escape the cold.
Thompson found the wrecked vehicle the next morning, about a quarter-mile into a field.
The stranger's decision to climb into her car might have saved his life, Thompson said. Had he stayed in the cold, the story might have ended differently.
Thousands Of Calls
Over the past five years, Cheyenne police have averaged 3,083 suspicious-activity reports annually, with only about 17% resulting in criminal cases.
Through Nov. 10 this year, officers handled 2,348 such reports, with about 22% generating criminal investigations.
That doesn't mean the others were all false alarms. Some involved legitimate concerns that simply didn't lead to criminal cases.
In Casper, false security alarms became such a headache that the police chief brought the issue before City Council in 2022.
At the time, officers were responding to around 1,200 private burglar alarms every year — and 99.2% were false.
Between 2017 and 2022, Casper officers spent an estimated 3,169 hours responding to false alarms. That's the equivalent of more than 132 straight days of police work.
Casper eventually adopted escalating fines, reaching $500 for repeated burglar alarms and $750 for repeated panic alarms.
Cheyenne has similar rules, with fees reaching $400. Its ordinance even recognizes animals, birds and reptiles as possible culprits behind accidentally triggered alarms.
Those penalties apply to security systems, not neighbors reporting something they genuinely believe is suspicious.
"Fortunately, this call was a false alarm," said Farkas of the Christmas light installer mix-up, "but we always encourage people to contact us if they see something suspicious."
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
