Watch ‘Mr. Squirrel’ attempt this nutty break-in at an Illinois police department
Do they make handcuffs that tiny?
A squirrel attempted to break into a suburban Chicago police department in broad daylight last week — and people are still laughing.
The video of two officers trying to shoo the furry scofflaw from the building’s outer lobby has been viewed more than 800,000 times on the police department’s Facebook page.
“In 2019 we’re upping our training game. This video is a test of our officer’s ability to handle disorderly subjects who come in to the police department,” the department wrote. “We were inspired by Rocky chasing a chicken, because ‘if you can catch a chicken, you can catch greased lightning!’ - right?
”If you can handle a squirrel, you can handle, well, we don’t know, that’s why we’re training!”
According to the Chicago Tribune, dispatcher Holly Neville shot the video.
Presumably, that’s her voice from off-camera yelling, “Oh my god, wait! He’s going to come at me,” when we first catch sight of “Mr. Squirrel” standing in the outer lobby.
The Tribune identified the two officers in the video as Paul Prather and Ryan Pardue. Neville yells at Prather to close one the lobby’s heavy automatic doors to keep the squirrel from getting all the way in.
The tree rodent, thus trapped in the small vestibule, proceeds to put on quite a show, running “up and down the doors” like a squirrel trapped inside a lobby.
At one point, when it looked like the squirrel might successfully dash into the lobby, Prather made a run for it. At the beginning of the video he was standing safely on a chair.
“The officer isn’t standing on the chair because he was scared, BTW,” the department wrote on Facebook. “It’s a police ‘tactical approach’....”
The video has attracted more than 1,000 comments, most from people LOLing.
“Some days you just need a good laugh....thanks for sharing this, and for not being afraid to laugh at yourself,” wrote one woman.
One Facebook commenter suggested that the cops should have called the fire department. “They will save you guys,” he wrote.
“Sure they will, after they break the windows, cut a hole in the roof and finally use a fan to blow the squirrel out!” the police department responded.
“It’s a positive police-animal event that we could always use now and then,” the department’s public affairs officer, Patrick Polidori, told the Tribune.
No charges were filed.
“Note, Mr. Squirrel made it out just fine and was not injured. Our officers on the other hand, they are seeking counseling,” the department wrote.