File this under "Inexplicable"

So if any of you reading remember my dilemma I posted last year (oddly enough, almost a year ago today) about a strange situation I found myself in at a local mall, here's another chapter in the seamier side of urban life.

Yesterday, a group of mom friends and I gathered at a local playground for a little birthday party. There was a fancy car parked there that sort of viscerally struck everyone as “wrong” somehow. The occupant, just barely visible through the tinted black windows, never came out. For two hours, they just sat there, never opening a door or a window. Facing the kids.

Of course we all thought “pedophile” and were a little creeped but basically tried to ignore it. After a couple hours, though, I went to put something in my car (parked next to it) and noticed that I could see a woman slumped over in the front seat – head to the chest, arms splayed wide. Looking more than a little dead, to be honest.

When I told the others, one of them walked over to take a closer look through the driver's window and saw what looked like a pipe in her lap, and a bag of powder, and some kind of stove-like thing. Uh oh. So of course we thought overdose, and we called 911.

And what a horrendous experience that turned out to be. What could the 911 dispatcher be thinking? They kept my friend on the phone for almost 20 minutes and kept asking for someone to go over to the car and knock on the window, make noise, try the door, try to rouse the occupant.

Who was holding a crack pipe.
And had drugs in her system.
And who was a total stranger.
And whose car we couldn't really see into clearly.

There was no way to know for sure what kind of state she'd be in if she woke up, or what or who else might be in the car. And we had our kids with us, for pete's sake.

We did go back up to the car a few times at the dispatcher's request, including setting off my car alarm to see if we could rouse her, but finally my friend (who, bless her heart, is a tough lady and can clearly stand up for herself) put her foot down and said we all were holding babies and didn’t feel comfortable fielding any more requests and they just needed to SEND SOMEONE. NOW.

At which point the dispatcher finally seemed to come to his senses and told us to “back away from the scene” and that the police were on their way. Great advice, now that you’ve encouraged us to take our little ones right over to the scene five or six times and put everyone in harm's way.

AND -- even then we had to stick around because the dispatcher said someone had to be available to direct them to the right car when they arrived, even though we’d given them the license plate, description, and parking location. So we waited. And one of us waved the cops in.

Seriously. Is this really how these situations are supposed to be handled? This is why people hesitate to get involved when they see something like this, why people might think twice about even calling 911 to help someone they don't know. It was a fragile and scary situation and the emergency dispatcher, in my opinion, was incredibly unprofessional.

The police, to their credit, were all business. When they showed up, we watched for a few minutes from the other side of the park and then finally got out of there. The occupant was alive and even standing up by the time we left. Who knows what the outcome was. It wasn’t immediately clear if she was going to be arrested or not.

But I really wish I knew where to direct a complaint or inquiry about this. Perhaps the dispatchers of this town need a little more training in what is and isn't the job of a bystander vs. the police. A lot of bad things could have ensued from an innocent bystander's being told to go meddle in a potential drug bust. Thank goodness none of that came to pass.

I’m thinking our next outing is probably going to be indoors.