I visited the police station on the following day, April 10th in order to make sure of my facts. I asked the desk officer if I could arrange for a police officer to serve a document for me. I was told that it was not something the police would do. She suggested I engage a licensed process server for the purpose. I asked if there were any circumstances in which a police officer would deliver a document to a person. She explained that the police often execute warrants, where they take along a document when they attend a place where a person is known to be located, or to search premises, but the document they carry is simply a means to show the legality of the actions they take upon locating the person. Service of documents alone, unaccompanied by other action, is not something the police would normally do.
So here are the facts, then:
1) Prior to this incident with the police, I had successfully received a letter from the Recreation Department by certified mail on April 3rd. There had been no difficulty involved in delivering it. The mailman had successfully located me, and I had cheerfully signed the receipt, as requested. There was no reason why a different method of delivery should have been chosen for this second letter, dated April 8th.
2) This second letter was not a different kind of document, insofar as it was not an item of legal process, or a warrant, or anything which required an affidavit to be signed to prove it had been delivered.
3) After this incident, on Wednesday April 14th, I received by certified mail a copy of the same letter. Yes, that's right - exactly the same letter as the one which had been delivered so theatrically by a police officer. It had been sent by certified mail, and was received successfully by me without difficulty, just like the one before it. The involvement of the police had been entirely unnecessary, after all.
Unnecessary that is, unless your purpose in duping a police officer into acting as a gold-plated mailman is to instill 'shock and awe' in the person receiving the mail. I'm awaiting the next letter from the Recreation Department with some trepidation. I expect I'll be woken up in the middle of the night by the flashing lights of a fire truck, with sirens blaring, and a fireman on the top of a ladder outside my balcony, leaning over to hand me the next notice of disbarment from the Senior Center.
How could a highly trained, seasoned and otherwise competent police officer have been hoodwinked into taking part in such a farce? Didn't he know that the whole sorry episode would be reported on the internet for the world to chuckle over? This website had been up and running for over a week by the time the incident occurred, and examples of mistakes by officials were already documented here.
It happened because the intention of the caller who contacted the police station on that day was to trick the police into cooperating, unknowingly, in a sustained and directed program of harassment of a critic of the City administration, regardless of any damage to the reputation of the police and their public esteem. This was accomplished by presenting the situation as a simple, isolated incident requiring routine police attendance, and withholding from them important background information they should have had regarding the long-term nature and seriousness of the dispute. The call was, essentially, a prank by a Recreation Department employee, directed against myself but at the expense of the police. Had the police officer known the true situation, which was that no crime had taken place, and there was no crime taking place or likely to take place, and, further, that any mis-step he might make would undoubtedly be held up to public scrutiny on a popular website, then he might have acted more circumspectly, or even preferred not to get involved at all.
Especially in view of the other, more important law enforcement challenges which were taking place on that day . . .