C. O. C., Inc. Ch. 02

My idea is simple, cost effective, and it works. My company is called C. O. C. Catchy name isn't it? It stands for Cutout Cops. I make life-sized, cardboard cops that look like the real thing. You see, I use actual police officers as models, pay them a fee to photograph them and to use their image, and reprint their likeness on cardboard.

I even make phony police cars. I take retired police cars, buy them for a song, and remove the engine and drive train, so that they are lighter and easier to roll. I repaint them to match the patrol cars of your community and decorate them with a couple of cardboard cutout cops, and viola, officers on duty without the coffee breaks, stops for donuts, and bad attitude. Then, I park the cardboard patrol car on your street, in front of your house, and leave it in your driveway, wherever there are criminals.

Crime and criminals will quickly go in the other direction when they spot a police car regardless if it is real of fake. It is the human nature of criminals to react reflexively and to flee the area pronto. Trust me, they can spot a police unit from a great distance and will not even come close to it to see if it is real or fake.

Once my idea catches on, once I sell my products nationwide, and once I am a multi-millionaire, I plan on taking my idea to the military. I plan on making cutout soldiers, cutout sailors, cutout airmen, and cutout marines. Also, I plan on making cutout tanks, planes, and ships. I plan on making a frigging war arsenal of cutout military icons.

What do you think? I know; I'm on to something. I figure my phony cutout arsenal will dissuade war. They'll take one look at the million cutout tanks, planes, and ships and go home. Moreover, it is a way for the military to save big bucks by buying recyclable cutout cardboard instead of having to maintain tons of rusting steel. Why spend a billion dollars on one plane when you can buy my fleet of a million cutout planes for a fraction of that amount?

Once I supply the military with my phony cutout tanks, ships, planes, and recruits, war as we know it will end. Of course, to make it effective you must pepper your phony cutout arsenal with the real thing. Only, the enemy will never know which is real and which a decoy, until they waste their time, effort, and ammunition on the phony cutout decoys.

Yeah, I can see myself winning the Nobel Prize for Peace and standing up where Al Gore stood. How better to win a war than by intimidation and without firing a single bullet and wasting a single human life?

"I'd like to thank everyone involved in the creation of my Cutout Cop company, COC, and now my Cutout Military Company, CUM, and those who are responsible for the production of products and who directly and indirectly helped me to win the Nobel Peace Prize."

Yes, I am sure that I will have my detractors making a negative comment to this story, but if you are someone driving in an unfamiliar neighborhood looking to buy drugs, pick up a prostitute, or break into a home and there on the corner is a cardboard cop and an authentic looking police car, you are not going to drive closer to investigate. You are going to keep on going. Yeah, it's that simple.

And I am not so naïve to know that my idea is not original and has not already been tried by someone else and/or is being done now. Nonetheless, it is a good idea and one that will work. Sure, criminals will laugh at it, once they discover that it is just a cardboard cutout. Yet, it will make them weary and uneasy, even when they fully know that it is not real. Moreover, once they get comfortable having the cardboard cutout sitting their innocuously in their neighborhood is when you do the old switcheroo. You park a real police car where the decoy had been sitting for a week. Bait and switch will jail the bitch.

Besides, much of the crime is from criminals coming into your unfamiliar neighborhood from their familiar neighborhood. Now, if there is a decoy police car parked at the corner, on your street, in front of your house or in your driveway, they are not going to take the risk to determine if it is real or not. They will drive to a street where there are no police cars real or otherwise.

Moreover, there are all kinds of possibilities with this kind of business. I can make cardboard cutouts of people to sit in your car, so that you can drive in the carpool lane. I can make cardboard cutouts of you, your wife, and your kids and have them sit around the house when you are away on vacation so that burglars will think that you are home. I can even make a cardboard cutout of your car to leave parked in your driveway so that criminals will think you are home.

I can even make a cardboard cutout of you, should you ever need an alibi.

"Yes, officer, I saw him sitting there at the time when his wife was murdered. There is no way that he could have murdered her. There is no way that he could be in two places at the same time, now is there?"