The power of pizza is unparalleled. It’s God’s food. It can make you perform miracles like mustering up the energy to converse with Debbie from Accounting at your company Christmas party or give you the ability to eat a whole pie even though you’re lactose intolerant. But did you even consider pizza to be strong enough to save lives?
Last week, a knife-wielding man in San Jose, California was threatening to throw himself onto the freeway from an overpass above in an obvious suicide mission.
The California Highway Patrol was then called to the scene, where a five-hour standoff ensued as police pulled out all their tricks to try to lure this man away from a certain death. They sent officers to speak with him face-to-face and trained negotiators spoke with him via a PA system, neither worked.
So their next move went something like this:
Officer 1: We should get pizza.
Officer 2: Ya bro, I’m hungry as fuck.
Officer 1: No, for that dude over there who’s about to kill himself.
Officer 2: Which one?
Officer 1: The one we’ve been talking to for five hours.
Officer 2: Oh, right. Well how we going to get it over to him? This weed has deemed me paralyzed.
[In a moment of revelation, Officer 1 and 2 look at each other]
Officer 1 & 2: ROBOTS.
No, but legit what happened, effectively.
The San Jose Police department deployed its final negotiator: Northrup Grumman Remotec Andros F6A, a robot traditionally used to dismantle bombs. The police attached a phone to the robot in an attempt to talk to the unstable man through a different medium, but thought that sending over bomb dismantling robotic device with simply a phone attached to it would be too intimidating for a man threatening to jump to his death.
So they sent the robot over carrying a pizza and programmed it to not let go of the pizza until the man picked up the phone. The robot was equipped with cameras and mics, so the police could handle the situation from there.
The man eventually succumbed to the Power of the Pie and turned himself into the Police. With a full stomach.
[H/T Vice Munchies]