Officers were originally trying to get the critter down from a channel marker.
This mischievous raccoon shouldn’t have been on the channel marker, and it definitely shouldn’t have tried to escape in the sea.
Officer Ron Dixon, who is with the Marine Division of the Sarasota Police Department, said the rescue-slash-capture of the raccoon ended up being his most difficult arrest of the day.
“I’ve been in plenty of foot pursuits, but this was a first for me with a raccoon in the water,” Dixon told InsideEdition.com.
He explained that they were originally responding to an injured turtle when they noticed a raccoon hanging out on the channel marker.
“He was up there just sort of chilling out,” Dixon said.
Birds and seagulls are often spotted perching on the channel marker, but they are fairly easy to chase away, Dixon said. The raccoon, however, proved a little harder to get. Even though it seemed he was ready to be brought down, he ended up putting up a fight and eventually jumped into the sea to evade arrest.
After swimming between police boats, the critter turned itself in.
“We were able to after many failed attempts to reach out and grab him,” Dixon said. “I stopped the boat and he actually climbed onto the dive platform of my boat.”
Officers put the rascal into a cooler until they arrived to the mangroves, where they opened the lid and let the raccoon flee to safety.
“You never know what the water is going to bring,” Dixon said. “I love working on the water and Sarasota is a great place to work, but you just come across so many different things and this is one of them so it's awesome.”
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