West Salem man ties up dispatch for over 3 hours with 30 harrassing calls

Incident stems from his harassing a woman with 56 calls

He spent over five hours harassing a woman and police on the telephone one night over the weekend. 

First, according to a police report, Mike Rude harassed an unnamed woman with 56 phone calls over a two-hour span of time.

She called police, who then called Rude, a 38-year-old West Salem, Wis., man, to inform him he was being issued a citation.

Rude didn’t like hearing that and called the La Crosse County Emergency Dispatch Center to let them know.

He called dispatch over 30 times, spanning 3 hours, 20 minutes of call time, harassing various officers. He even, on two different occasions, played a pair of ballads from the band Chicago – “You’re the inspiration” and “I don’t want to live without your love.”

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Wasting valuable resources, police went to Rude’s home in West Salem, but he didn’t answer his door, instead standing in his picture window screaming obscenities while showing police a certain finger. That forced police to obtain a search warrant.

Once in hand, police went back to Rude’s home, but he still wouldn’t let them in, ordering them to show him the search warrant through one of his security cameras outside.

Police then forced their way into Rude’s garage, and he gave himself up with little incident. Still, unable to get into Rude’s house, police found a spare key in the garage – instead of breaking through the house door – and found nothing of consequence, except for a couple empty bottles of wine.

Once in the patrol vehicle, Rude, once again, began screaming obscenities, while ramming his head against the plexiglass barrier. An officer had to hold his head for the duration of the ride back to the station. Rude went from screaming at police to crying as he was booked. He was charged with disorderly by phone ($150), harassment ($150) and bail jumping ($1,000).