Taiho Shichauzo! Full Throttle Episode 05
逮捕しちゃうぞ フルスロットル Episode 05

SPOILER Summary:

As the Bokuto force is warned to be on the lookout for a vehicle break-in thief, a woman drives her car into a local parking lot and leaves a baby in the back seat as she yacks on cell phone and goes to do some shopping. An older man enters the parking lot and expertly breaks into the vehicles, stealing money, then re-locking the vehicles. He notices the baby in the back of the car but decides to ignore it. Completing his rounds, he stops at a nearby eating establishment but seeing a newspaper article on a rash of incidents of babies being left in cars, he decides to return to the parking lot and rescue the baby from the back of the hot car.

After some reports of break-ins at the parking lot, Natsumi and Miyuki arrive to investigate. The mother shows up and is shocked to see her baby gone. The mother is taken to the station where Inspector Tokuno grills her on leaving her baby in the back of a car in the heat. She gets angry at him and the police and even threatens to sue them, feeling she did nothing wrong. This leads Miyuki to slap the woman, who then falls silent.

For his part, the thief takes care of the baby, but questions why he’s doing this. So he decides he’ll drop the baby off at a hospital. However, a crowd of people wanting to see the baby make him flee the scene. He then passes the Bokuto station but won’t drop it there. He’s spotted by Nakajima-kun and the thief thinks the jig is up. However, Nakajima only wants to tell him about the leaking backpack (where the kid has obviously peed). He then tries to return the baby to the parking lot, but is spotted and has to flee again. Natsumi and Miyuki give chase and Natsumi breaks out the tiny bike. They end up saving the baby and capturing the thief. They have him return the baby to its mother in exchange for leniency.

The episode ends with Kacho and Tokuno playing a game of Go.

Thoughts:

Considering some recent cases where a child was left to die in the back of a car while some worthless mother did something else, this was a tad hard for me to watch but I loved Miyuki slapping the mother. I’ve never understood how a mother could forget her baby. In the case of this episode, it was worse in that the mother left the baby on purpose because it would be in the way of her shopping and yacking on the phone. Ugh.