Rejected titles for this post include: Welcome to the Gun Show; Decaf Mocha Rifle Latte; No Foam, No Whip; and others...
If you ever watched 24, you know that Jack Bauer was always setting up perimeters. I personally loved it when he barked at the young CTU agents that they needed to set up a perimeter and wait for his orders. It was his way of cordoning off an area as a danger zone (cue the Kenny Loggins). But did you ever wonder what it felt like to be inside the perimeter? Well, welcome to the gun show.
All I wanted was a change of scenery and a latte on a Sunday morning. And I ended up inside the perimeter, as our friendly neighborhood Starbucks was nearly surrounded by "black-and-whites" (slang for police cars, if "Law & Order" and every other crime procedural on TV is to be believed). The cars pulled up to the curb on Robertson, just north of Pico, and I watched (along with about 25 other caffeinated customers) as the cops got out, dashed around the sides of the car to the trunk, pulled out rifles or shotguns or some other artillery, donned Kevlar vests and crouched, ready for their orders.
The two baristas, two Israeli students who had been sitting at the same table with me, and I ran to the back of the store, away from the windows that cover the entire corner arc of Pico to Robertson. Everyone else seemed to think it was a better idea to run TOWARD the windows. You know, to see what's happening, but also to potentially see how bulletproof the glass is. I tweeted at the back of the store and updated my Facebook status:
Guns in pico robertson in daylight; am safe inside starbucks, but the cops keep pulling up and unloading shotguns. I am guessing zombies.
I give myself points for using a semi-colon and keeping my sense of humor, but deduct points for not capping "Starbucks" or "Pico-Robertson." Also, if I'd had time to self-edit, I would have gone with "My guess? Zombies."
The baristas locked us in, as much to keep us safe from any potential gunfire as to keep out the hot-coffee-seeking people who were still steadily streaming into the store as if there weren't cops with guns drawn surrounding us. But there was something very claustrophobic about being locked inside a Starbucks. Eventually the baristas realized they couldn't lock us in - that it was a smarter idea to close the store entirely until the situation had subsided. So that's what they did - basically telling us to leave.
I walked out the side door with about five other bewildered people. We squinted at the sunlight and tried to figure out where we could go, because we couldn't go home and we couldn't stay here. I was on foot, so I hoofed it north, quickly, as a helicopter hovered overhead like a giant mosquito that I wouldn't try to swat.
But as I left the corner, I tweeted, which became the central piece of information in a report on LAist, to date the only publication online to mention it (mostly because the editor follows me on Twitter). I walked fast in the opposite direction - stopping for frozen yogurt at Toppings and then continuing north and east to the Old Navy at Beverly and La Cienega. So much for journalistic instincts about getting the story and finding out what happened. Christiane Amanpour...your job is safe. I fled the scene - when the going got tough, the tough went shopping.
As I continued to check in via social media, I learned different pieces of information - unverified, of course. It might have been a break-in gone bad; the perp might have been heavily armed; there might have been a hostage situation. All "might," because no one had any real information - it was all hearsay.
Several days later, there's still no report of it in any official news medium. It's almost like the whole thing was a dream. Some of my friends are still convinced it was a film - I maintain that you can't do that to the population of a neighborhood on a Sunday unless you warn them: posting signs, specifically getting permission from local business owners, etc. Los Angeles must have rules about such things.
Another disturbing moment: apparently Entertainment Weekly writer Michael Ausiello (@michaelausiello on Twitter) was across the street from me and we didn't get a chance to schmooze about how jealous I am of his work for EW.
But I found myself shaking my head in wonder - I lived in New York for a decade, and have been to Israel myriad times (I'm convinced that the US State Department has the warning against visiting Israel laminated and hanging on a wall). I've walked through some sketchy neighborhoods at night, worked on the edge of Harlem, and been on the NYC subways during hours when no one should be awake, let alone underground. But it turned out that the least safe place to be was at the busiest intersection in my largely Jewish neighborhood, around 12:15 pm on a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon. The words "who knew?" don't even begin to cover it.
But I guess that's the human variable at work - it's not really the neighborhood, and not inherently the night time that's dangerous. A felon can just as easily leave his or her "bad neighborhood" and perpetrate crimes elsewhere, during the day, in broad daylight. Or as one of our IT people used to say at MTV Networks, "there's only one problem with computers: they're made by humans."
You can read my briefly tweeted reports (yes, that means me as human, using smartphone as computer, and then being the sole source of information from the scene) here. Were you there? Do you know what happened? Feel free to share your reports.
