Running shooting thread 2023

Ohh what a beautiful morning....

Ohh what a beautiful....

Hey wait, there's apparently an armed standoff going on across the street 50 yards from where I sit.

Probably 25 cop cars blockading the streets in all directions. Chopper overhead. A couple dozen cops in modified SWAT gear.

One shirtless dude is sitting on the porch of a house catty-corner across the street, playing guitar badly and attempting off tune karaoke versions of the Sex Pistols' most obscene hits at full hollering volume. Cops don't seem really inclined to do anything.

My coffee is ready. But I am gonna move away from the picture window.

 

Is it catty-corner or kitty-corner?

 

Caddy-Corner, Kitty-Corner or Catty-Corner.

Diagonally across the way.

Wasn't much going on for about 15 minutes but the copter just circled the block at about 200 feet altitude, definitely giving us an Apocalypse Now feeling for the morning. The cop car count is up -- probably 50.

 

I haven't been paying much attention the past half hour or so. Nothing dramatic has happened but things seem to be winding down.

The shirtless guitar dude is gone and the cop car squadron is dwindling away to about a dozen. They still have the three access streets blocked off. Doesn't sound like the choppers are around anymore either.

Hopefully everybody just decided to go home. My brother was gonna come over to grill burgers later today, it'd be nice if our cookout wasn't taking place within stray-bullet territory of an armed standoff.

 

Couple of months ago there was a standoff in my mother-in-law's neighborhood and it turned ugly. Guy took a hostage and spent most of the morning shooting at the cops in one of the most suburban of suburban neighborhoods you'll find around here. One cop was wounded and another was killed when they finally breached the house. The suspect was also killed.

During the standoff, the cops used a small bulldozer with a bulletproof shield to tear the house apart. They knocked out one or two walls so that the suspect would have less cover and they could hopefully see what he was doing. The house looked like a tornado had hit it.
Once it was over, we couldn't help but wonder who was responsible for paying for that damage? It wasn't the suspect's house. He was a psycho ex-boyfriend who went there at 2 a.m. to do harm to a woman. And in any event, he was dead. It wasn't clear if the house was a rental or if the woman owned it. I doubt the police department would pay for that, or be liable for it, since they could claim it was a necessary part of a police operation. Would insurance cover something like that? Or is the homeowner, whoever it is, shit out of luck?

 

Was the dude white, cause I don’t see a Black man surviving an encounter with 50 cops

 

Yeah just your typical 30-40ish white trailer trash dude who wanders around without a shirt at 9-10 am Sunday morning. I didn't recognize him as a regular resident but I don't really keep tabs on who comes and goes across the street.


Now down to four or six cop cars scattered a couple blocks away. No sirens cane screaming in or out. Hopefully it's all over.

 

When I see news coverage of a crime, I cannot get the number of police who show up. There are a couple groups of plainclothes pointing around and there are another few groups of uniformed officers holding up their pants, looking bored.

 

I'll read about it in the Starrtown Daily Screech in five or six days.

 

I've only used "catty-cornered" and mostly to describe where the ethanol-free gas is sold in relation to where the Aldi is located in a neighboring town.

 

As the afternoon wore on, apparently things did just dwindle away. By about dinnertime the last cop cars quietly pulled out and everything was all over.
Nothing on any news outlet I can find. I guess I'll have to wait a day or so before the wilder rumors spread across NextDoor, the backyard fence of the 21st Century.

if I were still in the news biz, I'd put on my little reporter hat, grab an old reporters notebook, walk across the street, ask a few questions, and try to pick up $50 (or maybe $20) to whip up a stringer story.

But I happen to know that the Starrville Daily Screech goes to bed at 4:30 pm, ironclad, on Sunday afternoons (they've run mewling "notes from the publisher" rationalizing why they can't get all (or even many) of the 1:00 pm Sunday NFL games into the Monday paper.

Nobody died, I don't think, and in the end this was probably just some drunk fucker running off at the mouth, but hey, they dispatched 50 cop cars (or more), a couple of the SWAT mobile command trailers, at least two or three EMT vehicles, at least one police helicopter was buzzing the area pretty closely for an hour or so, they had drones buzzing around, and even if they sent, maybe, 75 percent of the personnel home after an hour, a dozen or so of them stayed on scene for 3-4 hours.

Bottom line is this little fandango will cost somebody, undoubtedly the taxpayers, a little chunk of money which frankly won't be little at all once the invoices start rolling in -- my totally wild ass guess is the tab will easily run into the six figures, I'd futher wild ass guess into the middle six figures. Once those helicopters go up into the air the meter goes ding ding ding in a hurry.

So yeah, I suspect there's a significant public interest in finding out WTF was really going on.

 

Good luck in Michigan, where the cops all give the 45º salute and say BIG GUILE!