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Freeway Shootings: The Newsmedia Cry PANIC*
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5052 Reads
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 UPDATE BELOW
The grim joke going around in '92 was that L.A. had a new type of seasonal weather: riot season was added to earthquake, wildfire and mudslide seasons.
Now we can add a fifth: freeway gunfire season. After seven shootings including a windshield-buster on the 14 in Santa Clarita just now, and four deaths in two months, the city's newsmedia are putting the rest of us through the same paroxysms of paranoia and dread that L.A. endured in the late '80s.
Channel 4 has a helpful timeline/slideshow. KCAL9 lets you download an enlarged version of its scary handgun graphic so you can - I don't know - use it as a desktop image? It's only a matter of time before Leno breaks out the jokes ...
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With no more Scott Peterson to kick around, the Pope dead and buried and the runaway bride already slunk back home to her family, the newsmedia need something else about which to obsess so as to distract us from stories with huge local impact that are just too difficult for most local news outlets to cover, e.g. the economy, the Iraq War and the increasingly unstable position in which we find ourselves while Bush and Kim Jong Il wave their nukes at each other.
The Times, ever eager to put things in perspective (while dutifully joining in the "fear-on-the-freeways" chorus), hustled up a sociologist to point out the statistics that put the lie to the screaming headlines, radio bulletins and lurid Chyrons on the city's overly coiffed newscasts.Sociologist Joel Best, who studied reports of the freeway violence in 1987, said such incidents are deeply frightening, although the likelihood of dying from freeway violence is far less than the chance of being killed in a traffic accident.
"You sort of assume you're going to get through the day and not be struck by lightning and you're going to get through the day without having someone you don't know shooting you for no reason," said Best.
Best, however, cautioned that such "crime waves" often represent a spike in media coverage of certain types of incidents rather than a true trend.
Indeed, so far this year, 11 freeway shootings have been reported in which a person or vehicle was hit by gunfire within Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department said. That is two fewer than over the same time period a year ago.
In 2004, 36 freeway-related shootings were reported within Los Angeles, and one resulted in a death. In 2003, four people were killed and 46 incidents reported. (The CHP does not have current statistics on the number of freeway shootings.) Authorities believe that the most recent shootings are unrelated. I heard on NPR this evening, there's even a bogus email meme going around saying that certain Latino shooters have orders to kill 400 black men in Los Angeles in X amount of time.
Listen, we're human. We need pat explanations for fractal patterns of chaos. Sometimes, half a dozen people take it into their heads in a two-month period to shoot someone else on the freeway. And for that matter, sometimes, coroners around the planet in a single 2-week period welcome the likes of Pope John Paul II, Terri Schiavo, Johnnie L. Cochran and Frank Purdue.
I don't mean to make light of anyone's death or shattered nerves. The shootings are horrible, and we can all hope fervently that the CHP helps nail the evildoers responsible ASAP.
But as for a sane, practical response that we should all take during rush hour? Sh!t happens. What can you do?
- Worry about it the way you're worrying about West Nile virus - (oh, you forgot about that one? Mosquito season's in full swing, but are you running about emptying standing pools of water from around your home? No, you're probably ignoring it, like I am.)
- Wear Kevlar - not much good against a head or shoulder shot, which is pretty much all a shooter would see by pulling alongside you.
- Pack heat of your own - and risk injuring or killing someone else, or yourself, not to mention getting busted with your gun, detained and grilled for 12 hours as a potential freeway-shooting suspect.
- Buy a Target bumper sticker and paste a shooting-range silhouette in your rear window and throw random gang signs at anything with smoked glass, dubs and a kickin' subwoofer.
- Ignore the whole thing. You're one of four million people in this city. What are the odds?
- Keep your eyes open: The tip line is 1-877-LAWFULL (1-877-529-3855).
I'm choosing the last two - and the first. How worried are you?
UPDATE: LAObserved points out this fatuous New York Times report: These shootings change the very idea of the freeway. I was surprised to find, after a few weeks here, what a release I feel when I accelerate down the on-ramp and merge with the flow of traffic. I've been struck by the attentiveness and skill of the drivers around me, by the fact that nearly everyone signals a change of lane and tries to keep a reasonable distance between vehicles. In three months of freeway driving here, I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard a horn sounded in anger. And now I know why.
If nothing else, these good driving manners express the centrality of the freeway system in the consciousness of Southern California. I've begun to think of those lanes as a giant public square spreading all across the city, a square where most people try to contribute their mite of civility in hopes of keeping the overall experience as tolerable as possible. But there's another way to look at it. The civility on display may reflect nothing more than the profound hostility lying just below the surface.
As a friend from Fullerton puts it, you drive politely, without challenging other drivers even implicitly, because "they're packing." No one honks because no one wants a fight. People use their turn signals to say, as innocently as possible: "Changing lanes now! Not cutting in! No disrespect intended!" Huh? Your paranoid fantasy leads you to using turn signals as a form of flinching?
Man, I had no idea I lived somewhere so inherently dangerous. Here I thought L.A. drivers were simply a more courteous freeway culture (than, say Boston, where people pass you at 80 on the right shoulder and cut you off at every turn) because driving boorishly in this city's thick traffic could plunge you into a 12-car pileup.
Good thing the New York Times straightened me out.
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| Posted by: mack_reed on Monday, May 02, 2005 - 11:27 PM
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