Split-Second

Hot summer night.  I was coming back from a walk through the darkened streets of my neighborhood when I stopped to water the plants on my patio.  Out of the darkness, four or five LAPD officers came down the street on foot, shining flashlights into backyards, side yards, driveways, windows, cars.  One hopped the fence across the street and I could see his flashlight beam slinging around in the tree-shadowed darkness.  Several beams lit me up and in the blinding glare I heard a man’s voice:  “Hey, did you see anybody come walking this way?”  I told him no.  “Well if you see a guy, maybe five-eight, 140 pounds, white with scraggy blond hair, dial 911, will you?”

The cop did not wait for an answer.  The group dematerialized back into the shadows, moving off down the street and soon disappearing without a trace.  Then, as I finished the watering and turned off the hose, a guy, white, five-eight, 140 pounds with scraggy hair rounded the corner and calmly walked down the street in the direction the cops went.  If he kept going, he was sure to catch up with them.  Should I call 911?  Should I get involved?

I started walking after him.  I really had no plan.  I would follow the guy who was following the cops and see what would happen.  Stupid on my part.  The guy walked faster and began to pull ahead of me.  I’d see him pass through a puddle of light from the street lamps, then disappear into the darkness only to emerge again in the next puddle.  I picked up the pace and began a light jog.  I took out my cell phone and dialed 911.

“911 emergency.”

“Yeah, the guy you’re chasing, he’s heading east bound from the boulevard.”

The operator quizzed me about cross streets, what the guy was wearing, if I saw any officers in the vicinity. “Are you following him, sir?” she wanted to know.

“Yes, yes I am, but he is getting away.”

You need to stay back,” she cautioned.  Truer words and all that, but I kept increasing my speed.

I watched the guy pass through a lit area and then into the darkness beyond.  He did not re-emerge.

From all around the neighborhood, I heard revved engines and screeching tires.  Police cars careened out of the darkness.  One slid to the curb and I pointed down the street where I last saw the suspect.  The cops did not even say anything to me but sped away toward where I was pointing.  I could see there was a driveway there and a house, but I did not think the guy went inside.  He had to be somewhere in that area hiding.  And almost as soon as I had the thought, I saw a figure explode out of the bushes and sprint down the street.  One of the cops ran after him while the other jumped back into his cruiser and accelerated after his partner.  The night came alive with sirens and chaos.  Police cars from every direction.  Officers running.  One police vehicle, lights and sirens blazing, came down the street with two officers inside and two sitting on the trunk lid with one holding a shotgun.

My wife caught up with me at this point and told me to get back to our house before I got hurt.  We had turned to go back when a police car rounded the corner and nearly clipped us.  We jumped over the curb onto the sidewalk to avoid the vehicle.  I realized I was breathing heavily and needed a moment to recover.  A police car pulled to the curb across the street from us and we heard the broadcast.  The units up the street had the suspect in custody, but now, the other officers were to fan out and look for the gun and the drugs he threw into the bushes as he was being chased.  The guy had a gun??!!!  What was I thinking??!!

We made a beeline back to our apartment and locked the door.  I suddenly was not so keen on being a witness to an armed suspect running through our neighborhood.

I was helping a student this week with her paper on the Los Angeles Police Department’s use of force and officer involved shooting policies.  Specifically, she was analyzing how the department’s incidents have been impacted by the wearing of body cameras.  The LAPD now releases carefully edited incidents where officers used deadly force or were subjected to assaults requiring a lethal, or a non-lethal response in the field.  We watched in spellbound, rapt attention as we literally went on calls with the officers in the field and saw exactly what they were experiencing and the confusion and chaos that they often walked into.

One incident was catalogued as NRF046-18, and occurred when officers began chasing a domestic violence suspect who had already shot his grandmother seven times and wounded his girlfriend.  The suspect, Gene Evins Atkins, led police on a high speed chase from south central Los Angeles to Silver Lake where he crashed into a light pole outside a Trader Joe’s Market.  He ran from his vehicle while firing at pursuing officers, who returned fire.  He went inside the market, took hostages, and engaged in a standoff with police.  During the shootout, a police officer’s bullet struck and killed the manager of the Trader Joe’s.  Eventually, Atkins was taken into custody and the hostages were released. (View the video below)

What becomes apparent immediately when we watched it was that the cops were crazy for firing at the suspect on a crowded street with other cars, pedestrians, shoppers, and people in nearby businesses.  It is a miracle no one else was hit.  The suspect needed to be stopped, and if the officers did not fire their weapons, Atkins would have continued to fire his.  But what makes these videos so valuable is that they demonstrate how officers often have to make split-second decisions that involve life and death.  We sat in my office watching and analyzing the cops' and the suspect’s actions for over an hour.  It is very easy, in retrospect with plenty of time, to say this or that should not have happened.  When officers have only seconds to decide, it is sheer luck that things go well, and most of the time, they don’t, leading people to be injured or killed.

We hear the cliches:  the camera never lies.  Truth is subjective.  Each witness has a slightly different, or sometimes radically different view of an incident.  When watching a number of these videos, it is interesting how there is, of course, a truth about what happened.  However, the camera does not always catch the entire incident, even when it is pointed right at the action.  In several of these videos, the crime is just out of sight, or the perp is not in frame or the film is jerky and blurry.  In the Trader Joe’s incident, the camera from the officer who was driving captures the steering wheel through most of the chase, although we can hear the dialogue between the two officers and the radio traffic.

Then, what must also be counted in, is the adrenaline.  Life and death, bullets flying, cars, people—sheer panic and cacophony.  Can one be trained to shut all of that out and operate in a way that results in a positive outcome?  There are too many variables, too many outcomes.  One trains, but then there is the wildcard that must be taken into account.  The unpredictability of human behavior, especially in the flight or fight moment.

On television and in film, we see things unfold in violence that is cinematic and, maybe not during the incident itself, but in its outcome, clear.  The bad guys are bad and the good guys are good.  When people are shot, they drop.  Or worse, if people are shot, they are shot repeatedly and keep running and running and running.  In real life, on these videos, some people get shot and seem to have little reaction.  Very few drop dead unless they are hit in the head.  Even if someone takes a bullet to the heart, he or she can keep going and still be dangerous.  My father used to tell me that a dying rattlesnake is sometimes more dangerous than a live one.  Why?  Because a live one wants to avoid humans and get away; a dying snake has reflexes and nothing to lose.  If the snake is going down, he will take as many of these human creatures as he can with him.

In the street, the cops do not know who is good or who is bad at a scene.  When those officers nearly ran us down, my first thought was, they do not know if I am the suspect or is he hiding in the dark waiting to pick them off.  In short, it is easy to quarterback the situation on film with plenty of time for analysis; it is quite another thing to enter a situation where literally everyone may be an enemy.  This is why officers who confront shooters in crowded schools and malls do an incredible job:  they must save people and eliminate the shooter without knowing, exactly, who is who.  If they kill the right guy, we cheer them on and hail them as heroes.  If they accidentally kill the wrong people, or, god forbid, hesitate, we excoriate them, maybe even prosecute them for their decisions made under extreme duress and in combat situations.  Policing an American city is no different these days from being in combat—weapons, tactics, ammunition, friendlies and enemies—it is the same.  So here in an urban city in 21^st century America, we must prepare for urban warfare.  That is not a comfortable thought.

Earlier this year, the story broke in our local press about the military and Homeland Security conducting drills in downtown Los Angeles to prepare for such urban warfare.  Helicopters would sweep over the downtown area and soldiers would repel from the aircraft down to the tops of buildings.  It is not an understatement to say I was terrified and saw only the malevolence and the threat in this “simulated action.”  What was my country preparing to do to its citizens?

I was frightened and disturbed but conflicted as well.  If my loved ones were at school, or the mall, or taking a walk in their neighborhood, I would want them to be protected.  I would want officers to confront the danger within seconds.  Therein lies the problem:  we can give police officers tanks and AR-15s, we can scan people and thoroughly search them at sporting events and airports; I would want them to be safe, even if that meant locking them up in a secure area or depriving them of their civil liberties guaranteed by the Constitution, but it is never that simple.  It is never that clear.  It is never, in short, safe.  It all boils down to a split-second decision—pull the trigger, don’t pull the trigger.  Life and death.  All in a moment.

Waiting For Elysium

Photo by Francine Orr / Los Angeles Times

To drive the streets of Echo Park or along the 101 Freeway or shop along the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica is to enter the realm of the ghosts, the real-life zombies of Los Angeles.  They gather here because the weather is right for sleeping rough and anyways, there are no points farther west than the pier at Santa Monica.  It is the end of the line where all the movie magic falls off the continent into the sea.  No one notices the irony of a human being with little in this world to comfort him camped out in a dirty, torn and frayed tent, a slop bucket and some tarps nearby, all within shouting distance of where La La Land was filmed, that mythical, colorful tribute to Hollywood where a rising star simply must hold fast to her dreams and it will all turn out okay.  These tent camps are our Hoovervilles, the historical harbingers of the Great Depression.

According to Mayor Eric Garcetti in his Open Letter to Angelenos About Homelessness, there are 129,972 people living on the streets statewide.  In Los Angeles city proper and L.A. County the number stands at 49,521.  Those numbers seem low to me.  There are encampments under nearly every freeway overpass, in vacant lots, in parks, and most dangerously, in flood control channels and the Sepulveda Basin.  The numbers are a double-digit increase over last year, that much is certain, and the numbers are confirmed by Garcetti himself in his letter.

These poor people, simply by trying to survive, demonstrate the consequences of the homeless problem in Los Angeles.  Last month, a fire broke out in the Sepulveda Basin that forced the people camped there to abandon belongings and flee the flames.  Residences and businesses were threatened.

In December of 2017, a camp cooking fire ignited a blaze that burned uncomfortably close to homes, museums, businesses and schools, including the college where I teach which had to be evacuated even though the flames were burning away from campus.  Lessons from previous fires have taught us not to take wind direction for granted since Santa Ana winds can turn a fire around in an instant.

Vermin infestation, physical illnesses like measles and rabies, and mental illnesses abound; quality health care, another human right like shelter, is spotty at best for these souls tormented with demons left over from war, traumas and abuse.  The problem is clearly growing and all of us are responsible to do something about it.

Mayor Garcetti is trying.  Over the last year, he says, 21,000 homeless were provided housing across the county.  The current city budget allocates $460 million for measures to help people find transitional shelter leading, we hope, to permanent housing.  But rents are sky high here, and no one seems to want a homeless housing unit in their neighborhood.  Just ask the folks in Koreatown and Sherman Oaks.  Both communities have been vigorously debating plans for affordable housing with residents not wanting to encourage the blight and crime that might accompany the homeless as they relocate to their neighborhoods.

Voters across the city approved Proposition HHH in 2016, which provides funding for supportive housing for those who are homeless or at risk for homelessness.  This has led to 109 homeless housing developments promising 7,400 new units that will be available for occupancy.  This is on top of the 16,525 units created in 2018.  But Garcetti says that people are becoming homeless faster than housing can be provided.

Why is this happening?  Here in Los Angeles, there is a housing shortage, rampant income inequality and a sky-rocketing poverty level.  Even those earning wages are struggling with the cost of rent, utilities, medical care and food.  L.A. is becoming a tough, or even near impossible city to live in and raise a family.  Young people are burdened with exploding student loan debt and the economy is rocky at best, and as we heard this week, we may be headed for a recession right around the time of the next presidential election.

Garcetti’s solution, while he pushes for more affordable housing, is to try to help people living on the streets with more portable showers, bathrooms, and storage units.  He also promises sanitation teams that will go in and clean up the mess of so many people living without facilities in our streets and alleys.  However, the tensions rise when LAPD and other city personnel confiscate carts and belongings of people and dispose of them.  If someone is arrested for a crime, even something as non-threatening as simple vagrancy, he or she often loses all possessions.  Tents and blankets and food—all of it is transported to the landfill while the homeless person is taken off to jail or for medical treatment.  Many times, those life supporting possessions took months to accumulate from patient foraging in dumpsters and trash heaps across the city.  Several of the missions and support groups on Skid Row, like the Catholic Worker, offer their clients storage areas for carts and belongings while they wash up, eat a good meal, and line up for assistance.

Garcetti is marshaling funding to address the problem.  Sacramento sent $86 million for an emergency fund last year.  California also contributed $81 million to the city and county effort to assist people with getting off the street and into safe housing.  But a lot of this crisis falls on Los Angeles residents.  It is far too easy to look right through these people as we walk in our neighborhoods and shopping malls.  It is devastating human misery hiding in plain sight.  Once these units are built, we must welcome them in our neighborhoods.  This is a moral and ethical crisis that cannot be hidden away behind some Hollywood façade.  It is here and now and real, and human beings are suffering.  It is on us to do something about it.

Photo by Frederic J. Brown / AFP/Getty Images

Stillness

Deer photographed from my car (August, 2019)

Often in these last days of summer, the mist makes its way up the canyon from Santa Monica Bay and swirls around the Spanish Colonial architecture of the college where I work.  On these days of meetings, working with students, organizing lists and course syllabi, I try to get in at least two or three walks around campus to keep the blood flowing.

The thing about Los Angeles is that you are never more than an hour from every kind of geographic environment:  oceans, lakes, a river, flood plains; mountains, deserts, and several valleys.  On the steps of the chapel on campus, I can see mountains, the flats of Santa Monica, and the bay itself stretching out to Catalina Island on a clear morning.

Quite often, especially in the monastic summers when the campus is mostly in repose while summer session is being held downtown at our other campus, the lawns and walkways become the province of nature:  deer, coyotes, squirrels, sparrows, red-tailed hawks, owls and butterflies.  Occasionally, during the fall and spring semesters, we see wildlife in the quieter corners of the campus.  I have felt a particular kinship with the deer.  It is ironic that I used to accompany my father on his quest to shoot one every fall Saturday morning of my childhood.

A typical encounter goes like this:  I feel the fatigue of looking at paper after paper from my writing students.  Or, I have a challenging problem in research or writing that I must work out in my head.  I excuse myself from the office and go out and begin a trek around one of the walking paths that crisscross the campus.  A spot I like overlooks a deep canyon that flows south passed the Getty Center.  Red-tailed hawks ride thermals all the way up the canyon, searching for field mice and other small prey.  It is necessary to stand for a moment, close my eyes, and breathe deeply.  When I open them, I allow my vision and awareness to lock in on the canyon choked with eucalyptus, sage, yucca, and scrub oak.  Only then do I become aware of an otherness, a presence, and inevitably, the deer will materialize out of nowhere, grazing lightly while watching me.  I do not move, and they relax and go about their business.  I watch them, their movements, their patterns.  Usually, I see females and young ones; rarely do I catch a glimpse of the more cautious males, or bucks.  Sometimes, their antlers are in velvet, meaning they have not hardened yet and can be tender if the deer bumps into something or tries to fight another animal.

These deer seem to exist in a parallel universe to ours.  I have seen them gently grazing while students or cars pass within feet of them.  Only occasionally do they spook and lope away with a speed that is breath-taking.  Once I saw one sprint back and forth repeatedly across a rectangular patch of grass, relishing freedom like a condemned man.  I’ve seen them bedded down in the dense brush.  They do their thing and the human beings inhabiting their space do theirs.

I drink in the calm, measured life of grazing the hillside.  I feel the tension slip away as it does in deep meditation.  Feet away from each other, we human beings, facing tests and course work and rushing to class, exist parallel to the deer who take their time meandering across the canyon.  Two universes, two speeds, both unique.

So daily, I seek out this parallel dimension alongside the academic human reality.  I connect with nature—the deer—and allow my human cares to dissipate.  When I am driving onto or off of campus and I see a deer or two or three, I’ll stop and watch them.  Often, they have come right up to the car and walked so close I could have touched them.  I don’t.  I think that would disrupt the transparent membrane between our reality and theirs.  I just watch, and they watch me.

Once, while driving onto campus one early morning, I saw two coyotes in an open meadow, circling around, warily staring at me, baring teeth even though I did not even get out of my car.  This is strange behavior for coyotes except when they are cornered.  Normally, they run for cover and do not like to be out in the open.  If they are stalking something, they attack and carry the unfortunate prey away to the underbrush to strip flesh and gnaw on the bones.  But these two stared at me defiantly, and kept circling around.  I waited, holding my breath, and watched them from the safety of my car.  One, feeling I was not a threat, went down into the tall grass to pull and rip at something while the other kept watch.  The other came up out of the grass with a deer leg in his mouth and blood covering his snout.  This was desecration, a bloody testament to the horrors inherent in nature.  It is never all peace and tranquility.  This is life—predators and prey.  Even in the realm of the deer, every day is a struggle.  The rules of their universe parallel the rules of our own.

Not too long ago, our campus security saw a mountain lion crossing near the guard shack at the entrance to campus.  This hunter, the most fearsome predator in this area of the Santa Monica Mountains, was out and about.  A week ago, a mountain lion managed to cross from our western side of Interstate 405 in Brentwood to the eastern side where Bel-Air and Beverly Hills are located.  This is an amazing feat that a human being probably could not duplicate as the 405 is one of the busiest freeways in California.

We exist side-by-side with nature.  In Los Angeles, this means dealing with an alternative universe of great beauty, tranquility, violence and danger.  In short, one not unlike our own.  It is what makes Los Angeles unique as a large metropolis with a population equal to some countries.  It is the intersection of several strands of existence, and if we live here long enough, it becomes part of who we are.  Humanity and nature, us and our animal counterparts, side by side, the twin souls of the city.