It’s very exciting. Police cars have barricaded the ends of the street and there’s a helicopter circling overhead with a big spotlight. And a couple of cops just walked through my yard with a dog. :eek: Nobody’s knocked on the door yet and let me know what’s going on tho’…
Hmmm, now they seem to be concentrating on the other end of the street. I don’t see how the helicopter is all that effective; the spotlight only lights up a small area at a time and there’s tons of trees and sheds in my neighborhood. It’s got all the dogs stirred up tho’.
They probably won’t. Too busy doing things if they catch the guy and too disappointed if they don’t.
When I was living in a condo complex, about two in the morning we were awakened by the sound of sirens – lots of them – getting closer and closer, then the roar of an engine and a crunch. By that time we were up in time to see two cops run by, no guns drawn but they were clutching onto their gear to keep it from flapping too much. About ten minutes later they were back with a guy in cuffs between them. All this time, of course, lights of various colors were reflecting off the sides of the building around us.
Turned out he was fleeing some felony and tried to turn into the driveway of the condo complex, lost it and bashed into the corner of one of the buildings. Luckily, being a corner, it was sturdy enough that the building didn’t collapse nor did he wind up in the middle of someone’s bedroom. Anyhoo, we didn’t hear nuthin’ at the time, we had to read about it in the paper.
I guess I’ll just have to read about it tomorrow, dang it, 'cause it look like things keep moving a block over. It must be something fairly big 'cause they have a lot of manpower out tonight.
The spotlight is likely for the benefit of those on the ground; the helicopter itself should have an infrared camera. People show up very nicely on infrared.
A helicopter once hovered over a complex where I lived; there were what looked like thousands of cops on the grounds—more squad cars than I’ve ever seen in one place. I, with my usual brilliance, opened the door and stepped outside to see what was going on. The helicopter spoke to me and told me to “get your ass inside and lock your door.” I never did find out what was going on; there was nothing on TV news and not a word in the newspaper. Of course, this was in the Miami-Dade area; such things were common there.
I don’t know what I walked past earlier, but it looked like a police checkpoint or somesuch: they had two patrol cars parked on the median, one about 20 metres behind the other, and they were interviewing the drivers of each car that came by.
If it was at night, good chance it was a sobriety check. Bonus for nailing people without proof of insurance.
When I got off the bus yesterday morning, just before noon, I noticed that the next block up from my apartment was blocked off by police cars, there was about 6-8 different firetrucks, and other fire-related vehicles (including a bright red school bus!?), a couple of ambulances, and more cop cars. I figured one of the buildings might have caught fire, but I couldn’t see any smoke, and there didn’t seem to be a lot of people moving around, so I thought it must have been something happening inside a building.
Over the next hour or two, though, I saw several more cop cars show up (at one point there were 6 of them, in a line, all showing up together), the lights controlling the intersection were turned off, and cops were controlling the traffic going through (we were then lucky to listen to several hours of whistles and yelling as one particularly disgruntled cop seemed to get pissed off at every car that drove through). I could hear several helicopters, but the one I did get a good look at was a news one.
We decided not to walk up to have a look (the angry cop at the crosswalk was a good deterrent) so we turned on the news and found out that workers had been excavating the empty lot next to the KFC and the ground caved in and two buildings are on the edge of collapse. http://www.940news.com/local.php?news=16021
I haven’t gone to see if anything has happened overnight, but the traffic lights are running now and the road appears to still be blocked (there are trees in the way and I’m too lazy to go outside just to see!)
There was insane traffic yesterday afternoon, though, since this road is the main road leading to one of the bridges connecting Montreal to the south shore… lots of traffic on a normal day, but block a major intersection like that, and you get chaos!
Where I live, we get a helicopter with a spotlight just about every other weekend. Which is an improvement on where I lived in Dublin, when it was about every other day. Mostly they’re tracking stolen cars, I think.
Though the other day there were three or four riot vans around a particular house at the end of the road; and there had been one a few weeks before. Drugs or terrorists, I would imagine…
Quartz is right, though, those choppers using IR are good for tracking suspects through foliage.
Huh, last night was the first time I’d seen it outside of “Cops”. Ten years ago, this was a pretty rough neighborhood but it’s quite safe now. I did find out that there’s a prison escapee with relatives in Austin so maybe that’s who they were looking for.
I’ve been to Austin a few times (and it’s one of the many reasons I get irritated when people diss Texas). It’s a lovely place. So I hope your one chopper remains an anomaly!
The only mitigation I’ll give about where we live, is the crimes the helicopters are tracking are really lame compared to the US, as in very few firearms, murders, and so on - mainly theft.