Lots and lots of cops in front of our house right now. They’re not after us; there’s a stand-off in the house across the street. They’ve got someone trapped in there who shot a cop earlier this week. Earlier, they were telling him through a megaphone to come out and he won’t be hurt.<\/p>\n
They’ve got cars parked blocking access to our block from every direction; when Kim got home, she had to park a block away, and then a cop with a big black police dog walked her to the door. They also arrested a woman – we saw them lead her in handcuffs to one of the five parked police cars we can see from our window. Her coat was slipping down, and she was trying to shrug it back onto her shoulders, but couldn’t with her hands cuffed behind her.<\/p>\n
A few minutes ago, a cop came to our door with the six-year-old girl who lives across the street – apparently they have her and her father sitting in one of the cars. They asked if she could use our bathroom. We let her use it, of course. We offered to let her stay here and watch TV, but they didn’t even bother saying “no” to that, it was so clearly not something they were going to do. Poor girl.<\/p>\n
I think we’re perfectly safe – there are cops crawling all over the neighborhood, and we’re white, so they’ll probably protect us rather than shoot us. Even if there’s gunfire – and there probably won’t be – the odds of a stray bullet hitting one of us is incredibly low.<\/p>\n
Morbid thought: If a stray bullet does by a billion-to-one chance hit and kill me, that plus the fact that I wrote this blog entry probably means that I’ll get into the newspaper. It might even get “Alas” more traffic than that time Neil Gaiman linked to me.<\/p>\n
Morbid thought the second: Once – just once – I’d like to live in a house where the next door neighbors aren’t<\/i> arrested or put under seige by the cops. This house, cop shooter; previous house, drug dealer in basement (moved out just before we moved in); previous house, bank robber; previous house, drug dealer (the cops sat outside our house shining a spotlight at us until they figured out they had the wrong address and moved one house over). Also at previous house, a shooting on the bus. If we include down the street stuff, we can include an insane man shot by the police at the previous house, and a man killed by a bouncer at the bar down the street from our current house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lots and lots of cops in front of our house right now. They’re not after us; there’s a stand-off in the house across the street. They’ve got someone trapped in there who shot a cop earlier this week. Earlier, they … Continue reading