Must Be a Southern California Thing…

On Monday, Clarence Page from the nearby PBS station, WETA, was using our street as a backdrop (keep your eyes peeled for the front corner of our house on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer during one of Mr. Page’s segments airing sometime within the next three weeks, also be sure to note our garden hose strewn sloppily across the lawn and the neighbor's semi-dilapidated Alfa Romeo semi-permanently parked in front of our house). Now a real television camera, crew and on-air personality in our neighborhood are certainly exciting enough on their own, but it didn’t end there… as they were filming, a red sports car blew down the street at 50+ mph! And, in hot pursuit, was a black pick-up truck moving at a similarly high rate of speed.

Unfortunately, I was in the kitchen chopping veggies for dinner (Thai pepper chicken with carrots, spicy garlic eggplant and rice, if you must know) and missed it. But our neighbor Max, a one-man neighborhood watch, witnessed it all and was more than happy to give a play-by-play account when I ventured outside to throw the vegetable peelings and chicken trimmings into the trash. It turns out the red car was car-jacked and following in the black pick-up was an off-duty policeman. Instead of heading toward the nearby Beltway as expected, the car-jacker drove through residential neighborhoods (with speeds approaching upwards of 80 mph according to the off-duty cop) in an attempt to get to 395 and into D.C..

The guy did make it to 395, but crashed on the 14th Street bridge and that was the end of the chase. The police later returned to our street to get a copy of the tape from the television crew for use in any future legal proceedings (like being found in a car, not of his belonging, crashed into the side of a bridge is insufficient evidence to convict the guy?!?). After getting the scoop from the neighbor, I went inside, turned off the Tivo’ed Iron Chef I was listening to while wielding my knife against the carrots and switched the channel to the local news to hear about the car chase. Nothing. Tried another channel. Nothing again. What is wrong with these people? There was a high-speed chase! Where is the footage?!? Then I remembered… I’m not in southern California anymore.

In southern California, car chases are a favored form of entertainment. This includes high-speed chases, OJ Simpson-like slow-speed chases, and, the most common, low-to-medium-with-bursts-of-high-when-between-clots-of-traffic-speed chases. Maybe because the news people there don’t have snow storms to cover, they rush to even the most serene and short-lived of chases (and ignore the pleadings of the mayor and law enforcement officials that television coverage only leads to more car chases, which is probably true since the car-jackers waving out the car windows to the viewing audience at home is a common sight). And people do watch. RWT and I watch. And we’re not the type of folk who watch “Cops” or shows like that normally. But there’s something about a car chase…

An episode of the short-lived sitcom, It’s Like, You Know…, covered this phenomenon to a tee. In that episode, the characters, who all live in Los Angeles, drop everything to watch a live car chase on television. One guy pulls out a notebook containing statistics from previous chases and the group starts debating the best route for the car-jacker to take to avoid traffic. Then they take bets on the duration of the chase and yell advice at the television. RWT and I were practically rolling on the floor while watching that episode because it is so true.

There is just something compelling about watching a live car chase on television. Initially, it is the curiosity of where it is occurring – I once watched a chase (involving a bus!) that went by the exit to my friend ADD’s house at least a half a dozen times. Then, it is figuring out the overall strategy of the chase – it’s surprising how often the pursued car will make great big circles around the Los Angeles area. But other times they are totally random in their route (lost?) and only very rarely do they attempt to run in a straight line up or down the coast (which almost invariably ends in either mechanical breakdown of the vehicle or simply running out of gas). And what will the police do? Will they use the spike strips? Or will the speeds drop enough for the PIT maneuver? Next comes my favorite part, just how much abuse will the car take before it stops – one guy drove a Ranger Rover over four spike strips (which only blew out the left front tire), then on the flat tire, then on the rim (which got smaller and smaller with each passing mile), then on the end of the axle and finally drove for a few miles scraping the undercarriage of the car on the road surface before grinding to a halt (what a great advertisement for Range Rover!). But once the car stops, I turn it off. I have no desire to witness the actual arrest (possibly due to seeing too much Rodney King incident footage).

I’ve been pondering why car chases are not seen (and I mean this literally, I’m sure just as many occur) as much on the East coast. Perhaps all the trees block good helicopter views or there are not enough long stretches of freeway. Or do we have too much restricted air-space around here for all the newscopters?

But just like putting “The” in front of freeway numbers (“The 101”, “The 405”, and so on), In-N-Out Burgers and ever-present smog, very few things say “southern California” to me like a televised car chase.