11:15 PM last night: Local news broadcasts in L.A. begin covering a high-speed police chase out on the 5 Freeway in Buena Park. A bevy of officers are chasing a stolen taxi with one man inside. Apparently, a cab driver stopped at a store, ran in for a moment to get something and left the keys in the cab. Not the brightest thing you could do. The "suspect," as we must call him, hopped in and sped away.
As chases go, this one is boring…just a lot of cops following the cab who's driving just barely fast enough to make this a high-speed police chase. The cops "PIT" him, spinning his car out expertly but he manages to recover and the chase goes back into boring mode. One can sense news directors at all three stations hoping hard for some kind of end to it before 11:35 because this ain't worth pre-empting Dave or either Jimmy for.
11:34 PM: I think KNBC and KABC abandon coverage at this time but I'm not sure because I'm watching KCBS. They're going to keep with it but not on this station. So that Letterman can start on time, they're going to switch their coverage over to KCAL Channel 9, a local station owned by the same company. 9 and 2 share newsrooms and sometimes hand off developing stories from one to the other.
The episode of The Late Show with David Letterman is a rerun. Still, if I were Dave, I think I'd be a little pissed that my lead-in is telling people that if they're interested in what they're watching, they should change the channel. As I do.
11:35 PM: Over on KCAL 9, they dump out on an episode of The Insider that had just started so they can show the chase…during which nothing continued to happen. For the next 25 minutes, police continue to follow the suspect as he transitions from the 5 to the 605 to the 90, all the time driving rather safely but still refusing to stop. I feel sorry for the in-studio anchors who are expected to narrate but have absolutely nothing to say.
Midnight: Someone at the station finally decides the chase is too dull to be on broadcast television at all so KCAL 9 starts an episode of OK! TV (I have no idea what that is) and announces that their helicopter coverage of the chase will continue on their website. By now, I don't care much about the stolen cab as I do about the news coverage of it (if that makes any sense) so I scurry to to their page. There, they are indeed running the feed from their copter…
…but the reporters back in the station have gone away. All we hear is the reporter in the helicopter, Stu Mundel, and I'm not sure if his intermittment comments are intended for us or for his associates back in the station. He's alternately listening to police chatter we can't hear, then explaining what the cops are planning. He says they're fixing to puncture the tires of the stolen cab by laying a spike-strip down at Long Beach Boulevard. This information would come in handy if I was a friend or relative of the suspect and I was in phone contact with him. I could tell him how to avoid the trap the police are setting for him. I'm not sure if Mr. Mundel knows that what he's saying is going out on the web.
12:14 AM: The feed goes dead and the website just says "Live Stream is Unavailable." My interest in this whole case is also unavailable.
12:37 AM: I finish writing/polishing the above and am about to post it when the live feed comes back on. From what Mr. Mundel is saying, it's obvious he does know that what he's saying is going out on the Internet. In fact, he's addressing those of us who are watching this way, thanking us for our Tweets and letting us in on more of what the police are saying and planning. Again, if I were in contact with the suspect and wanted to help him, I could relay a lot of useful information to him but I guess that's not a concern. I've watched a lot of these chases and Mundel is by far the best guy at covering these things. I decide he must know what to say and what not to say.
12:52 AM: The fleeing cab has lost one tire due to a spike-strip and is about to lose at least one more. Mundel tells us that both he and the police chopper (I gather there's only one) are concerned with how much fuel they each have left. A second police helicopter is on its way to take over for the first one but the KCBS/KCAL copter will soon have to abandon the coverage and head back with no one to replace them. The cab is shaky and down to two uncompromised tires but, he cautions us, they may have to terminate coverage before wear on the remaining tires bring the pursuit to a conclusion. There are also more spike-strips ahead but Mundel is not about to tip where these are.
1:01 AM: He says they have to head back…a bit reluctantly. His experience covering these thing had told him it won't be long before the taxi has to stop due to a lack of rubber on its wheels. He again thanks the viewers who've been Tweeting him and engaging in what he calls "True modern media interaction" and they get a last shot of more than a dozen police cars following the cab into the distance before the coverage ends.
There's something oddly personal about this. I don't care that much about that stolen cab but I really like the fact that someone in local news gave us the best coverage they could. And except for a short ad when I first went to the live feed on the website, it was all done without commercial interruption. Good for them.
UPDATE AT 4:30 AM: Just found this on the web…
A man was arrested after driving a stolen cab all the way from Orange County to Lancaster. The pursuit started when the taxi was left unattended with the keys in the vehicle while a taxi driver went into a 7-Eleven in Santa Ana at around 11 p.m. Thursday night, a Santa Ana Police Department spokesman said. And after running a gauntlet of PIT maneuvers and spike strips, driving on burst tires for much of the way, he was finally apprehended in Lancaster at around 3 a.m. Friday.
If the arrest didn't happen until 3 AM, that means it was two hours after the KCBS helicopter gave up and returned to its home base. There's no way they could have stayed on the air that long…and I doubt anyone would have been watching by then.