WHEN IT RAINED BULLETS IN THE CITY OF ANGELS

Back when I worked as a police officer and homicide detective for the LAPD in South Central Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s, it was a custom there that on New Year’s Eve the local citizens would fire off their guns in celebration.  You would hear a cacophony of gunshots from 11:30 PM on New Year’s Eve till about 1:00 AM New Year’s Morning.  If you were working patrol during those hours, you would try to get back to the station and sit in the parking lot to avoid getting hit.  I vividly recall pulling into the station parking lot and seeing a guy who lived in one of the apartments next to the station run out on his porch and fire a bunch of rounds from his gun into the air right around the stroke of midnight.   If you couldn’t make it back in by then because you were on  a call, as soon as you cleared that scene you’d at least try to make it to a freeway underpass if you weren’t close to the station.  It wasn’t that people took a free pass to shoot at the cops, it was just that there were so many guns down there and so many rounds going off you might become an accidental casualty.  Newton’s Law of Gravity, what comes up must come down, definitely plays into effect here.  All those rounds being shot in the air have to go someplace, so if they go up, eventually there going to go down. They also come down at the same speed they went up.  My homicide partner at 77^th Street Division handled a murder that happened just around midnight one New Year’s Eve where the unfortunate victim happened to be walking down the street when a spent bullet  came down and hit him on top of the head, killing him instantly.  With so many people firing their guns off in celebration in the area, how were you going to identify the shooter?  The case went unsolved. One year we put a tape recorder on top of the station on New Year’s Eve and left it up there for about an hour.  When we played it back, it sounded like the Battle of Hue City (Viet Nam).  So every year when I celebrate the New Year, my memories take me back to the one night each year when it rained bullets in the City of Angels.