cease fire

Gunfire has been bad here this year.  Somebody put up "Cease Fire! Now!" notices on several of the stop signs around my neighborhood this week.  I emailed the address on the page (redacted in my photo here) to thank them.

• I heard about 20 shots (0.3 mi away) around 1:30am this morning.  The high capacity magazines are always more memorable than the 1-3 shots happening all over the place.
• Last week, it was about 10 shots, a pause for over half a minute, then 18 shots (farther away than the earlier ones), another pause, then 2 more shots.
• July was busy in general, though.  There was the attempted carjacking near the main intersection here.
• There was the helicopter circling overhead for an hour while a different emergency brought fire trucks to the end of the block at the same time.
• I already blogged about the death on my block and the simultaneous health emergency on the other end of my block.
• My very favorite incident, though, was the man who drove into a house before running away on foot.

All within a dozen blocks of my home.  I am in no way providing a complete list of incidents. Some days, the reports are practically hourly.

It's just bad out there.  The unemployment numbers, the gdp numbers, the stock market numbers, the covid hospitalization numbers... none of them explain just how bad it is out there.  It's worse here now than it was 2 years ago when a local house put up a huge sign in their front yard.  I wish we had extensive and meaningful social programs, but those suggestions always seem to be resisted by blissfully unaffected people.  Those people increasingly annoy me.

Somebody put up "Cease Fire! Now!" notices on stop signs in my neighborhood this week.  Because we can't get the solutions that we want.  Pleading at city hall doesn't help, so apparently now we're pleading at stop signs.

Update 2020 August 09: Yesterday afternoon, people were shooting at each other from cars at the end of my block.  And I was woken at 2:40am last night by 3 blammos of something a lot bigger than a pistol (but didn't sound to me like fireworks) followed by distant yelling for about 15 minutes.  I never found any evidence of what it was, but about 40 minutes later, police came to an intersection about 3 blocks away for reports of gunfire (which I apparently slept through).

Update 2020 August 09:  Unrelated to the gunfire, and nowhere near my house, but this incident amused me when I saw it.  Expect to see more cases of people raiding or stealing delivery trucks as this pandemic/economic crisis worsens.

Update 2020 August 10:  I just filed an illegal dumping report.  I took some trash and recycling to the garbage bins this evening, and I saw that nearly the entire stretch of my back fence is now lined with dumped furniture.  Various wood and metal chairs, a large computer desk, headboard, "box" cabinet.  Somebody didn't want to pay the dumping fee to have the city pick it up from their property, so they left it on my property instead.  Lovely.

Update 2020 August 11: While trying to sleep through some noise last night, I browsed my phone and saw that someone nearby had their gas line damaged by gunfire.  It's not the first time.  That's what prompted our Jordan neighborhood organizer to create the citizen patrols a few years ago.  She was asleep when her son came home and smelled gas in the house.  He woke her up, and someone came out to check the line.  They found bullet damage to the equipment.