Originally published at: TV news crew robbed while reporting on robbery spree | Boing Boing
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So there were multiple vehicles with dudes in ski masks driving around looking for something to rob and they just happened upon this news team? They sound awfully well prepared for something that had to be spontaneous. This MO makes no sense.
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There only needs to be one, in the right place at the right time. Serendipity (for them - not so much for the camera crew).
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Yeah, it still makes no sense.
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the op points out how many robberies had been happening in the previous few days. it sounds like they were prepared because it was their mo
as for happening on a news crew, if life hadn’t chanced to evolve on the third planet of this solar system this never would have happened. but given enough time…
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But the cops also radioed that they were neither following nor pursuing the vehicle full of armed men.
That is reassuring.
Not everyone is a master criminal
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You’ve never happened upon a news team?
Guns, masks, getaway vehicle. It’s the same preparation you’d make for any other robbery.
It makes perfect sense. They’re driving around looking for someone to rob. They see a news truck full of valuable camera equipment and do the obvious thing.
The only “serendipitous” part is that it was a news crew reporting on the robberies. But again, a bunch of robberies were happening in the area, the joint probability of a news crew showing up to report on those robberies and having the robbers drive by is not that small.
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That sort of thing happens a lot - someone (reporters in this case) hears about a thing that is happening a lot in a specific place - so they go to that place, and that thing happens to them.
In the city I used to live in, thefts of parked cars on an area of the main street in town were happening a lot, so the police put out a “bait” car (of the type most often stolen), and waited watching it in a van across the street. And then the car thieves stole the van the police were doing their stakeout in. With the officers in question sitting in plain view watching them, in the back of the van. Not all criminals are smart.
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Where were the police in all this? Unless they were the ones in the ski masks?
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Someone I know through the local kink community was attacked yesterday, and is in the hospital for a collapsed lung, so this is hitting a little close for me. These haven’t exactly been particularly bad areas. Wicker Park, Logan Square, Humbolt Park, and surrounding neighborhoods. The TV crew was attacked at W. Division and N. Ashland – big intersection and not really on the radar for “avoid.”
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That’s like saying it makes no sense that a war correspondent just happened to catch a bullet or for that a weather reporter got caught in a flash flood.
The news crew was there because these robberies were a common occurrence in the area. It makes total sense that they’d be at greater risk for getting robbed than, say, a news crew covering a flower show.
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Right? The wage theft in Winetka is outrageous!
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If you’re suggesting that this incident was staged…
It’s really not. There have been many such incidents. In 2021, an off-duty cop, working as security for KRON-TV, was shot and killed while protecting a news crew in Oakland, covering a very similar story about a surge in robberies.
Very similar thing happened in 2019, when a new crew was shot and robbed in Oakland.
An NBC sports new team was robbed at gunpoint in Oakland in 2021.
Another armed robbery, defended by an armed news guard, in Oakland in 2021. Hilariously, from the article, the armed robbery occured while:
KNTV were filming the interview with Guillermo Cespedes, the director of the Department of Violence Prevention
(Department of Violence Prevention is hiring a director, pays up to $253k per year, get your application in!)
I unfortunately work in an area that suffers similar problems. Some areas just seem to have situations like this. News crews have adapted by having armed guards. It’s still dangerous.
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I don’t think it was staged. I think the police are using laundered drug money to pay their confidential informants to commit high-profile crimes in order to justify their bloated and entirely unnecessary budgets.
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