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Something Unbelievable Happens In This Video

04/23/2023

Couple of interesting facets to this incident that occurred near the intersection of Grant and West Ferry. But the really big one will be spotted only by the sharpest eyes. Watch the video closely.

I became cognizant of this incident, which was just a block or two outside my BuffScan residential response zone, by sirens running past my apartment. One siren had the gun of an engine that told me it was a) the police, and b) it was something serious enough to merit charging to the scene.

And believe it or not, despite the excitement of the obvious crisis -- somewhere nearby -- my first instinct was not to crawl out of bed to investigate. I could tell it wasn't "just out front" and as fate had it, I was suffering from the lingering effect of what felt like the flu. I was too comfy under the covers and while I knew I was missing something "just close enough" maybe, I wasn't getting up to see what.

That was for the first siren, and I believe for the second. But after the third, and then, when I managed myself up to look out the window, I saw two other police cars racing sans lights and sirens in the same direction, I knew, well shoot, physical health be damned, I had to figure out what was up.

Whatever the heck it was, I couldn't legitimately be "Mister BuffScan" if the world was coming down a few blocks away and I didn't at least try to go and document it. So, mumbling and grumbling I found my sneakers and got going.

I also fired up the YouTube BuffScan feed to get some insight as to what I might be foolishly driving myself into, but only in time to hear this one line: "Cars slow it down, slow it down for Grant and West Ferry."

Well at least I knew where this thing was. Just a few blocks up. In the back of my mind I had hoped it would be farther away so that I could just wave it off as "too far" and get myself back into bed. But with that veracious a response, and so close, well, as I've said already, I couldn't not go check it out.

So off I go in my car. As I turn out of the driveway I immediately spot the conflagration of police and fire trucks directly ahead of me. It wouldn't be a far drive, and while I was at it, I could pick up some toilet paper after I was done recording whatever was going on. I suspected the flu after all, people, and I needed a resupply.

I did park my car in a near empty parking lot across the street, hopped out, and in no time was that weirdo filming the scene; some footage of which you see above.

The scene I had injected myself into was a block-length's line of police vehicles, some with overheads on, some not. Most dramatically as you see in the video, one of them had been driven on to the sidewalk as if having just about driven into the building ahead of it.

A group of firemen and police were "working on" someone seemingly at the hood of the BPD cruiser and immediately I feared the worst. Had a BPD vehicle physically mowed someone down? Was there a shootout that meant an officer had to keep his attention on a gun instead of the steering wheel? The layout wasn't good so I mentally prepared myself for whatever gruesome thing those people were hovering over.

In short order I heard the bellowing cries of a man and knew right away someone hadn't been killed, irregardless of whatever happened. Thank god. The cries came from what I took to be a brown-skinned man lying on the ground, still in a bit of a physical tussel. He was shouting arbitrary sentences at the people trying desperately to tend to him.

I settled on what most of the others standing around me did, which was that someone enduring a mental health crisis, or drug consumption, was having a breakdown and acting out. He was probably confronted by the police somehow and then challenged them which of course did not end well. At this writing, the actual story is still unknown, but when speculating, it's fair to start with the simple theories first.

But in looking at the video, all of that is really beside the point. A block's worth of police, an untold gaggle of police officers remunerating everything among themselves; citizens standing around aghast, a screaming perp-victim on the ground who was bounded quickly and loaded into an ambulance (and I might add much to his apparent objection), and a weirdo - heh - filming it all.

And yet, what you see in the video is this: Absolutely nothing.

And by that I mean, save for my filming, save for the inside knowledge of the public safety system and a few direct witnesses, to the wider knowledge of the world at large, nothing happened. This was a non-event that evaporated of police cars and witnesses relatively quickly afterwards.

Don't take that the wrong way. Yes, the information exists. Police have it, AMR has it, the fire department has it, and even the witnesses with their individual memories and renditions, have it. And certainly with great effort, the story of what happened could be "mined away" from the people who hold it. Maybe it would flow freely from them on the simplest of query. Maybe it would take a fight, if for some reason it mattered to have one. Maybe a resource-strapped for-profit media house would actually step up and blotter it as perhaps a lit up city block of public safety vehicles should be logically incentivizing enough to do.

But then again, maybe not.

Information is caprciously over-controlled. Maybe there is fear of wrong-doing and mismanagement; or maybe, as the saying goes: Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Who knows. But if public safety feels something is too routine, or the for-profit media is too lean to cover it, whatever dark thing we think can happen in a world where human curiosity is squelched, might-could.