Opinion: Smackdown on the 405 Freeway ... for a burglar?

This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.

If you were stuck in the southbound 405 Freeway mess Tuesday, you had plenty of time to listen to the radio, so you probably know it was all because of a guy who dodged the cops for nearly 12 hours after allegedly committing a crime.

Not murder. Not rape. He was supposedly stealing copper wire.

From about 3 a.m., when the LAPD answered a call about a burglary in an empty building alongside the 405 in North Hills, the effort to flush out this suspected burglar at first closed down the entire southbound freeway and then, as the hours wore on, the three right lanes stayed shut -- all this according to news reports.

The southbound 405 Freeway is already one of the nine circles of traffic hell at the best of times, and to have it tied up for a dozen hours to catch ... a copper burglar?

The guy was wily, I’ll give him that -- the cops caught his alleged partner, but he raced right off into a storm drain. He dodged police who tried to grab him. He cut a rope that the cops dropped down to him. He resisted the bitter blandishments of tear gas and stayed stubbornly put. At one point, authorities were pumping oxygen down the storm drain. One deputy chief quoted by the Associated Press said that they had to get the man out of there for his own good: the storm drain runoff could amount to ‘’gas and anti-freeze and battery acid and God knows what else.’’

Now, I am a fan of the ‘broken windows’ school of policing, about stopping small crimes to prevent bigger ones. But at some point, shouldn’t someone in authority have been asking, ‘’What’s the trade-off here?’’ Thousands of people mired in miserable traffic, millions of dollars in commuters’ time lost, and then the cost to public resources. The guy’s alleged partner in crime had already been caught and surely could have fingered the fellow any time, with a leisurely arrest to follow -- after all, the guy in the storm drain reportedly said he had a newborn baby at home. Maybe police could have closed off one end of the storm drain and waited him out at the other. Wasn’t there just a teeny bit of fear of losing face going on here, with this 12-hour-long standoff?

It was a great saga for the TV cameras, but the question needs to be asked: Did L.A. taxpayers get their money’s worth on this one?