Crap Built on Lies: Coming of age in the city: My first drive-by

At about 9:40 yesterday morning there was a drive-by shooting almost directly in front of my apartment building. I heard two very loud pops (gunshots don't sound like they do in the movies) and rushed to my open window to see what the heck was going on. There was some shouting followed by more shots in very quick succession. The San Francisco Chronicle's reporting on the incident seems pretty inaccurate. The victim that was shot did not run down Steiner to Grove Street. He was dropped right on the corner of Fulton and Steiner, as the fuzzy picture I took with my cell phone camera shows. The ambulance is on the corner, and the crowd that's gathered there is watching the paramedics put the guy on a board and put him in the ambulance.

For some reason, the focus of the SF Chronicle article is on SF Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and how he supposedly swooped in from Grove Street and helped apprehend the suspects. (A post over at SFist.com goes ga-ga for this Mirkarimi-as-hero thing too). The claim seems pretty random to me, again since the incident did NOT occur on Grove Street. There were numerous people standing on the corner of Fulton and Steiner, including the people going in and out of Alamo Square Park (there are stairs leading up to the park on that corner), and plenty of witnesses who had a much better view than Mirkarimi (if he was jogging on Grove as claimed). Those people, who were truly in the crossfire zone and got a good look at everything that went on, are the true heroes of the story.

Anyway, it was a scary incident, and in all my years of urban living in a few different major cities, I've never experienced anything like it. The SFPD should have uniformed officers ALL OVER the streets in the Western Addition/Tenderloin areas. Say what you will about Giuliani, but his "broken windows" theory of policing works.

Here are more pictures: