Yo! Venice! reader Dianna C. writes that there was a vehicle pursuit in Venice Beach last night that resulted in the suspect vehicle crashing through her gate and into her yard. Dianna says “the LAPD car crashed into the (Toyota) Prius at the same time the Prius crashed through my steel gate.” The Prius had bicycles on the roof and bicycle parts in the back seat, so it may be connected to bicycle thefts around Venice. Other witnesses have said that it was a recent parolee driving the vehicle, and along with three high end bicycles on a bike rack there were 20 or so pairs of forks and bike parks in the vehicle.
From Dianna: “The LAPD shouldn’t be car chasing and pitting criminals in residential neighborhoods. They also didn’t even ask if we were ok. We had 3 people here and quite a few people on the street that came. They were treating us like criminals rather than victims. Someone was in the yard that got hurt from flying debris as well. It’s one thing to catch a criminal, it’s another to put innocent people at risk.”
It is unfortunate that this chase resulted in this outcome, but having seen a lot of police pursuits on TV, I have to say that 99.9% of the time the cops are dealing with maniacs and for that reason we are assuming that the bad guys were being reckless and created this problem. None of this would have happened if the criminals did not try and flee. We are still happy that the LAPD is taking interest in getting the “bad guys” like these bike thieves off the streets of Venice. The thieves made the decision to run and use their car as a weapon against safety, the police were doing the correct thing to shut them down.
