The rest of the world’s news seemed fairly uneventful by recent standards, so the big news on Tuesday in our fashionable Riverside neighborhood of Wichita, Kansas, was the massive law enforcement presence just a couple of blocks to the north and a block to the west.
There were five Wichita Police Department patrol cars already in the area as we headed out on an afternoon chore, once of which stopped just ahead of us and blocked our way, as the cops around here are particularly fussy about citizens driving around, but he waved us ahead and we waved our thanks as we passed. By the time we drove home there were several more WPD patrol cars, a similar number of patrol cars from the Sedgwick County Sheriff’s Department, at least one from the Kansas Highway Patrol, a few heavily armored vehicles, and numerous men in full combat gear wielding actual assault rifles, and not just the semi-automatic kind that the gun-grabbers like to call “assault rifles” but the real deal.
Which is not at all what we usually see on a drive home. Most Riverside homes aren’t all that fancy, but almost all of them have a certain unpretentious 20th century charm, and they’re all nestled between the Arkansas and Little Arkansas Rivers — both pronounced “Are-Kansas,” by the way — with several public parks and the art museum and the botanical gardens and a disc golf course and a real golf course, so it’s a fashionable neighborhood with all sorts of arty types and more than the usual number of of delightfully neighborly homosexuals, and it’s usually quiet and quite placid. We had a bike swiped from a back porch once, and a long while ago the “Riverside rapist” was terrorizing the neighborhood, and there’s the usual graffiti and other low-level crime you’d expect in the heart of any large American city, but in more than 25 years here we’ve never seen anything that so closely resembled a battleground.
We didn’t see any cars marked with the logos of any of the local media, which wasn’t surprising, given the late hour and the budget-cutting state of the local media. Once upon a time we’d have run down the street and flashed our credentials at the big city newspaper and demanded to know what was going on, but these days we’re not considered considered credentialed by the local authorities and don’t run very well, and the cops around here can be impatient with citizens asking question.
By happenstance one of our Facebook friends and actual friends lives exactly a few blocks north one and one block west where it was happening, and he’s one of those video-phone-owning and Facebook-posting types, so he was providing live coverage of it all from his porch. He could provide no explanation for anyone of it in his audio commentary, but had plenty of expletives to describe what was going on, and it indeed did look at least that curse worthy crazy. He posted that the cops were asking if he could use his bathroom, and we posted a question about what he’d learned, but he didn’t answer, and for all we know he told them to go around back and thus blew a journalistic scoop. Our friend’s a good guy, but he’s the type who might do that.
The first reporting from a credentialed local news source came from radio station KNSS, which did not surprise us. For most of the day KNSS is right wing talk radio and late night shows about the supernatural and unidentified flying objects and weird conspiracy theories, along with a lot of ads for tax debt experts and hail damage repair and other businesses, but they always fit a few timely and reliable minutes of reporting into every hour. It ranges from everything about the traffic tie-up at Kellogg and the Canal Route to the latest shenanigans at City Hall, and they gainfully employ our pal Ted Woodward, whose honesty and good intentions we will vouch for, even if it’s our personal opinion they’re working him into an early grave. They still maintain 24-hour shifts, too, which comes in handy when there are routine severe thunderstorm and tornado warnings or a very unusual amassing of military fire power down one’s block.
According to KNSS it all has something to do with a man who has a handgun and is “having a mental health crisis,” and we’re inclined to believe it. The poor suckers pulling the late shift at KNSS are usually pretty reliable, the cops around here aren’t inclined to lie to them, and these days it’s not hard to believe that there’s someone with a handgun and a mental health crisis just a few blocks away, even here in the fashionable Riverside neighborhood of Wichita.
Sorry to leave our readers in suspense, but for now we’ve no idea how this turns out. At this late hour we haven’t heard any gunfire, which is heartening, but even in our modern media age, where we all think we instantaneously know everything that’s going on in the world, that’s all we know about what’s going on a few blocks away. According to the latest report from the usually reliable 24-hour news team at KNSS, “police will provide an update on the situation Wednesday morning.”
— Bud Norman
The Central Standard Times 