From a fireworks tip to 'catastrophic failure' in 12 hours: How the LAPD blew up a neighborhood

[WhiskeyGrinder]

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-03-06/how-lapd-blew-up-a-neighborhood

In a city obsessed with lighting fuses for big events, the anonymous tip to police was not particularly explosive: A man was selling illegal fireworks out of an alley in South L.A.

Los Angeles police officers pulled up to the pink house on East 27th Street on June 30 and found dozens and dozens of boxes — some stacked nine high — marked with an explosives symbol and eye-catching labels: King of Pyro. Supernova Rockets. All American Block Buster.

As more police arrived, Jose Becerra and his wife, Claudia Silva, watched it all unfold in front of their home, which sits next door to the pink house. Later, after the bomb squad came and their family was warned to stay inside, Silva asked an officer if they’d be safe.

“Yes, don’t worry,” she recalled the officer saying.

*narrator voice* "It depended on your definition of 'safe.'"

[MLAA]

1. Wow, what a clusterfuck of incompetence and arrogance that made the more senior guys

refuse to take the junior guy’s warnings.

[rsdsharp]

3. Beat me to it. I was going to say:

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the definition of a clusterfuck.

[prodigitalson]

2. Nothing to see here