So The Torrance Police Department busted these four people living in the South Bay area of Los Angeles. It turns out that they weren't tipped off by his Afghan rocket launcher, or the imitation police badges, or even the "Anarchist Cookbook" and other illegal books. They were busted because the police where there looking for drugs, and apparently ended up hitting the jackpot. The house was located near the intersection of 190th and Rindge,......

Photo by Andrew at Here in Van Nuys A couple weeks ago, Andrew Hurvitz at the Here in Van Nuys blog snapped this photo of the Sherman Way tunnel under the Van Nuys Airport and questioned the state of security. "Is it just my foolish and suspicious imagination that sees this tagged up tunnel as something which raises questions about security at Van Nuys Airport?" he asked. "This is evidence that security right on......

Santee Village Apartments | Photo by atomicshakespeares via the LAist Featured Photos pool on Flickr It's not the same thrill as being singled out as a draft pick when it's the police who want you: "An arrest warrant has been issued by the Irvine Police Department for St. Louis Cardinals utilityman Scott Spiezio on six charges stemming from a Dec. 30 incident." Police in Burbank are investigating the mysterious death of 47-year-old Glen Giles,......

Here's a humorous one. In Anaheim today, a man pulled over to the side of the road looking at a map was robbed by two men who approached on foot. The robbers indicated they had a gun, stole the driver's possessions including his cell phone and fled on foot, hailing a taxi. With no cell phone, the victim used his On-Star service to call police as he pursued the taxi. About one block into the......

Photo provided to the press by the family of Eileen Orta For the second time in two months, police and rescue workers overlooked a woman's dead body in a vehicle that was in their possession. The Pomona Police Department announced today that the body of 22-year-old Eileen Nicole Ponce-Orta was discovered inside of her van on Friday. Police initially summoned the Orta family to remove the illegally parked vehicle before it was impounded. In......

UPDATE, 4:12 P.M., FRI., FEB. 15: KNBC reports that the Oxnard boy has been taken off life support and "his organs have been given away." UPDATE, 7:00 A.M., TH., FEB. 14: The shooting is now being treated as a murder case with possible hate crime motives. Go to our latest story on the Oxnard school shooting here. UPDATE, 5:33 P.M., WED., FEB. 13: Contrary to what CNN said below, the shooting victim, Lawrence King, is......

A member of the Los Angeles Police Department's elite SWAT team was shot dead in a gunbattle with a barricaded suspect in the San Fernando Valley this morning. * UPDATE: The suspect was killed in an exchange of gunfire with police around 7:30 a.m., leaving the death toll at 5 (AP). The Mayor has lowered city flags in honor of the officer killed on duty. Randal Simmons, 51, a 27-year veteran officer with the LAPD,......

At 11:13 p.m., the Los Angeles Fire Department alerted of a small helicopter has crashed at the southbound 110 Freeway and Century Blvd. One person was dead on board the fiery crash. Fire officials are describing it as a "small, private type, possibly home made type" aircraft. "The Federal Aviation Administration and California Highway Patrol would investigate the cause of the accident.," reports the LA Times. "The Los Angeles Police Department and Los Angeles County......

Bobby Fischer died this week. He was totally insane and totally brilliant, a prodigy and a pariah. In the world he inhabited, the only thing you could possibly do was throw up your hands and move to Iceland. Chess players, you know? Twelve California research institutions (including UCLA and USC) are in the running for $263 million dollars worth of valuable stem-cell research funding from the the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine. The body......

It seems the Valley isn't the place to be if you're a gang-affiliated criminal. One year ago, Mayor Villaraigosa held a press conference in North Hills at the LAPD's Mission Division, mapping out their plan for a crackdown on gangs. This past Thursday he returned, along with Police Chief William Bratton, to the same spot to announce that the plan had been successful. The Daily News reports on Mayor Tony's proud assertion, and 2007 statistics:......

Just like yesterday, when we announced that while the federal government can rob medical marijuana dispensaries, citizens can't, we find that LAPD officers are not allowed to rob drug dealers. In a separate case from the widely known Rampart Division Scandal, a group of rogue officers held up at least 30 drug dealers in a two year period ending in 2001 according to CBS2 News. After the robberies, which included taking the drugs, money......

When 37-year-old Monica Harris didn't show up for work Friday morning, her family began to suspect that she had been abducted by her estranged husband. The Upland woman had been previously kidnapped by her husband, who is currently scheduled to start a 16-month prison term in a few weeks for those charges. Harris' Ford Explorer was found Saturday morning in the parking lot of the Whittier Inn Motel, where inside, another discovery was made: two......

Post-holiday shopping took a gruesome turn in the parking lot of the Target store in Gardena last month when three women robbed another woman of her earrings and slashed her face. According to CBS2.com: The victim had returned to her vehicle after shopping at the Target in the 2100 block of West Redondo Beach Boulevard at 2:27 p.m. Dec. 27th when a woman reached through the driver's door window and yanked a three-inch gold hoop......

Last night's powerful rains beat down on Los Angeles, and Southern California in general, with a vengeance. Widespread power outages, mudslides, and flooded roads are just some of the consequences of the overnight downpour. Most of the road flooding occurred in the San Fernando Valley, reports the Daily News: "Among them, Forest Lawn Drive between Memorial Park and the Los Angeles Zoo was closed because of excessive run-off, Los Angeles Police Department Officer Jason Lee......

Unemployment is no longer an issue for LA's population of feral cats. The stray and often unfriendly felines that are known for populating local neighborhoods and prowling the streets for food and shelter have been put to work as rat-catchers for the LAPD in some of their stations through the assistance of The Working Cats program of Voice for the Animals. The non-profit organization explains on their website that a feral cat is defined as......

Authorities in Anaheim are working on putting together the pieces of a very disturbing puzzle they uncovered on Thursday on North Lemon Street near the 91 Freeway. The LA Times reports that police found 34-year-old Rene Lopex Montez "with unexplained second- and third-degree burns over 80% of his body." His clothes were burned off, and Montez told police "he'd been doused with gasoline and set afire at another location, then dropped off." Family members of......

File this under "oops." After a Saturday morning solo car crash involving a son and mother in Tarzana on Ventura Blvd., fire and police officials failed to notice a woman in the passenger seat under the air bag after removing her son from the driver's seat.The woman, whose identity was not released, had apparently been left in the car at the accident scene in Tarzana even as her son was taken to a hospital, police......

Police are searching for an 11-month-old girl who was allegedly taken from her North Hollywood home last night. The suspected kidnapper, Raul Carillo Alderete, was already wanted by Pomona police on suspicion of kidnapping, raping, and torturing the girl's mother and was profiled last month on America's Most Wanted. The LA Times reports:According to Los Angeles Police Department Officer Kate Lopez, Alderete went to the home of his child's mother near Sherman Way and Lankershim......

LAPD concluded that no crime was committed in the possible rape being investigated early this morning on USC's University Park Campus. We have no crime," said Los Angeles Police Department Officer April Harding of the Media Relations office. "The woman was interviewed and she admitted she was drinking and passed out. She was not raped." -- Fox The woman, a USC undergrad, was reported as passed out in a basement classroom around 3:30 a.m. by......

ExperienceLA.com and Lonely Planet are running a community based Downtown photo contest. If you win, you're photo will be on the cover of the free guide that will distributed around LA and all over the world. And while you're Downtown shooting photos, drop by Pershing Square to go ice skating through the holidays. The tunnel on the 5 Freeway where a fiery crash killed three, shutting down the tunnel for over a month, reopened......

The Los Angeles Police Department has decided against instituting a plan to "map" the city's Muslim communities, in what was being billed as a counter-terrorism effort. According to the LA Daily News: "It's been put aside," said LAPD spokeswoman Mary Grady. "It became clear to us [that Muslim communities] were not comfortable with the word mapping and what they believed it meant: racial profiling." Instead, Grady said the Los Angeles Police Department would build......

We can see it now, a new bestseller hitting the shelves just before Christmas: "If I Did It: Confessions of a Sports Memorabilia Armed Robber." Ohhhh, OJ Simpson, you and a cadre of other celebrities just like to entertain the masses in a different way. A special way. The "criminal" way!Las Vegas police arrested former football star O.J. Simpson on Sunday in connection with a hotel room break-in, CNN said. A source with the......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers......

On Friday afternoon, the Beverly Hills Police Department presented Gothamist, LLC, LAist's parent company in New York City, with a Search Warrant and Affidavit due to an e-mail threat to an officer after last week's controversial article about a Beverly Hills SUV driver attacking a bicyclist where the bicyclist was given two tickets. The warrant states that the police are to search the author's information and any relevant IP associations (even though the author......

Capt. Curtis of the Beverly Hills Police Department appeared before the BH Traffic Commission to address one issue, the “SUV vs. Cyclist” incident on August 21, 2007 that resulted in a citation for the cyclist and nothing for the motorist. Also in attendance were 8 local cyclists, none having met the cited cyclist before but all committed to supporting his fight for justice and all committed to fighting for equal access to the streets for......

It was just a year ago that a small group of Valley kids started a Valley Midnight Ridazz contingent. Ten bicyclists met up and rode through the night. Now a year later, the Valley has its fair share... in one way at least. Last night proved the Valley is hardcore, or maybe just a little more crazy. More cops, more helicopters, more scents of weed, more beer, more angry drivers, more near fist fights and......

Maybe we should take things like this more seriously, but last week "vandals" broke into a vacation home in Palm Springs and caused some eyebrows to rise when they turned over furniture (very nicely), arranged foliage and sticks to create pentagrams and clog toilets, and wrote words like "Pigz" and "Helter Skelter" on a window and on the fireplace... with soap! It was right around the 38th anniversary of the Manson Family murders of......

Perhaps the oddest story that came out this holiday weekend was the one about the LAPD medical administrator who stepped down from her job because a half dozen of her cohorts felt it was wrong for the LAPD to continue to accept "grossly overweight" new officer recruits. The controversy stems from a decision by the city Personnel Department to change the standards for police recruits, including a move to raise the maximum body fat......

Photo by Wathana Lim It would be nice to be able to make light of my last article, and its many entertaining and inspired comments, but it is pretty tough to do that given what happened at the end of Tuesday's May Day immigration protest culminating in MacArthur Park. By most accounts, and as has been demonstrated by several different video recordings of the situation, there was an absolute loss of control on the......

Expect delays between 6 a.m. and noon on Saturday: On Saturday morning, April 28, transit patrons utilizing Union Station between 6 a.m. and noon are advised that they may experience service delays of 15 minutes or longer on inbound and outbound rail and bus services due to a scheduled joint security training exercise.Union Station transit operators, including the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro), Metrolink and Amtrak, will join the Los Angeles County......