Nothing to see here. Move along . . . go 'bout yer business. Move along . . .

Nothing on www.nytimes.com yet.

Hope they get things straightened out soon. There are car crashes in the intersection outside our kitchen window at least once a week, and it can be something of a distraction from work.

That's what puzzles me about this thing: What did the guy think he was doing? You might get away with fleeing the scene in some Sun Belt city -- but in Brooklyn?

Also, you have to understand that our freeways aren't fast enough, so we have to have our high-speed crashes on surface streets. Fourth Ave. gets a bit more than its share because it's broad and, by local standards, not too badly congested.

It's a vexation. This neighborhood is full of little kids (not to mention defenseless parked cars), and speeding drivers will turn off Fourth onto residential streets at dangerously high speeds. I'm on record as thinking, even before my car got totalled, that it would be a good idea if the city installed one speed bump per block around here. I don't see that there's any sane reason to do forty or fifty miles an hour up these narrow residential streets, and I don't see why we have to accommodate the drivers who do.

http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/news/WABC_051203_trafficstop.html

Sounds like it was pretty dramatic. And you're right, Brooklyn is no place for high-speed chases - except on a motorcycle :-)

Going off on a bit of a tangent:

His friend told him to go back out and check his own car for damage; there92d been shots fired, some of them to take out the tires of the fleeing vehicle, so I guess that either some of the shots went wild, or not all of them were aimed at tires.

Something similar happened in Montgomery County while I was in grad school, and I remember hearing a cop (or ex-cop) explaining that it's really very difficult to shoot out the tires of a moving car. Not just because it's a moving target, but because tires are designed to resist being punctured by random objects, and as a consequence the bullets are fairly likely to bounce off, and ricochet into other cars, buildings, or passers-by.

(In that particular case, I think a bystander got hit by a police round that (they said) had glanced off a tire.)

I can't speak for the accuracy of this claim, as I'm not a Gun Person. Somebody here almost certainly knows more than I do about the subejct. (Were we on r.a.s.w, I'd expect James Nicoll to chime in with a story about how he got a bullet lodged somewhere painful while trying to shoot out the tires of a speeding eighteen-wheeler...)

Stefan: Good idea there. Of course, if you'd tried it a few years ago, they'd have probably given you the Gowanus for free.

[notes Xeroxed license plate trick; hey, you never know]

Glad you're all OK.

The car looked pretty smashed up when I saw it walking home from school. Insane though, veritably insane. Where would you escape to on 4th avenue?

Lord knows where the guy thought he'd escape to on Fourth Avenue. Can you imagine if he'd been heading north? You get your choice of Flatbush, Atlantic, and the approaches to the bridges and the BQE. Southbound it's the wilds of Brooklyn, or if you're inordinatey lucky the further reaches of Long Island.