Not questioning the Sheriff’s Department, but damn

If I was a Stevenson Ranch resident, I don’t know what would scare me more: a mystery burglar who never apparently was there or the vast armada of para-military cops  who lined up for battle in a quiet residential neighborhood yesterday.

In case you missed the story, there was a report yesterday afternoon about a man entering the garage of an O’Hara lane home at around 11am. The homeowner was contacted and he told Deputies he had a gun in the house, so the Sheriff’s station responded as if the burglar was armed, an entirely reasonable assumption.

Coincidentally, the Signal says, an LASD SWAT team was in town for exercises. They diverted to Stevenson Ranch to confront the possibly armed burglar.

I hope the Signal & photog Francisca Rivas won’t get upset with me for borrowing these images, but I feel I have to illustrate what Stevenson Ranch residents saw later that afternoon:

Was there ever a burglar in the first place? Who knows. Deputies found nothing missing in the house once they entered it.But if there had been he surely would have surrendered in the face of such awesome firepower. The weapon pictured above, I believe, is a Heckler & Koch MP-5 submachine gun, nicknamed the “Room Broom” by special forces people because it is small enough to rapidly sweep around a room, clearing it of bad guys.

Now as I said in the title of this post, I’m not one to question the reaction, but damn that’s a lot of firepower for a simple burglar. It sounds like the reaction was incidental, however. If the SWAT team hadn’t been in town to practice, would normal LASD units have coordinated the response, containment & search?

This reminds me of another incident -also in Stevenson Ranch- a year ago or so where some 13 year old boys stole a bicycle from a neighborhood garage and were tracked by an LASD helicopter until they were successfully apprehended at a local elementary school.  Yes we had aerial pursuit of some children on bikes!

That’s just the way it works in the SCV. Sometimes you get a big law enforcement response and lots of coverage for something like yesterday’s phantom burglary, and sometimes you only hear about melees, crime and LASD response through the grapevine, like last month’s Town Center Drive melee.