by Justice William W. Bedsworth

“Handcuffed Woman in Raiders Gear Steals Police Cruiser near Magic Castle and Eludes Capture.”

That was the headline that caught my eye. I assume the suspect will be easily captured. We need only stake out every home registered to someone named Houdini.

Talk about “only in Los Angeles!”

I hardly know where to start.

A woman in Raiders gear. Handcuffed. The Magic Castle. Escaped in a squad car. Even for L.A. that’s a lot to unpack.

Our county and our big brother to the north have spent my entire lifetime serving as each other’s crazy uncle. But this one may be hard for us to top.

On a scale of one-to-ten, one being Minneapolis and ten being somewhere in the Van Allen Belt, this is at least a twelve.

Yet all around the country, people who see this headline will nod, smile ruefully, shake their heads, and finish their Cheerios. “L.A.,” they’ll say, “it’s in a basin and all the loose nuts and screws just naturally slide down into it.”

Don’t get me wrong. I have great affection for Los Angeles. It’s my hometown.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life there before going off to Berkeley for law school.¹ And I defended it for much of my life.

This was hard as a boy. We had a basketball team called the Lakers. I noticed early on that there is a distinct shortage of lakes in Los Angeles.

We had a football team called the Rams. Unless there was a zoo escape I never heard about, I’m pretty sure no ram ever trod Los Angeles County soil.

We had a baseball team whose name derived from its forbears, a Brooklyn team called the Trolley-dodgers. By the time they arrived in Los Angeles, we hadn’t had trolleys in years.²

We later added to this nonsense a hockey team called the Kings.³ And another basketball team⁴ called the Clippers.⁵

I lived near a community called San Pedro. But I was taught that it had to be pronounced San Pee-dro. My high school, Bishop Montgomery, was referred to not as “Montgomery” but as “Bishop.” I assumed people who went to Washington High called it “George.”

It was hard for my youthful mind to wrap itself around all this, but I was an Angeleno, so I learned to live with lunacy on a daily basis. I was, after all, living in a city that needed hundreds of miles of complicated concrete linguini called a freeway system just to get you from one part of the city to another.

Los Angeles put people’s hand and footprints into sidewalk cement. It pioneered drive-through doughnut shops shaped like giant doughnuts. It embraced the Kardashians.

Its echo of the Irish city of Holywood was the longer but less metaphysical Hollywood. That always seemed to me to provide a succinct example of the level the city worked on.

There’s a certain loveable goofiness about these things.⁶ That, combined with a youthful brashness that characterizes the city even as it ages into its third century, makes it seem largely harmless.

But not entirely.

I lost a little of my enthusiasm about defending my birthplace about the time they elected a goofball named Sam Yorty as mayor over City Councilman and ex-police officer Tom Bradley, whose major campaign gaffe was being Black. In fairness, they regained consciousness four years later and elected Bradley for the next twenty years, but still . . . .⁷

Over time—fifty-some years of living in Orange County—my allegiance to my birthplace has diminished. I’ve gone from “Yay, team!” to “Oh my God, they did what?”

So my reaction to the aforementioned headline was the intellectual equivalent of a yawn. Which is pretty amazing when you break the story down. I mean, there’s a lot of madness in those few words.

First, it was a woman. I don’t have statistics on this, but fifty-four years in the court system convinced me the vast majority of crimes are committed by my gender. Women who steal squad cars are thin on the ground.

Second, she was wearing “Raiders gear.” None of the stories I’ve read about this incident elaborated on that term so we have to use our imagination here.

Full-on Raiders gear would have included spiked epaulets, a skull mask, chains, and a quantity of fake blood. Turning my imagination loose on the mental picture of a woman in that get-up would result in sleepless nights at my house, so I’m going to leave it to you. I’m just going to picture a football jersey. And maybe an eyepatch. Still . . .

She stole a police car. While handcuffed.

I’ve encountered some . . . ballsy⁸. . . women in my time but stealing a squad car gets you to the top of my list.

And she did it while handcuffed! She somehow turned the key in the ignition, released the emergency brake, and drove off into the night.

That’s a feat in itself. But how do you make turns? I’m willing to assume she was not especially concerned with signaling her turns. But how did she handle the basic physical requirements of a turn.

Do this for me: Get in your car, hold your hands two inches apart, put them on the steering wheel, and try to turn the wheel through an ordinary right turn.⁹ Or a left turn; handcuffs are ambidextrously restrictive.

Then imagine trying to accomplish that maneuver at high speed—a speed you might adopt if, say, you were trying to get away from the police.

I’m sorry. I can’t figure out how this can be done short of some kind of criminal magic.

Oh, wait. Did I mention this took place “near the Magic Castle”?

Kudos, Los Angeles. You’ve delivered another bravura performance. Long live the king.

And the lady in Raiders gear.

BEDS NOTES

1. Berkeley! Talk about low-hanging fruit on the crazy tree! Berkeley makes the Star Wars bar scene look like The Brady Bunch.
2. And we never called them trolleys; we called them streetcars. I guess Streetcar Dodgers didn’t fit on the front of a jersey, so they just stuck with the eastern form.
3. As common in Los Angeles as yaks and kangaroos, either of which would have made for a better mascot.
4. No city needs two NBA teams but this one is Erwin Chemerinsky’s favorite so I’ll cut it some slack.
5. I’m guessing the last time a clipper ship made an appearance in Los Angeles was about the time General Fremont did. Fremont signed the Treaty of Cahuenga in Los Angeles in 1847. I could root for a basketball team called the Los Angeles Cahuengas. That would have a historical connection to the city.
6. Well, maybe not the Kardashians, but the other stuff.
7. There’s an LAX airport terminal named after Tom Bradley; you’ll look in vain for something named after Sam Yorty.
8. Sorry for the earthiness of that word but nothing else combines nervy initiative and idiotic recklessness with such economy of expression.
9. Please don’t do this in traffic.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.