Deadly New Year’s Fallout: Bullets From the Sky

Los Angeles police call it “the most dangerous half-hour of the year.”

It’s coming up Thursday morning, officers say--the 30-minute period after midnight, when celebrants “in the thousands” will fire guns into the air in what most apparently believe is a harmless way to welcome in the new year.

But the practice is anything but harmless, two top officers of the Los Angeles Police Department told reporters at a news conference Tuesday at the department’s Parker Center headquarters.

Assistant Chief Robert Vernon said that a bullet fired straight up from a service revolver can reach a height of almost 10,000 feet before hurtling back to Earth with an impact velocity of 800 feet per second, only slightly less than the gun’s muzzle velocity of 960 feet per second.

Last New Year’s Eve, in fact, a man was killed in front of his wife and daughter, and a 13-year-old boy was mortally wounded outside his home in what investigators said were unrelated incidents resulting from random gunfire.

Deputy Chief Jesse Brewer, commander of the department’s South and Central bureaus, said the practice of celebrating the new year with gunfire occurs throughout the city, with the heaviest concentration in the South-Central areas.

“At times, it sounds like combat,” said Brewer, himself a combat veteran of World War II. “It’s been on the increase in the last five years. I wish I could tell you why they do it, but I don’t know.”

“The staccato of gunfire can be heard erupting from the inner city to the suburbs of Los Angeles County,” Sheriff Sherman Block said in a press release issued last week.

The gunfire is so heavy that last New Year’s Day on just one roof--the helicopter landing apron atop the sprawling Irwin C. Piper Technical Facility downtown--cleanup personnel found about 100 spent bullets, according to Vernon.