Published Friday, September 25, 2026 at 08:04 AM PT

Burbank · Friday, September 25, 2026 · 8:04 AM · 67°F, 92% humidity, wind 0 mph ENE (gusts 2), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 23

Police

Two thousand one hundred forty-nine transmissions. Nineteen events. That’s roughly 113 radio calls to document one actual thing — which is either the most thorough dispatch system in North America or the loudest argument for earplugs I’ve ever heard. Pick your metaphor and pour yourself a drink.

Marlene Whitaker is missing. Seventy-eight years old, dementia, floral dress, black shoes. Female, Black, five-foot-eight. This is the call that actually matters in the endless churn — the missing elderly with cognitive impairment. Not a welfare check. Not a false alarm. A person who needs to come home. If you’re in NoHo or Burbank and you see her, you know what to do.

The weapons trend continued without pausing for breath. Hatchet guy at 426 South Spring Street in a green jacket, behaving aggressively. A hatchet. Not a knife. Not a pipe. A full goddamn hatchet, like he’s auditioning for a frontier noir film and missed the dress code memo. Then stick guy at 830 Green Avenue near Conception School, threatening parents. We’ve apparently opened a historical-reenactment faire and forgot to close the gate. Medieval hardware keeps showing up in people’s hands during daylight hours, and dispatch keeps watching.

Verdugo and York Boulevard westbound lost its traffic lights. In a city where infrastructure is held together by hope and spite, a major intersection losing signal control is the kind of urban poetry that writes itself. No punchline needed; LA just provided it.

Transit crime stays on brand. Two suspects at the North Vermont Metro Station — gray-haired 40-something with black chains, another in a black hooded sweater blocking the elevator. Criminal genius: making public transit slightly more inconvenient. The LAPD probably has a special award for that level of ambition.

Fire / EMS

Twenty coherent calls out of 785 transmissions. That’s a 2.5% signal-to-noise ratio, which tells you everything you need to know about what Verdugo dispatch is wading through. It’s white noise with occasional human suffering embedded in the static.

The usual catalog: fire alarms at West 20th Boulevard, Cordova and Mission, Tower and California. Difficulty breathing on North Central Avenue. Abdominal pain, unconsciousness, heart problems, falls, altered consciousness, blood pressure emergencies, diabetic calls. The background hum of a city where something is always going sideways inside someone’s body, and Verdugo shows up anyway. No major fires. No legendary rescues in the coherent feed. Just the grind — which, honestly, means the day worked.

Rail

Rail is still radio-silent. Two hundred forty transmissions yielded one (1) coherent event. Spoiler: there wasn’t one. Just ATIS weather data and aviation forecasts (coming soon to this column, Little Mister — the sky awaits its close-up). Metrolink and UP corridor either ran flawlessly or switched to a frequency only dogs and very frustrated engineers can receive.

Across the 24 hours: weapons keep showing up in the hands of people walking through daylight in residential areas. Missing elderly remain a search-and-rescue category that needs your attention. Traffic infrastructure is failing at the intersection level. And if you filter out the noise and the repetition and the routine, here’s what remains: a normal day in Northeast LA — which means 2,150 radio calls bought 39 events worth remembering and one person who still needs to get home.

Stay alert. If you see Marlene Whitaker, call 911.