Police Shoot Up Muni Bus During Anti-Terrorist Drill by Phillip Matier, Andrew Ross San Francisco Chronicle, May 31, 2000 We've all heard of cops playing Rambo -- well, now here in San Francisco, we've got a new twist on the game. It's called "Rambus." How do you play it? You take an old bus out to a remote spot out by the airport, use it as part of a mock terrorist drill -- then for laughs, you let rip with semiautomatics until the bus looks like a giant block of Swiss cheese. In the process, you also blow the living hell out of a Muni fare box that someone over at the transit agency somehow forgot to take out of the bus before all the fun started. Those boxes cost $13,000 new. Then for added fun, a Muni whistle-blower snaps off a couple of pictures of the bullet-riddled ride and hands them our way -- along with a few pointed questions. The result: Both the Municipal Railway and the cops are having to go back and take a second look at what may turn out to be a very embarrassing bus ride for all. Here's why. A couple of months back, the Muni donated a surplus bus to the cops for training purposes. Nothing new there. Cmdr. Rick Bruce, who heads the tactical squad, says most of the exercise centered on storming the bus so the cops could learn how to free hostages in the event of a hijacking or terrorist takeover. "Mostly, they practiced their entries," Bruce said. Apparently, the drill went something like this: The cops would set off an explosion to distract the supposed terrorists, and at that exact moment they'd charge the bus. The official exercise lasted a couple of hours and largely left the bus intact. Then the unofficial fun began. A short time later, when the smoke cleared, the Muni bus was riddled with hundreds of rounds of live ammo. Windows were shot out and the fare box was pumped full of lead. What happened? At first, Bruce told us that the 20 or so cops in the exercise had just taken some informal target practice. "To see the effectiveness of their rounds," Bruce said. "Whether they penetrate when they hit the glass, or certain kinds of metal."' But in a follow-up call, Bruce said he learned that his officers had actually fired only into the bus' windshield and that the rest of the shots --and there were scores of them -- were fired off by an Arts and Entertainment crew that was filming the department's tactical squad for a forthcoming TV show. As for why they did it? "It's the same reason kids put firecrackers in cans," said one police source -- because it's fun. In any event, Police Chief Fred Lau says he has asked for a departmental review of the exercise to find out what happened. In fact, he has already dispatched a management control team to take pictures of the bullet-riddled bus, which is in storage at a city pier. One question likely to be asked is whether it was proper for the cops to turn over their weapons to a camera crew. "It depends on the circumstances," Lau said. "If they are allowed to do it, it's under the supervision of a police safety officer." As for that damaged fare box? Well, it's also now the subject of an internal probe -- this one by the Muni. "There are supposed to be procedures in place to prevent this," said Muni spokeswoman Maggie Lynch. "We want to make sure this doesn't happen again." But Muni whistle-blower mechanic Michael Cheney, who came up with the photos of the wrecked bus, isn't buying the company line. "It was inappropriate to destroy city property, whether somebody thought it had value or not," Cheney said. "Those windows alone are worth thousands of dollars." But Cheney said it wasn't just the destruction of the bus that bothered him. The part that really bothered him was that an ad on one side of the bus also got shot up. The ad prominently featured a black man, who got it between the eyes. Simple target practice? Maybe. But on the other side, an ad for Disney on Ice featuring the Little Mermaid was practically untouched. "I think people can draw their own conclusions," Cheney said.
