After a 24-year-old man armed with what appeared to be a handgun hijacked a Metro bus, causing multiple traffic collisions and crashing into a downtown Los Angeles hotel last week, the union representing bus drivers is demanding better safeguards.
That incident occurred around midnight on March 21. Officers with the Los Angeles Police Department responded to a report that a Metro bus on Line 2 had been hijacked at gunpoint, Metro officials confirmed in a statement.
Surveillance footage captured several of the collisions before the bus crashed into the side of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel at West Olympic Boulevard and Georgia Street.
The bus driver, injured in one of the collisions, was taken to the hospital in stable condition.
The suspect, later identified as Anai Lindsey, had been wielding a BB gun that looked like a handgun. He was arrested shortly after fleeing the scene of the Ritz-Carlton crash.
This incident, along with other dangerous assaults on L.A. public transit, is why the Smart Transportation Division, the union representing L.A. Metro bus drivers, wants better protection for its drivers and, by extension, riders.
Among the safety improvements the union is demanding for drivers are:
- Full bulletproof enclosures for drivers
- Armed security officers
- Felony-level charges with a long jail sentence for anyone who assaults a Metro driver
- Silent alarms to alert police of a disturbance or live shooter
“I would say everything is on the table right now,” International Vice President of Smart Transportation Division James Sandoval told KTLA’s Rachel Menitoff. “I feel like we’ve tried so many different things already and some of them haven’t been working. We need to try every single thing we can to make it safer.”
Union officials say the additional measures need to be universal and federally mandated for all transportation agencies in order to prevent issues like the hijacking, as well as problems like what Metro bus rider and Loyola Law Student Maria Montale sees on her daily commute to classes.
“Sometimes there are people arguing and it happened two times that the driver had to call police because of a fight on the bus,” she told KTLA.
Montale believes that the demands the union is making on behalf of its drivers could work or that at the very least, it’s worth a try.
“The penalties or also a guard that is looking to everyone’s security, that would be useful,” she said.
For its part, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Authority told KTLA that it’s adding more security bus riding teams, building more significant barriers on all buses and will provide de-escalation training to bus operators.