Consider the inventory. Five men in mismatched military surplus gear. A small arsenal of rifles, including a Chinese-made SKS. A stolen getaway van. Their plan, on May 9, 1980, was to rob the Security Pacific bank in Norco, a sleepy town at the foot of the San Bernardino Mountains. It was not a sophisticated operation. It became one of the most violent police confrontations in American history.
The scale unfolded slowly, then all at once. A bank guard’s pistol shot sparked a firefight. The robbers escaped, but their van was soon punctured by police bullets. They carjacked a pickup truck. Then another. They shot at everything: police cars, a helicopter, a horse, a house where a family was eating dinner. For forty kilometers, they waged a rolling battle, a surreal procession of stolen vehicles and flying lead down suburban streets and rural highways. The police, outgunned, commandeered civilian cars to join the pursuit.
By the end, two robbers and one police officer were dead. Thirty-three vehicles were destroyed or damaged, a junkyard’s worth scattered across the chase route. The surviving robbers were found with a map marked with targets for future attacks, suggesting a murky, apocalyptic ideology. The Norco shootout was a bizarre and bloody anomaly, a moment when the line between a bank job and an insurrection blurred completely. It prompted police departments nationwide to militarize their patrol units, a quiet policy shift born from a very loud, very strange afternoon in the California sun.