Twins chase the news on L.A.'s dark streets

It was pushing 11 on a Friday night, and Austin Raishbrook wanted to be prowling the streets of Los Angeles looking for murder and mayhem.

Mired in a pocket of messy downtown traffic, the 32-year-old British transplant clenched the wheel of his Police Interceptor Crown Victoria and cursed out loud. Every few seconds, he turned his attention to the laptop computer glowing beside him, checking for any fresh crash alerts on an internal California Highway Patrol website.

One of the three radio scanners clipped to the visor above Raishbrook's head crackled to life. A Los Angeles Police Department dispatcher reported gun shots on 110th Street, near Broadway. A victim was lying in the street.

"Agghhh, come on!" Raishbrook growled as a traffic light turned red in front of him.

Reaching the onramp to the Harbor Freeway, he floored the accelerator. The speedometer soared into triple digits.

"With shootings, you need to get there quick enough to get the shot of them loading him into the ambulance," he said, weaving in and out of lanes and blowing past cars that appeared to be standing still. "Unless he's dead on arrival. If he's D.O.A., you've got all the time in the world."

Raishbrook has an identical twin brother, Howard, who also spends most nights in a Crown Vic, monitoring police scanners. The brothers don't wear badges of any sort. But if it's late at night in Los Angeles and there is a police pursuit, shootout, terrible car accident or a good-sized fire, chances are they'll be there. They'll be the ones with the video cameras.

Call them the paparazzi of pain.

The Raishbrook brothers own RMG News, a news video agency that supplies local and national TV programs with footage of the chaos that plays out each night in and around the city. There is good money in feeding TV news' insatiable appetite for violence and upheaval. But hang out with the Raishbrook brothers long enough and you begin to believe them when they say they would still be out on the streets even if there wasn't a dollar to be had.

"To actually be in the middle of it all, the gangs and all. It's just a visual feast," Howard said. "I swear on my life, I was put on this planet to film police chases. I swear on my life."

Austin concurred. "If you're not living life on the edge, you're not living life at all," he said. "You can't get close enough to the action for me. If you're covering a fire and not getting burned or wet from the hoses, you're not close enough."