Too Much Excitement in our town

Stopped by a local drug store (which shall remain unnamed) on the way home from work today. Jill ran in to get some missing ingredients for a dinner she had planned, and I (lazily) stayed in the car to wait and play on my Blackberry.

I looked out the window and saw an SUV sitting in a parking space behind us (about 30 feet away) in the parking lot, and then a marked XXXX county police car with lights flashing. The officer got out of the car, gun drawn, and moved swiftly towards the driver's sided door of the SUV. I was a little shocked--and tried to figure out what I was seeing. I noticed an Altima-looking car parked between the police car and the SUV at a strange angle. The officer was yelling--gun still drawn--and someone was trying to get out of the SUV. While this was happening, another Altima-type 4-door vehicle pulled up on the far side of the SUV. (So the layout was squad car, 4-door #1, SUV, 4-door #2.)

Two (?) guys in plain clothes jumped out of the second sedan and I thought to myself, "Great - this guy in the SUV has friends nearby, and they're going to go jump the police officer while he's trying to get the driver out of the SUV." They started moving towards the SUV, and even cautiously opened the SUV's tailgate a crack. I lost sight of the uniformed officer while I was watching these other men converge on the scene - but saw him again walking an individual towards the squad car, while the other men were poking around the SUV.

In the meantime, I headed into the drug store to see where Jill was - making sure she wasn't going to walk out into some gunfight or something. She was almost next in line, we checked out, then I led us back out of the store, looking to see what was happening outside. I explained briefly that something was going down and we should get out of there.

I tried to snap this picture as we quickly walked back to the car, but the other vehicle got in the way:

(click to enlarge)

We got in the car and started driving out the other side of the parking lot. The view on the drive out looked something like this:


It turns out those guys who unloaded from the sedans were plainclothes officers. Jill thought she saw one of the officers flipping through/counting a stack of money that likely was confiscated from the suspect(s).

It must have been a planned sting or something, because the unmarked sedans were right there - and, thinking back, pulled up pretty nicely to block of the chance for the SUV to drive away if it tried to do so after the uniformed officer left his car. I have no idea how they got into the parking lot - I don't remember a siren, so it's probably not likely the SUV was pulled over for a moving violation and pulled into the parking lot (right off a main street).

Anyway - from the little that I caught (and the rest I deduced) - it looked like the bust went pretty smoothly, although test.