Unlike Gyllenhaal’s character, he doesn’t salivate when he hears news of a shooting. Over the course of Baker’s two-decade long career, his car has been shot up, he has administered first aid to gunshot wound victims and has had police threaten to break his equipment. He also runs A Million Hits, an Instagram account and YouTube channel that have become the go-to source of information on shootings for many Angelenos living in the communities that face the most gun violence. He works as a stringer for, a southern California news gathering service from which local outlets buy footage. Inevitably, at some point, he hears three beeps over the scanner and “goes into another zone” as he drives toward the site of a shooting.įor more than 20 years, Baker, 49, has covered the aftermath of shootings and police violence in south LA’s historically-Black neighborhoods and cities like Inglewood, Watts and Compton. But Baker refers to himself as a “daycrawler”, leaving his home in south Los Angeles every day around noon wearing his bulletproof vest and helmet.īaker usually parks his blue Crown Victoria at a Starbucks in a plaza at the intersection of Western and Slauson avenues, not far from his home, and starts listening to his police scanner and browsing news wires. Most people may know about Baker’s line of work from Nightcrawler, the 2014 film in which Jake Gyllenhaal skulks around Los Angeles to film car crashes and murder scenes.

Cover photo gun violence