Security alert at Emmys

 Traffic is snarled to an insane degree near Nokia, enough to give frequent Hollywood entertainment trekkers flashbacks to Comic-Con. Emmy-goers are bumper-to-bumper down Pico.

"Nobody's going anywhere," says a traffic cop, not knowing where to point her hands.

I abandoned my friend's car a mile from Nokia and hoofed it. Walking in a tux through That Part of town, my Westside nervousness kicks in, fueled by watching too many episodes of the "The Shield" (where the lesson always seems to be that any white guy wandering around downtown LA deserves whatever happens to them).

Nearby, fellow THR staffers see a line of drivers forced to abandon their cars by police and move a half block away. The LAPD bomb squad moved in, performed a search.

By the time I'm near the theater, a cop stops me. "You need to go through the checkpoints, we've had an incident."

I look around. "What checkpoints?"

"We've had an incident," the cop says. "It's OK now. But walking around like you are, you could have gotten shot."

Ah yes, that forgotten reality of urban living: The cops are always more dangerous than the locals.

In the press room, rumors going around: bomb threat. A car was stopped with guns inside, etc. There apparently was an all-points security alert, which diverted  the security force.

"Hey, you know what the upside was?" a colleague points out, holding his laptop bag. "None of us were searched."

Update: 3 detained at Emmys after air rifle found

So ... wait. All that was for a frickin' air rifle?