A Nightcrawler For Gen Z

IN FEBRUARY, WHEN CONTENT creator Alex Choi posted a video to Instagram of his matte-black Porsche — which he explained is equipped with a remote-controlled spotlight, bullet-resistant doors, a night-vision infrared camera, and an AR-15 mounted on a rack in the back — plenty of his millions of followers compared him to Batman. On the surface, the 26-year-old Angeleno and the hero of Gotham City have a lot in common: They’re both known for their tricked-out rides, their wealthy families, and their frequent appearances at dangerous urban crime scenes. 

But that’s where the similarities end. Choi, unlike the Caped Crusader, doesn’t catch criminals or fight villains. Instead, he films the chaos he hears about on police scanners— sometimes arriving before police and paramedics do — and uploads the footage to Instagram and YouTube, where he’s racked up roughly 2 million followers and nearly 1 million subscribers, respectively.   

“He’s a social media genius. I mean, he just absolutely nails every single video,” said Howard Raishbrook, a longtime news videographer and producer who served as a consultant on the 2014 Jake Gyllenhaal-led crime thriller Nightcrawler. “ He's a pure businessman. He knows exactly what he's doing. Very successful at it.” 

The way Raishbrook sees it, Choi is easily the most prominent among a new crop of Gen Z “nightcrawlers” reviving a formerly dying occupation. Whereas stringers like Raishbrook rely on news outlets to purchase their footage, Choi and his numerous contemporaries are bypassing the traditional media — and their editorial standards —altogether, instead serving up explosive content directly to viewers on social media. In doing so, they’re blurring the lines between news and entertainment, and in the opinion of some, exploiting horrific tragedies for public consumption and personal gain. (Choi did not respond to repeated requests for an interview.) 

Choi’s videos are often a cross between T.V. news fare — chaotic police pursuits, heroic animal rescues, large-scale protests, harrowing wildfires — and the faster, shorter clips of YouTube and TikTok, where attention spans are limited and views are directly linked to revenue. Think: man-on-the-street interviews, if the man on the street happened to be an apparently intoxicated driver who either just crashed their vehicle or passed out behind the wheel (or maybe both). 

It’s lucrative. Outside experts in social media and content creation estimate that Choi  could be taking home monthly paychecks in the seven figures. Experts factor in potential revenue from brand sponsorships and collaborations — Choi’s have included an exotic car rental company, a luxury watch brand, and a camera gear manufacturer —as well as paid subscriptions on platforms such as Instagram, and YouTube ad revenue, including residuals from dozens of videos, many of them with millions of views. 

It helps that Choi’s foray into nightcrawling came after he’d already built a following in a different lane: as a daredevil driver of customized, uber-expensive “supercars” like McLarens and Lamborghinis. One of his most explosive stunts involved two women shooting fireworks at a Lamborghini from a helicopter circling above it. But it was another stunt, involving an airborne Tesla that crashed on a residential street, which Choi posted footage of on YouTube, that first landed him in the news and made him a sworn enemy of countless Echo Park residents. 

And while some of Choi’s videos call out risky behavior on the road, others seem to celebrate it. One of his earliest YouTube videos, posted in August 2017, is called “How to drive FAST.” In it, he gives advice on how to “do it safely and do it correctly.” In another, titled “My ILLEGAL Audi is INVISIBLE to COPS,” uploaded in March 2022, he shows off his radar detector which blocks speed readings. 

“This [is a] guy who should have had his license taken away years ago,” said James Gilboy, a former staff writer for the automotive industry blog The Drive. “You could argue that the unaccountability of social media and big tech is a big reason why somebody like this is able to continue what they're doing.”

LOS ANGELES HAS ALWAYS been enamored with the spectacle of violence, particularly when viewed from a safe distance. Arguably the world’s most famous crime-scene photo, a gruesome image of the so-called Black Dahlia’s body splayed out on a suburban lawn, was taken in Leimert Park in 1947. That same year, the New York photographer Weegee, having grown tired of selling photographs of murder scenes to tabloids, moved to Hollywood to try his hand at hawking images of celebrities (Weegee’s career, Nightcrawler filmmaker Dan Gilroy has said, was his original inspiration for the Gyllenhaal movie). 

Criminals often become celebrities, but in Los Angeles, celebrities can also become criminals. Nearly half a century after Black Dahlia’s murder, footage of O.J. Simpson leading the police on an hours-long chase — captured for a local CBS station by pioneering helicopter reporter Zoey Tur—became one of the most-watched live television events in history. Police pursuits, which translated to ratings even when the driver wasn’t famous, became a staple of L.A. T.V. news.

Across an ocean, in a small town in the U.K., a young Raishbrook and his brothers took notice. 

“Everything seemed to end up revolving around Los Angeles and being the bank robbery capital of the world,” said Raishbrook, who once consumed a steady diet of Beverly Hills, 90210, Baywatch, Cops, and World’s Scariest Police Chases. “ Watching all those shows really ingrained in us that that's the kind of route we want to take, and that's what we absolutely love doing.” 

When he was just 18, in 1995, Raishbrook packed up and moved across the pond to the dazzling city he’d seen on television. In the beginning, he worked a day job as a production assistant on commercials and spent his nights leading a double life. He’d drive around the city with a video camera, a Thomas Guide, and a police scanner he’d purchased from RadioShack. Listening in on the scanners, which are used by law enforcement and emergency services dispatchers to communicate, felt like tapping into a new language and gaining access to a more dangerous world. Raishbrook couldn’t get enough of it. 

Within a decade of his L.A. arrival, Raishbrook and his twin brother, Austin, along with their younger brother Marc, formed their own business: RMG, short for Raishbrook Media Group. In 2008, as reality television was starting to explode, partly as a result of the writers strike that year, the British cameramen landed their own set of cameramen. Their late-night escapades, and those of their colleagues, became the basis of a truTV reality show dubbed Stringers: LA. But it wasn’t until a half-dozen years later, when Gyllenhaal played a terrifyingly ruthless L.A. stringer named Lou Bloom, that Raishbrook’s line of work fully entered the popular imagination. 

Nightcrawler didn’t exactly paint stringers in the most positive light. Its main character was a morally bankrupt, down-and-out grifter who went so far as to move dead bodies and withhold evidence from the police in order to maximize his potential for profit. “It was pretty detrimental to us when the movie did come out. I can't tell you how many cops came up to me after the movie and they were like, ‘Hey, man, is it just like that? Is it like Jake Gyllenhaal?’” said Zak Holman, who founded the video news agency Key News Network. “The guys that we work with and myself included, we're the complete polar opposite from what you're seeing in that film as far as the character is concerned.” 

But Raishbrook said there’s some truth to the over-the-top portrayal: “There's definitely a morbid interest, like a darkness, in all these stringers. I mean, we all do it because we really, really enjoy it. There is definitely some Lou Bloom in all of us, whether we deny it or not.” 

Another quality that Raishbrook shares with Bloom? He’s enterprising. He seized on the attention from Nightcrawler by pitching a docuseries about the cutthroat world of stringers. Shot in the Dark, which he executive produced, aired on Netflix in November of 2017. The eight-episode series featured him and his brothers competing against rival companies to get the best shot the fastest. The series made an impression: It helped convince a whole new crop of aspiring stringers that this was a viable career choice.  

A videographer who goes by the alias Alien Alphabet was one of them. Like a lot of other men—and they’re basically all men—who do this kind of work, Alien Alphabet considered himself an adrenaline junkie. But unlike some of his peers, he didn’t have such a rosy view of  police. He grew up in West Los Angeles in the 1990s, during the “gang wars,” he said, and got stopped and searched constantly while riding his bike on the street. “When I grew up it was a whole different LAPD,” he said. “There was no cameras, no one knew their rights, you know? Now everyone knows their rights because of the internet.” 

Rather than join a video news agency, Alien Alphabet — who now runs the YouTube channel AXN News — decided to strike out on his own. He began livestreaming on YouTube, first covering the scene outside the Hyde Park strip mall where Nipsey Hussle had been fatally shot in March of 2019. “I got a bunch of viewers, so I knew there was a market for it,” he said. “There’s a niche for people wanting to see the live events on the ground and live.” 

TECHNOLOGY COMPANIES IT TURNED out were already catering to this emerging market. In May 2018, the home security company Ring introduced an app where owners of the doorbell-mounted cameras could share footage and discuss local news with one another. Less than a year later, Citizen launched its mobile app in Los Angeles, turning the whole city into a potential crime scene to be reported on by firsthand witnesses.

For many independent creators, monetization isn’t easy. In the beginning, Alien Alphabet said, he wasn’t making much more than gas money off his livestreams. That changed once he gained a following and began charging for exclusive content and soliciting viewer donations to his Cash App and PayPal accounts. But income is far from steady. Donations and paid memberships fluctuate, as does revenue from YouTube ads. Then there’s the algorithm itself, which creators say is always changing what it prioritizes, forcing them to constantly switch up their strategies. 

Still, feeding the social media slot machine is enticing compared with the alternative. News stations’ budgets have been shrinking for years, and stringers have been feeling the impact.

“Before, you could make a lot of money in a week and now you're making not even a third of what you used to make,” said Adrian Pineda, a stringer who’s been running his own newsgathering agency, O.C. Hawk, since 2012. “ Not only are you dealing with stringers, but you're also dealing with everybody having cell phones and getting that footage.  And if you don't get your hands on it before they put it up on social media and it gets into the news station’s or producer's hands, you're screwed.” 

T.V. news producers have also become pickier about the content they do purchase. When Pineda first started out, he said, “You could get a car [crashed] into a fire hydrant with the water shooting up in the air, and it was gonna sell.” But now? “You better have something juicy — like, it has to be carnage and deadly.”

CONTENT CREATORS AREN’T PLAYING the same game or even following the same rules as news publishers. And monetization comes a lot easier to those who’ve already cultivated a big online audience. Choi did so over the past decade, first with his flashy car collection. He created his Instagram in May 2016, when he was just 16 years old, and used it at first like a fan account for his “baby”: a steel-grey Audi. “RS7 just chillin' at my school, 😂” he captioned an image of the car in front of what appears to be The Buckley School, a private Sherman Oaks prep school where tuition for the 2026-27 academic year runs more than $66,000. 

Over the next several months, he documented the car wrapped in electric blue, smashed up, and reassembled again. Choi was undergoing his own transformation, too, testing out his new brand: A wealthy Valley kid with a YOLO mandate. “I'm doing 100 mph somewhere in Long Beach listening to dancing queen with no fuel left in the tank. Welcome to my life 😂,” he captioned a photo of a speedometer in November of 2016. Three months later, he celebrated his first Instagram milestone: 1,000 followers. 

When he launched his YouTube channel, in July 2017, he began posting videos on a near-daily basis. In one, he modifies a Fiat 500e to “do donuts,” he wrote in the caption. In another, he uses nitrous oxide to blow up a (presumably decommissioned) police car in what appears to be his own warehouse-like garage. But by far his most popular video to date came later that same month, when he uploaded dashcam footage of his Lamborghini passengers, all of whom appear to be fellow high schoolers or even younger, reacting to his driving as if they were riding a terrifying roller coaster. It’s since clocked more than 14 million views. 

The YouTube videos that garnered the most views often involved some combination of speed, collisions, or confrontations. It may have been with this in mind that Choi began tuning into police radios and racing to crime scenes several years ago. 

“He would basically hang out in South L.A. and he made friends with one of our guys down there,” said Raishbrook, who adds that Choi had questions about working in the field, including about how to acquire a press photographer license plate from the DMV. The specialty plate is intended to identify members of the media and potentially offer quicker access to emergency scenes, but it “honestly doesn’t do anything,” Choi said in the recent Instagram video of his black Porsche, which is outfitted with one. 

Raishbrook, 50, knew that Choi had a massive following, and he figured the two could learn something from one another: He wanted to get better at using social media to showcase his footage and promote his company; in exchange, he showed Choi how to program his high-end police scanners and advised him on which neighborhoods to avoid because he thought they were too dangerous.

Raishbrook saw, in Choi, a glimmer of his industry’s radical future. He knew that the profession  the way he practiced it was dying.

“He was turning out these 10-second, 15-second clips in a very distinct style, you know, using a flashlight to highlight what's going on in the image and doing a very brief narration over the top of it and he'd get like a million views. I'm like, ‘What the heck is this kid doing?’” said Raishbrook. “We've never shot anything vertically, he comes along and it is just astonishing to watch.” 

By 2024, CHOI HAD zeroed in on a subject that traditional stringers like Raishbrook typically ignored because it wasn’t considered newsworthy: Seemingly intoxicated drivers. In one such video, which appeared on Choi's popular but since-deleted Snapchat account, a young woman appears to have fallen asleep in her car at a McDonald’s drive-thru. “Hello? Are you ordering? I’m trying to get my Chicken McNuggets,” says a voice from behind the camera. The woman, clearly confused and caught off guard, puts her hand over her face and yells at him to stop filming. But the camera keeps rolling, the voice behind it repeating: “I want my McChicken.” 

Another Snapchat clip that went viral: In June of last year, a man broke into an Exposition Park car dealership and drove a showroom Corvette into a glass wall, apparently while attempting to steal it. Then he wandered around the office nonchalantly until police arrived to arrest him.

Other scenes are darker. Last July, Choi posted footage to his Snapchat story of a California Highway Patrol SUV wrapped around a tree in Culver City. “When he did not answer his radio calls and other officers were sent to go find him, he was found unconscious, stiff, and purple,” he captioned it. The L.A. County Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed seven months later what Choi likely heard on the police scanner and ultimately reported that night on Snapchat: the officer’s cause of death, leading him to lose control of the vehicle, was a fentanyl overdose.

The same month as Choi captured the aftermath of the fatal CHP collision, he showed up to another crash site to capture the carnage. More than 30 people were injured after a man drove his Nissan into a crowd gathered outside the Vermont Hollywood nightclub in East Hollywood, reportedly after he was denied entry to the venue. Choi uploaded the horrific scenes of bloodied bodies to his Instagram story. 

At least a portion of the footage, which shows outraged bystanders dragging the driver out of the vehicle and beating him to a pulp before the police arrived, appears to have been shot by an eyewitness, not Choi himself. 

His online critics worry that in Choi’s quest to get the perfect piece of content, he could be putting himself, or others, in harm’s way. They cite a 2018 video of Choi drifting his Lamborghini onto Mulholland Highway and nearly causing a head-on collision with a passing motorcyclist (Choi apologizes in the video, which has since been viewed more than 1 million times, and says the motorcyclist was in his blind spot). 

The following year, Choi received a torrent of negative press for posting a video seemingly filmed from the backseat of a Tesla driving on the highway on autopilot. “It’s very easy for somebody in a position like this to say that they're just putting on a show and not doing anything that is actually illegal, even though they're very explicitly glamorizing reckless driving,” said Gilboy, who called Choi a “notoriously reckless YouTuber” in a 2019 blog post he wrote about the video. He’s since stopped covering the auto industry after becoming disillusioned with it.

In 2022, Choi again drew ire for a stunt involving a Tesla: He posted a video of a driver soaring into the air above ultra-steep Baxter Street in Echo Park, losing control of the vehicle, and careening into two parked cars. Jonathan Sutak, who lived in the neighborhood at the time of the crash, later told CBSLA that he was infuriated by influencers like Choi, whom he said perform potentially fatal stunts in exchange for YouTube engagement. “It was super dangerous for them and for us," Sutak told ABC7. 

In a video he uploaded to his YouTube channel, Choi said he didn’t know the driver and didn’t have anything to do with the stunt, which took place following a Tesla driver meet-up that Choi had organized. After the LAPD caught wind of the video, they reached out to Choi as an eyewitness, said Detective Juan Campos, but without much luck: “I don't think he ever cooperated with the investigation.” The driver, who abandoned the rental car and took off on foot, was never charged in the hit-and-run. 

IN JUNE  2024, CHOI made headlines once again: He was arrested and federally charged with one count of causing the placement of an explosive or incendiary device on an aircraft. The criminal complaint, constructed in large part from a video that has since been deleted from Choi’s YouTube channel, titled “Destroying a Lamborghini With Fireworks” offered one of the first public glimpses into how Choi generates income. It also shed light on his company and the level of strategy involved in the production of his content. 

“We messed up 1 really important shot I wanted to get. The helicopter pilot said he would only charge me 700 dollars if I wanted to re-shoot it next week, since he will be out there for another job,” Choi allegedly texted his contact at the camera company that sponsored the video, according to the criminal complaint. “If you guys can’t cover that, I'll pay out of my own pocket… and I'm driving to Las Vegas next week to buy some more fireworks.”

The complaint, which identifies Choi by his birth name, Suk Min Choi, also references his corporation. It was registered in California in 2020 and lists its business type as YouTube content creator. The residential address listed on the paperwork is for a mansion perched in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and West Hollywood. According to an online listing of the sprawling gated property, it features a tennis court, a swimming pool, and a garage with space for more than two dozen cars. The owner of the property, according to public records, is Choi’s mother. 

Public filings show that Choi’s mother, like her son, also established a corporation in 2020. Hers was aimed at sourcing and exporting COVID-19-related protective equipment from Korea and Southeast Asia. The company’s website also boasts connections to the Korean pharmaceutical and production industries. 

After Choi’s arrest, his mother posted his $50,000 bond, court records show. Choi then entered a 12-month pretrial diversion program that, upon completion, resulted in dismissal of the charges. “If we think that somebody was sort of worthy of going through a particular program and staying out of trouble, then that will end up dismissing the charges,” said Ciaran McEvoy, a public information officer at the  U.S. Attorney's Office in California’s Central District. “When the situations apply themselves where somebody is qualified for this and is willing to go through the program, we can be flexible and make sure that justice is done but this guy doesn't necessarily have a felony conviction on his record.” 

While participating in the diversion program, Choi began to pursue breaking-news content more aggressively. In January 2025, as the Palisades Fire tore through the area, Choi garnered positive press in Reuters — and agreed to the rare interview — for his viral content. According to the article, his Snapchat video of a Palisades man using a garden hose to protect his home from the flames garnered more than 670 million views. 

In the months that followed, Choi posted videos of anti-ICE protests, looters being arrested, and immigrant detainees as seen through the small vertical windows of a downtown LA detention center. And by the summer of last year, Choi was offering on his Snapchat account a buffet of local car crashes and PSA-like captions warning against drinking and driving. 

Though Choi once bragged about evading police, he now works with them directly. Earlier this year, Choi collaborated on an Instagram post with the California Highway Patrol’s office in the East Bay city of Hayward. The roughly 60-second video, set to an upbeat Bruno Mars song, includes a montage of drivers getting out of their cars, turning around, and putting their hands behind their heads as officers point guns in their direction. The vibe is Cops, but for people with short attention spans. 

The California Highway Patrol’s Hayward office had invited Choi on a ride-along resulting in social media content, public information officer Nicole Mendibil wrote in an email. She said neither party received monetary compensation: “The intent was simply [a] mutual opportunity to highlight the professionalism and dedication of our personnel while sharing the realities of law enforcement work with [a] broader audience,” she continued. “We also recognize the value in inspiring individuals who may be considering a future career in law enforcement.”