the air-support division of the Los Angeles Police Department operates out of a labyrinthine building on Ramirez Street in the city’s downtown, near the Los Angeles River. A looming mass of utilitarian architecture tucked beside the 101 Freeway, the complex appears to have no real public face; here the view from the street matters little. Instead, like much of the city around it, the air-support division makes more sense when seen from above.
On the first of several flights I would take with the division over the course of the last three years, our helicopter lifted off into the haze of a July afternoon. The true bulk of the structure below us finally revealed itself. The building’s landing deck alone seemed nearly the size of an aircraft carrier’s, and from this new, elevated perspective, the headquarters indeed resembled a landlocked warship in the heart of the city; a half-dozen other helicopters were waiting there on the tarmac. The division began with a single helicopter in 1956, and it now has 19 in all, augmented by a King Air fixed-wing plane. The aircrews operate in a state of constant readiness, with at least two helicopters in flight at any given time for 21 hours of every day. A ground crew is suited up and on call for the remaining three, between 5 a.m. and 8 a.m. On weekends, considered peak hours, the number of airborne helicopters goes up to three, although in a crisis the division might send as many as four or five “ships†up at once.
The police had allowed me to fly with them so that I could see the world from their perspective. Through its aerial patrols, the division has uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of Los Angeles, one in which the city must constantly be reinterpreted from above, in real time, with the intention of locating, tracking and interrupting criminal activity. This also means that the police are not only thinking about Los Angeles as it currently exists. Their job is to anticipate things that have yet to occur — not just where criminals are, but where and when they might arrive next. They patrol time as well as space. In this sense, although it has been in continual operation for the past 60 years, the division has much to tell us about policing the cities of the future.
Soon after we were airborne, a call came in for helicopter support, and we diverted north, flying nearly to the mountains that separate Los Angeles from the deserts beyond. A woman had reportedly barricaded herself inside a house with a loaded 9-millimeter handgun. Why she had done this was not at all clear — and it would remain unexplained to us — but the police needed to set up a perimeter. They needed someone looking down from above.
A standard two-person helicopter crew consists of a pilot and a tactical flight officer, or T.F.O. The pilot steers, but the course is set by the T.F.O., who monitors as many as six simultaneous radio frequencies, including emergency calls from the ground, as well as chatter from other police helicopters and even passenger aircraft landing at Los Angeles International Airport. The constant buzz of layered voices, police codes and call signs was indecipherable to me, but the T.F.O. can decide in an instant if a given call is worth responding to. The pilot can change speed and direction significantly, accelerating up to 170 miles an hour, turning so sharply that the crew will sometimes arrive above a crime scene flying sideways, their bodies parallel to the ground. If none of the calls are worth answering, however, the crew might wander. Some T.F.O.s have a working knowledge of Los Angeles arcana to match that of the most veteran Hollywood tour guide, from the address of Charlie Chaplin’s old mansion to the location of the house used for exterior shots in “The Brady Bunch.â€
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A tactical flight officer surveying the scene in South Los Angeles following a robbery-in-progress call. Credit Kevin Cooley for The New York Times
This seemed like a particularly difficult case, however, because the street grid here was “out of sync,†Muro explained, with the rest of the city: The normally orderly numbering system didn’t apply, perhaps because the neighborhood was punctuated by strange L-shaped streets and cul-de-sacs. This presented a unique narrative challenge for her in relaying which bend in a particular street she wanted a patrol car to head toward.
Muro persevered, flying in an endless gyre over parking lots, freeway on-ramps and a confused tangle of empty streets, and I watched as a growing armada of patrol cars circled below. She patiently arranged them like chess pieces, forming a tactical geometry that locked down the entire neighborhood. It was real-time urban planning, as implemented by the police. Before we could learn the fate of the barricaded woman, however, we had moved on.
With the title of a book published 500 years ago, Thomas More coined a term we still use today for describing the ideal society. More’s “Utopia†is equal parts political theory and moral treatise, its arguments built atop a foundation of aspirational city planning. His panoramic survey of governance, public safety and crime, with its vigilant, top-down views of a megacity divided into districts with clearly defined canals, streets and squares, reads at times like a literary helicopter shot, as if we are passing over the roofs of an idyllic metropolis. We see forests and rivers, busy markets and residential neighborhoods — a well-ordered geography that More imagined would be governed by a nearly omnipotent political will, all in the name of the greater good. Before writing “Utopia,†More held a unique judicial position with broad responsibilities for governmental administration and municipal law enforcement: He was undersheriff of the City of London. For the last half-millennium, when we refer to the ideal city, we have been invoking an urban blueprint as imagined by a cop.
Crime shapes cities — even Paris, the “City of Light,†takes its nickname, according to one story, from streetlights first instituted as part of a 17th-century police operation — but the reverse is also true. Cities get the types of crime their design calls for. This logic extends even down to their bedrock: Tunnel jobs are almost unimaginable in granite-based Manhattan, for example, but the soft sedimentary rocks of Los Angeles — a former seabed — make it more susceptible to subterranean crime. Infrastructure also plays a major role in permitting or preventing entire classes of criminal activity. The construction of the city’s freeway system in the 1960s helped to instigate a later spike in bank-crime activity by offering easy getaways from financial institutions constructed at the confluence of on-ramps and offramps. This is a convenient location for busy commuters — but also for prospective bandits, who can pull off the freeway, rob a bank and get back on the freeway practically before the police have been alerted. The maneuver became so common in the 1990s that the Los Angeles police have a name for it: a “stop-and-rob.â€
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Looking west over Exposition Boulevard while flying above the University of Southern California. Credit Kevin Cooley for The New York Times
The built environment may inadvertently catalyze new forms of illegal activity, but this also means that the Los Angeles Police Department is constantly responding to criminal innovation with new forms of police work, often before the rest of the world even knows they might be necessary. With its campaign of ubiquitous aerial surveillance, Los Angeles is a kind of real-time R.&D. site for the world’s sprawling megacities, as they, too, try to manage the extralegal consequences of their newfound expansion.
After my first flight, Cole Burdette, the chief tactical flight officer, who supervises the training of all the other T.F.O.s, walked me through a quick tour of the headquarters, a dense warren of small corridors and stairways. Our final destination was a classroomlike space lined with whiteboards, where we sat down to talk about crime and the city. With his olive-green flight suit and a military-style haircut, Burdette, 50, could have passed for an Air Force officer. He was observant and detailed-oriented; he would frequently restart entire paragraphs of explanation until he arrived at the correct narrative sequence, and only then would he move on to his next point or answer. Those answers were also astonishingly precise in their geographic reference points. He would bring up exact intersections and even business addresses somewhere out there in the greater maze of Los Angeles, never once relying on a map. Each location would then serve a specific role in Burdette’s ensuing narrative — sometimes even five or 10 minutes later — as he tried to make clear why a certain crime or event had unfolded in one way and not another.
Los Angeles is a fundamentally different kind of place from New York or Chicago, he explained, with their skyscrapers and deep, canyonlike streets. Those dense clusters of high-rises and towers make thorough aerial patrols nearly impossible, not to mention potentially dangerous. In L.A., by contrast, you simply cannot see the whole city if you rely solely on ground patrols. Limiting yourself to roads is not going to work. The aerial perspective is crucial: You have to think in a distinctly volumetric way about how neighborhoods are actually linked and what the most efficient routes might be between them. After all, this is how criminals think, Burdette said, and this is how they pioneer new ways to escape from you.
Even the region’s flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city. The heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport, Burdette pointed out, has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city: Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes.
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Burdette’s own spatial understanding of Los Angeles easily rivals that of any urban historian, city planner or local architect. His knowledge of the terrain is the product of thousands of hours of flight time, during which he has had to constantly reconcile the moving map of the city displayed on his helicopter’s monitor with the actual streets below. But of course, Burdette has also had the help of advanced technology.
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The air-support division spots Los Angeles Fire Department activity over South Los Angeles, presumed by the pilot and the T.F.O. to be a car accident connected to a nearby house party. Credit Kevin Cooley for The New York Times
Over several more flights, each with a different combination of pilot and tactical flight officer, I was able to see this array of technical devices firsthand. Each helicopter, for example, contains a unit that picks up signals from LoJack tracking systems, which are used commercially as a tool for recovering stolen vehicles. During a slow spell one night, we drifted above a stretch of the 101 Freeway linking the streets of Hollywood with the San Fernando Valley, looking for stolen cars in transit. The T.F.O. intently watched the craft’s dashboard display, fishing for signals in the darkness. (To his apparent disappointment, we found none.)
Later, we tracked a possible stolen sedan, one not equipped with LoJack, using the next best technological assist: the helicopter’s spotlight, a blinding, 50-million-candlepower inferno justifiably known as the Nightsun. It has the effect of a colossal stage-lighting rig, implying high drama with its focused glow. “He’s going into the buildings!†the T.F.O. exclaimed. This meant the car was heading downtown, where the city’s dense core of skyscrapers would prevent us from following it. The driver wasn’t nearly as savvy as the pilot and T.F.O. thought, however. He soon exited the freeway — to drive straight home, we saw, followed by two squad cars and six motorcycle units that we had been directing all along. The driver was arrested in the street. After we flew away, we learned from radio chatter that it was simply a D.U.I.
On another flight, I was shown the FLIR, or forward-looking infrared camera. To demonstrate how it operated, my T.F.O. that night instructed his pilot to head for the beaches of Santa Monica. Almost at once, the FLIR monitor mounted in the cockpit lit up with the strangely beautiful thermal flare of human life: white-glowing forms walking along the beach or lying on dark blankets next to one another. We flew quite low to the water now as the T.F.O. explained some basics of infrared visualization, and I watched as apparently sleeping forms, white-hot, came into sharp focus, curled up beneath lifeguard structures. There was nowhere to hide, I saw; you could be concealed behind the trunk of a tree, yet an eerie aura would still surround you, shining like a halo. Looking out the helicopter window, I saw nothing but blackness, silky and absolute, up and down the beach in both directions. But when I peered back at the monitor, lights were moving everywhere, like fireflies.
