How Aerial Surveillance Has Changed Policing — and Crime — in Los Angeles

Lived in Reseda when "Crazy Ed" Davis was in charge and Manson's Creepy Crawly team was at work. Always found those choppers/lights were a buzz but all told, ineffectual. LAPD watched themselves on TV too often.

I have developed a nervous condition as a result of constant helicopter surveillance in my neighborhood, near a 101 freeway ramp. As it says in the article, these guys are in the air 21 hours a day, and they circle directly over my street multiple times an hour most hours of the day and night. Yes, it's important to reduce crime and catch criminals, but this is insane. Many nights locals are on Twitter discussing the circling copters, use of Nightsun, etc, keeping us all awake for hours, once (according to an LA crime beat account) in the pursuit of someone who had shoplifted. It seems like someone on the ground could handle this without the war zone tactics. I am looking to move.

I am shocked that the writer of this article completely disregards the impact that these helicopters (and other, non-police-related air traffic) have on the quality of life throughout L.A. If you live anywhere other than Beverly Hills and its Westside sibling neighborhoods, the deafening drone of helicopter wings and their blinding lights shining in your bedroom window at 3:00 am is a ubiquitous daily experience. I have left L.A. where I was born and raised, and I have no intention of going back. Helicopters, and all that they stand for, are one reason why.

Go live in Los Angeles County, then subtract the police from the equation and see what kind of an environment you end up with?
All the hand wringing liberal commenters below would be the first to express 'outrage' and bleat like cattle when their house is broken into and ransacked by one of those drug and alcohol induced 'noble victims' of racial bigotry and poverty.

I lived in Brentwood from 2001 - 2010. It's interesting that I rarely heard a helicopter in my wealthy neighborhood.

One of the true negatives of life in LA. I live in a low crime area of Pasadena which nonetheless feels like a war zone with the brain numbing roar of frequent helicopter flyovers.

Did the author mention that skyscrapers in LA are built -- by law -- with a flat top so police helicopters can land on them in an emergency. The law was repealed just last year.

The whine of a helicopter overhead is exceeded only by the whine from the ground.

A hilarious paean to Cartesian thinking! I once worked in Vegas on a film and my duties took me to the video surveillance center of a casino where the observers had a smug impression that they had a totalized perfect understanding of the gambling floor. Then I befriended some extras who ran a card counting gang on the side, designed to thwart the surveillance by substituting card counters and players in a rotation that kept the video guys looking at the wrong suspect.

We can rest assured that these helicopter crews are easily deceived, led on wild goose chases, and telegraph their activities very clearly to street level criminals. Law enforcement may think they are running an Panopticon, but in essence they are running a theater piece for the public, one that emphasizes the drama of bright lights and sound effects. It's an action movie literalized onto the grid of LA, an offensive, expensive, and often overproduced Bruce Willis comedy thriller.

Lillibet's mom here, horning in on her account again. In 1975 I was living with my boyfriend and his sister's family on a cul-de-sac in a well-off section of North Hollywood. It was late evening, and suddenly we heard what sounded like the approach of the apocalypse outside. We rushed out into the front yard to find a police helicopter hovering over the area, just above our neighbor's house, while a few marked cars came screaming into the street and vomited out a bunch of armored cops, who went flying up to the house. After they broke in, and after what seemed like an interminable time, the helicopter flew away and the cops drove out. Turned out the neighbor was away on vacation and had left a relative to watch the place, and another neighbor had called the cops after seeing movement and lights in what they thought was supposed to be an empty house. Thank God it was a white guy, or they might have murdered the poor relative first and asked questions later; those were the Ed Davis days, when the cops were even worse than under Darryl Gates. At any rate, it seemed a huge fuss and expense over what could have been a mundane B & E. The militarization of police, as with so many other trends, began not after 9/11 but in California.

I’m writing from LA as an LAPD helicopter runs a slow patrol at about 350 feet in height above our home in West Adams. We have on average 14 to 20 of these passes a day. They are loud and low and very disruptive to our community. We have been told that the majority of these flights are part of a patrol route, one that allows the Air Division to engage with predictive policing as you describe, but they simply function most of the time as a squad car in the sky. I don’t think this is how policing should work: we can’t see the officers, we can’t talk to them, they have no idea who we are. It might as well be a 5000lb drone.

The community here is very tight and we are good at noticing problems in our area. Our crime is fairly low as a result. We really need more officers in cars and on bikes that we can communicate with, share a cell phone number, and call when we see something going wrong.

I understand helicopters are a necessity of modern policing, but we need to have an independent inquiry into their use as crime prevention tool. At what point do we draw a line at the use of what many feel is a military method (and listening to soldiers that return from Afghanistan who promote personal contact with communities, not a very good one at that).

Interesting as an artifact of a failing culture, unable to address social issues of poverty and racism.

Very very nice, & informative writing Mr. Manaugh. This was a very enjoyable read. Thank you

One thing I have never missed about leaving LA is the constant drone of police helicopters overhead and their spotlights at night. Useful, yes, but they lend a dystopian feel to the city.

A whole article on aerial policing without mentioning drones? How about the always-on balloon-based surveillance currently used by our military to "replay" which truck stopped to lay that IED, and where it drove home. In the next several years cities much smaller than LA will be able to afford these sorts of surveillance.

We lived for years against a nursery property, and as soon as we moved in, neighbors taught us to go inside and lock everything up when the helicopters came over with the floodlights. Criminals would ditch cars in the nursery (open area with plants, easy to run through) and come out in a residential neighborhood on the other side. Our kids as toddlers learned to point and say Po-Po! and come inside. The best was when a criminal unwisely chose to try to hot-wire the car of a neighbor. . . who was a sheriff about to go to work.

Enjoyed this article. Well researched. Well written. Those helicopters, I hear one now as I write this...

Nice of example of police overkill: all that for one lousy DUI? Why does the slightest road incident require three separate police agencies (state, county, local) and paramedics, as I have see here from time to time? Do the authorities prefer to gather in mobs?