A Burglar's Guide to the City (5 page)

This was an ideal opportunity, I thought, to witness how the Air Support Division could put its unique perspective to work in establishing the outer spatial edge of an event such as this, identifying, assessing, and describing the streets, directions, and nearby properties where, if the woman fled, she was most likely to end up. This was the anticipatory geography of crime, where the helicopter crew’s job was to preempt any possibility of escape: to guess where the suspect might go next and to have police officers there waiting. This looked like a particularly interesting case because the street grid here was “out of sync,” in the tactical flight officer’s words, with the rest of the city. On top of that, she pointed out, the immediate neighborhood was also punctuated by strange, L-shaped streets and culs-de-sac, not only presenting a unique geometric problem for the tactical flight officer but giving her a narrative challenge in relaying which bend in a certain street she wanted a patrol car to head toward. (Her directions would be misunderstood more than once, leading to audible frustration on both sides of the radio.)

The tactical flight officer kept coming back to the name of the woman who had barricaded herself inside the house; she seemed distracted by it. The name had reminded her of something, she said, but she couldn’t quite figure out what it was; I began to imagine that we were circling over one of the LAPD’s most wanted criminals. While radioing down to an ever-increasing number of patrol cars filling the streets below, carefully arranging them like chess pieces throughout the neighborhood, the tactical flight officer kept saying the woman’s name out loud, like a mantra, again and again.

Then it struck her. “Isn’t that the girl from
Where the Sidewalk Ends
?” I thought she was making some sort of cryptic comment about the nature of the city down below, where any demands for walkability had long ago ceded the landscape to a metastasis of parking lots and home-improvement warehouses, but she was simply recalling the classic Shel Silverstein book.

“‘Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout,’” the officer said, almost singsong, “‘would not take the garbage out,’” and then she and her pilot were back on the radio, lining up cops, organizing a perimeter two, three, four, even five streets away. I laughed, hearing in her voice an unexpected weariness, if not actual boredom, as police officers fanned out through the neighborhood below, slinking into backyards, occupying the spaces between buildings, even posting a sniper up on a residential carport across the street from the barricaded home. This wasn’t high drama for the tactical flight officer, let alone an opportunity to catch one of L.A.’s most elusive outlaws. “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout,” she muttered again, looking down at the world beneath us. “I wonder if she’s ever read Shel Silverstein.” She was peering through binoculars as she said this, but actually appeared to be focusing on the mountain landscape to our immediate north. I got the impression this was the last thing in the world either she or the pilot wanted to be doing.

The feeling here—that armed home barricades and tactical police geometries coordinated from above in order to lock down an entire neighborhood were such run-of-the-mill activities that they inspired memories of a children’s book by Shel Silverstein—only increased when the pilot suddenly widened his orbit. We had been flying in a nauseatingly tight circle over the suspect’s barricaded home, and the change in pattern helped clear my head. The pilot called my attention to a huge Oakland Raiders logo extravagantly tiled into the bottom of someone’s swimming pool. “Do you see that?” he deadpanned. “There’s probably half a dozen of those around here. If we get out of here early enough, I’ll show you some more. Some people must really like football.” He didn’t sound excited by this; he sounded bored.

Later, when we were back on the ground, I would learn he was a die-hard ice hockey fan and that, a year earlier, when the L.A. Kings had won the Stanley Cup, he’d flown the trophy around the city as a ride-along in his helicopter, strapped into the back with seat belts. He took the Stanley Cup all over Greater Los Angeles for two and a half hours, in a kind of aerial victory lap, all the while following suspicious vehicles, tracking suspects, and responding to calls. It sounded like one of those early-medieval paintings of knights shocked into conversion to the Church by divine visions of hovering chalices shining inexplicably in midair—a kind of Roman triumph at one thousand feet, as if blessing the city from above—only here it was a professional-sports trophy gleaming above the city like a religious vision brought to you by the LAPD.

My point is simply that, for all the tens of millions of dollars spent on helicopter patrols over Los Angeles each year, the possibly more disconcerting reality is that you probably
aren’t
being watched. Those sinister government forces swirling around you like Valkyries are, as likely as not, flying with a headache over neighborhoods they’ve already seen so many times that they’ve been reduced to studying the tiles in someone’s swimming pool, or even helplessly ticcing on riffs from children’s books as nearly unbelievable suspect names come buzzing through on the police radio.

It’s hard to know which is more dystopian: the idea that your every move is being studied by occasionally malign figures of anonymous government authority, or that everything you’ve done in the public sphere has for years now been secretly recorded for no particular reason, by people who would rather be doing almost anything else, in an apotheosis of archival bureaucracy that you yourself pay for through tax.

I was reminded of a study I’d once read about surveillance-camera operators in the U.K.; an anthropologist had gone to work in a CCTV control room for a season to see what life was like “behind the screens” (the title of the paper). While most Brits are convinced they’re living through the rise of an all-pervasive surveillance state, being filmed from every conceivable angle at every time of day, the reality was far more diffuse and disorganized. In a particularly stark example, one security-room supervisor admitted that he would arrive at work each day and, first thing, train one of the cameras away from the building he was being paid to protect in order to watch his own car out in the parking lot. He would make himself a cup of tea, read the morning’s sports pages, and spy on his car against possible breakins.

Despite these reservations, the expense of patrolling Los Angeles from above is easy enough to justify. The city is huge. Whole regions would otherwise never see a patrol—roadless ocean cliffs, mountain fire trails, desert parks, and meandering canyons, to name but a few. The Air Support Division ensures that a huge terrain can be protected and served by the LAPD.

This claim is supported by, of all people, NASA, who nearly fifty years ago commissioned a broad study on the aerial policing of Los Angeles. That NASA was involved suggests that L.A. was considered so alien both to police officers and to scientists that it resembled the landscape of another world. There is Mars, there is the moon, and there is Los Angeles.

The resulting report, called “Effectiveness Analysis of Helicopter Patrols,” drawing on research by NASA’s Pasadena-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory, was published in July 1970. The basic goal was to discover, through empirical testing, whether specific urban forms are more appropriately patrolled from above. Do certain types of cities require helicopter patrols—and if so, what are the inflection points that could push a metropolis over this limit, from ground-based policing to a need for light aircraft? Had Los Angeles crossed this threshold?

NASA’s answer at the time was
yes
—albeit specifically in the fight against auto theft, and even more specifically limited to L.A.’s West Valley and University divisions. Nonetheless, NASA optimistically concluded not that helicopters should replace ground-based policing but that “the helicopter-car patrol team affects almost three times as many arrests as the city as a whole per reported offense.” A similar study has not since been undertaken, with the effect that evaluation of the performance of aerial police patrols, to a fairly large extent, relies even today on the good word of a crime study published in 1970. A May 2013 investigation by Los Angeles public radio station KPCC came to a slightly more damning conclusion: the Air Support Division “reviews its statistics every couple of months, but it never analyzes those numbers to determine the helicopters’ effectiveness,” instead leaving it up to the vagaries of self-assessment to say whether the division is still doing a good job.

Nevertheless, fast-forward half a century since the NASA study, and L.A. now has the largest police helicopter force in the world. Is there something about Los Angeles—how it was designed or the topography it covers—that leads to certain kinds of crimes, as well as to a particular method of policing? In the 1990s, for example, L.A. became the bank robbery capital of the world, as well as a city globally known for its televised car chases. Could there be a connection between the two?

Los Angeles as Police Utopia

My primary guide for understanding the Air Support Division was Tactical Flight Officer Cole Burdette, whom I unfortunately never had an opportunity to fly with. Burdette is originally from Michigan, though he is now thoroughly an Angeleno. He is observant, focused, and extremely detail oriented; he would frequently restart entire paragraphs of explanation about something until he got the exact narrative sequence correct, and only then would he move on to his next point or answer. Those answers were also astonishingly exact in their geographic references: he would bring up precise intersections and even business addresses somewhere out there in the sprawl of the city, and he never once referred to a map. Each pinpoint location would then serve a specific role in Burdette’s ensuing explanations—sometimes even five or ten minutes later—as he attempted to make clear why a certain crime or event had unfolded in one way and not another.

It was obvious right away that Burdette had turned himself into a kind of one-man atlas of the city, possessing a vision of Los Angeles that rivals—in fact, exceeds—that of any urban geographer, city planner, or local architect. His knowledge of the terrain is both geographically extensive and highly granular, the product of thousands of hours of flight time, reconciling the constantly moving map of the city displayed on his helicopter’s monitor with the actual streets tangled below. Dressed in his olive-green flight uniform and sporting a military-style haircut, Burdette walked me through the Air Support Division HQ on a quick tour, our final destination a classroom-like space lined with whiteboards where we could talk about burglary and the city.

Los Angeles is a fundamentally different kind of place, he explained, from New York or Chicago—or even San Francisco—with their skyscrapers and deep, canyon-like streets. Those dense clusters of high-rises and towers make thorough aerial patrols nearly impossible, as well as potentially dangerous and economically unnecessary. Out here in Los Angeles, however, you simply cannot see the whole city if you rely solely on ground patrols. Limiting yourself to roads—that is, thinking merely in two dimensions, like a driver—is clearly not going to work. As a cop trying to anticipate how burglars might use the city, you have to think three-dimensionally. Volumetrically. You have to think in a fundamentally different spatial way about the city laid out below, including how neighborhoods are actually connected and what the most efficient routes might be between them. After all, this is how criminals think, Burdette explained, and this is how they pioneer new geographic ways to escape from you.

I asked him, if he could redesign the city from the perspective of an LAPD tactical flight officer, what he would add or change to make his job easier. Burdette exhaled. What would be great, he finally said, would be a consistent application of the city’s numbering system, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and then, as if channeling Mike Davis, to paint large identifying numbers on the roofs of building complexes, such as schools and hospitals. If those sorts of buildings could be numbered in a clockwise direction, starting with the entry building, he explained, then the job of a helicopter crew in directing officers to a specific structure deep in the sprawl of the city would be almost infinitely easier. When I asked what he meant when he said that a more consistent application of the city’s grid would be useful, he told me about the rules of four.

The idea of studying the urban and architectural—even numerical—visions of police is by no means new or unique to my own research. Thomas More’s
Utopia
is a foundational text in the peculiar genre of describing the ideal metropolis; it is equal parts political theory and moral treatise, with a strong undercurrent of speculative design. What is the perfect city? More asks. What would it look like and how would it work? As it happens, one of the book’s earliest passages is a reflection on how to prevent not just crime but specifically theft and robbery in a perfect society.

Prior to writing
Utopia
, Thomas More was undersheriff of London. He was a cop. It should come as no surprise, then, to see that an LAPD tactical flight officer or, for that matter, an FBI special agent might also dabble in large-scale spatial thinking, where visionary law enforcement becomes its own strange form of architectural or urban design. After all, they belong to a distinguished lineage: More’s
Utopia
shows that police visions of the metropolis are integral to the Western literary tradition. Indeed, the possibility that a twenty-first-century
Utopia
might yet be written by a retired police helicopter pilot or by an FBI bank-crime investigator is oddly compelling, even if, as with More’s own classic text, it is unlikely that every aspect of their ideal city would appeal to everyone’s taste.

Using the rules of four, Burdette told me, he could navigate to basically any building in Los Angeles. It was as if some secret code had been found hidden within the city’s addressing system, an occult arithmetic uncovered by police helicopter crews to cast a spell over the metropolis below. In reality, the rules of four fall somewhere between a rule of thumb and an algorithm, and they allow for nearly instantaneous yet accurate aerial navigation. Using them, Burdette explained, he and his pilot could fly from edge to edge of the entire metropolis, reading the streets below like the scanning arm of a hard drive—then swooping down into that shining grid wherever a crime had occurred.