"In the erstwhile world capital of teenagers, where
millions overseas still imagine Gidget at a late-night
surf party, the beaches are now closed at dark, patrolled
by helicopter gunships and police dune buggies."
Down there. Three or four suspects in a Toyota with
red stripes. A copper dot swiftly moving across the
grid of streets pushing two cones of light. "Code
415" - suspects might be armed. The Aerostar Helicopter
suddenly banks sideways, swoops down and appraises
its prey like a vulture moving in on carrion. Abruptly
stopping its dive, the Aerostar shifts into a spiral.
120 MPH attack speed. The G-force presses the flesh
on your face against the skull, blood shoots into the
brain. Under the cabin the search light ignites. A
white beam briefly skims the ground, catches onto the
car speeding south on Vermont Avenue and locks onto
it. "Gotcha," Officer Knott growls.
Dave Knott is one of sixty officers of the Air Support
Division, the helicopter force of the Los Angeles Police
which patrols this megalopolis from the sky. Dave Knott
is part of a myth. The pilots of the ASD are futuristic
cowboys in fire-retardant flight suits riding over
the neon prairie of Los Angeles in their souped up
choppers. In a dive they drop down from the night sky
above the urban terrain, light up whole blocks with
their search lights, frisk the streets with their infra-red
sensors and high powered cameras, corral fleeing suspects
like cattle through the city streets until the ground
troops can nail them down and put on the handcuffs.
In Los Angeles the helicopter cops have been an institution
for years. The staccato drone of the helicopter are
to LA what the screaming sirens of police cars are
to NY.
The copper colored Toyota doesn't give up. It runs
red lights as it careens through traffic. "Why
don't you just give up, stupid." Dave Knott whispers.
In the 35 years of hunting criminals the ASD never
lost a car. The Toyota is as good as caught. The area
around it livens up. Pilot Frank Provenzano does helixes
over the moving car. Dave Knott keeps the search light
on it and radios every turn to the police below. One
squad car is tailing the fleeing suspects, then two
then three: police come from all directions. It's a
caravan of red and blue lights led by the suspect copper
Toyota.
Just before the highway the Honda changes its mind
and stops at a curb. Immediately police surround the
vehicle. Imperceptibly through the glare of the spotlight,
cops can be seen drawing their guns from behind the
cover of their opened car doors. One by one four youths
come out of the car hands high up in the air as they
are made to lie face down upon the ground spread eagle.
"Everything's under control," the ground
troops report. "Four arrested, one 9mm found."
The Aerostar banks away.
One shift of a helicopter crew lasts two and a half
hours. From nine a.m. until four in the morning there
are always at least three helicopters in action. Guarantees
seamless coverage from the air. On this early Saturday
evening, Dave Knott and Frank Provenzano, disperse
three gangs, pursue two cars down the highway involved
in armed robberies, inspect the scene of a rape, light
up the battlefield aftermath of a gang shoot out and
search a park for the murderer of a boy in a school
yard.
A quiet shift they assure me. That's why they have
enough time to show me their beat - South Central and
Watts.
The beam of the search light wandering along a row
of single story houses is as bright as daylight. Flying
low with the searchlight on is called "Patrolling"
- a kind of psychological warfare. "The gangsters
down there are supposed to have the feeling that there's
always someone looking over their shoulder." His
voice reduced to a mechanical squeal by the onboard
radio.
To convince the city of the usefulness of the helicopter
police the cops conducted a test at the end of the
1960's which proved that in areas with helicopter patrols
the crime rate was decreased by twenty percent. Ever
since then patrol missions have been a part of the
strategy to control the urban sprawl of Los Angeles.
And during the late seventies these patrols took on
a eerie technological dimension when NASA engineers
from the local Pasadena Jet Propulsion Laboratory -idle
when activity on the Apollo space missions started
cooling down- turned their prowess to coming up with
techno-strategies for newly blossoming urban warfare.
Frank Provenzano speaks on the radio. "Down there
is the intersection of Florence and Normandy where
the riots started," he says pointing out the side
window. This is where the first stores burned, this
is where the truck driver Reginald Denny was beaten.
All around the intersection are burned out buildings
which look like hollowed out teeth in a Blade Runner
landscape.
Back then Provenzano was flying the morning shift the
second day of the riots. "That was damned hard,"
he says. "Normally we use certain landmarks on
the ground for orientation, like schools, churches
or a MacDonalds' Arches. But there was fire everywhere
and we couldn't see through the smoke. Some of the
landmarks were completely gone." That's when the
infra-red equipment came to the rescue. "With
that we found snipers on rooftops," Dave Knott
remembers. "The rioters set houses aflame, smashed
hydrants and even shot at firemen. It was madness."
We fly back to the heliport, a concrete structure in
an industrial zone of Los Angeles set in the no mans
land between downtown skyscrapers and East Los Angeles.
In the past two and a half hours Dave Knott and Frank
Provenzano finished off more bad guys from above then
their comrades on the ground can do in a week. Longer
periods of time the helicopter cops can't stay up:
not only after three hours is the fuel gone , but under
such intense activity, the energy of the ASD cowboys
comes to an end. The dive, curve and rotations of these
flights places too much stress on the spine and circulatory
systems of its human operators. The physical stress
of this work along with the intense concentration needed
to psychology abstract the physical and human terrain
below chews up the officers capacity to fly for extended
periods of more than several hours. The abstract military-style
work, where the city is reduced to a system of coördinates
easily charted on a grid, divides the world into two
kinds of inhabitants: a world populated only by officers
and suspects. Still, helicopter cops know they have
a privileged job. Both have spent years in a patrol
car. "Up here nobody shoots at you," Dave
Knott says, adding "...at least nobody hits."
His laugh crackles across the in flight headgear. Frank
Provenzano lowers the helicopter precisely onto its
space on the tarmac, the copter's runners accurately
placed on markers painted on the ground. If he had
to he could land on a dollar bill. The airfield is
on the roof of this building: a concrete expanse the
size of a football field. On each side neatly lined
up sits the helicopters: the bulky Aerostars and the
slimmer Jet Rangers. Next to the helicopters is the
tower, below which stands the hangers. The "field"
is delineated with markings for landing the helicopters
punctuated by a string of landing lights.
The rotors gyrate through their last rotations as the
two cops get out of their seats. They look a little
sweaty and worn as they take off their helmets with
their dark smoke glass visors and integrated radio
gear. One has a decal of a vulture on it, the insignia
of this elite force. The 31 year old Dave Knott is
a bulky man with red cheeks and a blond mustache, next
to him Frank Provenzano, five years his senior, seems
almost frail. Slowly they swagger back to the control
tower, their leather holsters swinging with the weight
of their 9mm semiautomatic pistols. What would be a
police officer be without his gun, even if they never
need it up there? They go to the roll call room to
file reports and decompress while waiting for the next
shift to start. The room has the appearance of a club
house, lined on both sides with gray leather reclining
seats salvaged from first class passenger airliners,
made back in the days when air travel was still considered
a luxury. In the background drones a TV constantly
tuned to "COPS" or some similar live action
program or military documentary. The blaring video
offers a mirror to the work of the officers in this
club. Immediate and consuming yet at the same time
the images are experienced tangentially, remote, through
a veil of glass.
"Only very few of us have military training,"
proclaims shift commander Lt. Aikens whose gray hair
is cropped to millimeters. "We use the helicopters
as command and control centers in the air. That's why
our pilots need the eye and instincts of veteran beat
cops who know what's going on down there." Three
years in a squad car is a basic requirement to qualify
as a helicopter pilot for the LAPD ASD. Most have put
in more time on the ground and usually in the most
hazardous duty sectors of the city. "We can choose
from the best of the LAPD. We'd rather get a brilliant
police officer and train them to be a pilot, but to
turn a pilot into a police officer is next to impossible."
Not all helicopter cops are as friendly as Aikens,
Knott and Provenzano. Since the scandal around the
Rodney King beating the relations between the LAPD
and the press have been tense. One crew leaves the
room protesting as we enter. A lot of cops saw the
saw the riots surrounding the Rodney King verdict as
an attack on their whole profession. Officer Mike Doherty
tries to explain the mood of the cops to me, "I
myself was on patrol in South Central for years,"
he says, "This whole Rodney King thing just makes
the work that much harder. I feel really sorry for
the cops on the street. Now whenever a suspect complains
about mistreatment, all hell breaks loose." All
pilots know what he's talking about. LA has the lowest
police to civilian ratio of any major metropolitan
area in the world. This only adds to the siege mentality
critics often ascribe to the LAPD. Lieutenant Ken Hale,
a stern looking man whose features bear an uncanny
resemblance to Clint Eastwood's explains, "Since
the last budget cuts there are only 7600 officers.
Including desk and special assignment. And then people
wonder why the policeman on the street is under such
high stress."
Two and a half hours later we take flight again - the
next shift starts. Dave Knott and Frank Provenzano
want to show off their high-tech toys. Next to their
30 million candle power "Nightsun" searchlight
capable of illuminating a stadium is the high powered
cameras, which, from an altitude of 10,000 feet, can
identify the face of a suspect. The LOJACK search system
is used to detect stolen cars specially equipped with
a detection "bug". And the "Fluor",
an infrared video monitor, through which much of the
time copilot and observer Dave Knott watches ground
action, is operated by joystick. It's criminal hunting.
It's a video game. Up here, on this Saturday night,
all is in order. Down there are the cops and the bad
guys. Up here we exist the, the pointing finger of
the Law. There's high times in South Central. The monotonous
female voice in the headphones recites a litany of
atrocities. "Vermont and Slausson rape in progress,
two male suspects long black jackets. Manchester Avenue
robbery, gun with a banana clip, one suspect, blue
jacket, Latino. Sixty-second street drive-by shooting,
suspects around twenty, black car north bound on Western
Avenue." If the helicopter cops are not requested
they choose a case out of this endless list where they
can respond fast and feel their efforts can be effective.
This time we want to find the black car. "Down
there!" Knott says as he stares through his gyroscope
stabilized binoculars. Provenzano banks the Areostar
into a rotation. For a moment we circle above the car.
"False alarm," Knott radios. "This one's
too old." Too old? How could he see that from
400 feet above? Dave Knott laughs, "Because he
had a beer belly and he was wearing a seat belt. Gangbangers
usually don't wear their seat belts when they go on
a drive-by."
"Patrol car requests assistance." a disembodied
voice comes over the headgear. On Vermont Avenue two
gangs were involved in a shoot-out. Now the cops are
afraid some gangbangers are still lurking on surrounding
rooftops. "Thirty seconds," Provenzano responds.
It rarely takes the ASD longer than a minute to respond
to the scene of any call. In a dive we approach the
corner in question. Searchlight, rotation, Dave Knott
turns on the "Fluor." On the black and white
monitor people appear as bright white shadows, car
engine blocks glare white through the steel skin of
the body. The device detects temperature differentials
down to a tenth of a degree. Last week Knott found
a fleeing gangster. "He hid in a trash can. On
the first pass of our rotation we didn't see anything.
But by the second pass the heat from his body transferred
to the can and traced his outline on the container.
We just radioed down to the patrol searching the street.
Take the lid off the can, you'll find your guy inside."
Below the cops are surrounding a tarp. Knott is showing
me the scene on the monitor. The cops are white. Under
the tarp there is a figure traced in light gray. "This
one's been dead awhile," Knott explains, "he
lost so much body heat he only shows up gray on the
Fluor." Two minutes latter we find one of the
missing gangsters. He's crawling between the air shafts
of two buildings. You can barely make him out with
your eyes. But he couldn't escape the infra-red heat
detection ability of the Fluoroscope. Just before shift
end Knott and Provenzano disperse a garden party. You
can see them through the binoculars. Young black guys
in jogging suits and baseball jackets: the uniform
of the ghetto kids. "Can you imagine how many
guns these assholes out there have?" Dave Knott
asks me as he lights up the backyard with his Nightsun
beam. Over the radio he reports "Air Three to
dispatch. Party in backyard on the corner of Vermont
and Sixty-first. About fifty individuals, cars driving
up and down street at high speed. Problems possible."
Five patrol cars approach bringing festivities to an
end.
Provenzano takes us on a course downtown, mission accomplished.
It's not for nothing that they call the guys of the
LAPD ASD the "best of the best". Such an
effective helicopter patrol utilizing psychological
tactics coupled with high technology exists in only
one other place in the world: Belfast, Northern Ireland.
But there the helicopter don't belong to the police.
They belong to the British Army.
Mike Davis City of Quartz
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