I find it interesting that the question is "why don't they use drones". My question is: why so much air surveillance? I live in Germany. The only times I hear a helicopter is if someone is being rescued or if someones missing. I rarely see them at all.
There are high speed police chases (100mph+) in Los Angeles — no exaggeration — on an almost daily basis. Air support is the primary defense tool for law enforcement.
It's so bad that the local TV stations have their own choppers and a dedicated on-screen UI tailored for the chases with GPS-based tracking and speed.
They get away from time to time from the airship. Two in one week this past august and I don't think they ever caught the suspects. One drove under an overpass and fled on foot, the other entered LAX airspace which requires waiting on clearance from ATC and got away somehow after that. I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
> I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
Hitting a car going 100mph with a magnetic dart that and getting it to hit on a metal part, not a window or trim, and specially a steel panel, is not easy at all.
This got me curious so I went out on the street and held a magnet to the front passenger door of the first 6 parked cars I came across. The magnet stuck to 4 of them. The ones it did not stick to are a Nissan Rogue and a Jeep Sahara 4xe.
Unless the cars are perfectly washed and clayed, even running a clean finger over a car is likely to introduce scratches. I just wouldn’t ever touch someone’s car.
You can look up people even trying to detail their cars to make them cleaner and end up leaving “love marks.” It doesn’t matter how soft the thing you’re using is. It’s because the car has contaminants on it and by rubbing anything on the car, those contaminants end up scratching everything. It’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re trying to remove sand off your skin. You’re probably not aggressively rubbing it off or using much pressure but it still hurts. It’s the same with cars, it’s just that the rocks aren’t as visible to you. They will leave swirls and scratches though… which become noticeable.
I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail.
Possible but it seems like the chases are not even a US problem but more a "certain places" problem. I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
> I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
Seriously? It's from people not wanting to be arrested and go to jail. If they get away, perfect. If they don't, well, they were going to jail anyways. Now they have a cool story to tell while in jail. These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign. These are people doing dirt, know it, and are willing to try something to avoid getting caught. It's really not complicated
The cause of the behavior (as phrased when asked) is not wanting to go to jail. Asking why people are in situations where they are committing crimes that could land them in jail is a totally different question. Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction.
There is this perception that if you drive fast and recklessly enough the police will quickly stop following you. It's a get-out-of-jail-free card in popular perception.
I wonder how much of the high-speed chase "scene" is actually fuelled by all the hoopla. (TV broadcasts of soccer/football matches tend not to show streakers on the field for this reason)
Personally I prefer Fox 11's coverage of these chases. The guy they have up there is fun to listen to and always sprinkles in comparisons to past chases.
I mean in most other places people have simply realized that unless there is an immediate risk to life, the only thing high speed police chases do is create that very risk.
Nicely contrasts with all the news about the omnipresent license plate scanners - it's just pointless, don't take the risk, arrest them at your leisure.
I don't get this gotcha. The license plate scanner associates a plate with a location and time, it doesn't care for who drives it. In a chase, you know the plate, you don't know the location. Seems perfect?
Basically, letting them run away and then setting up a raid at their house the next morning is safer for everyone. If you can follow them from altitude well enough to do that, you reduce risk dramatically relative to either interception or chase.
> They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.
Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry? PIT maneuvers are extraordinarily dangerous, especially at high speeds.
That's underselling it a bit, IMO. You can look at an aerial map and observe that it's pretty big, but experiencing it in person ... it's enormous. It just goes, and goes, and goes, and goes ...
I suspect it has something to do with LA's large footprint. Comparing to where I'm from in Chicago, LA county is over 4x the land area with less than 2x the population:
Don't know how the math works out exactly, but if they don't have the workforce to cover their patrol area with squad cars, there's probably an argument to be made for covering gaps with areal support. Given that Chicago struggles with workforce shortages, I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if you had to cover 4x the area with half the tax base.
They bought them and spent a lot of money on supporting infrastructure and are therefore compelled to use them when they chase a middle aged drunken homeless man through a neighborhood.
Where in Germany though? Helicopters tend to be more popular to use for various purposes in very densely populated places, like Hong Kong or New York City, but you don't really see them much in rural areas except for emergencies.
At least for Berlin I can attest that helicopters, outside of the yellow ones for emergency care, are a very rare occurrence. I have yet so see a police helicopter outside of a large demonstration.
On average, the city spent an average of $46.6 million on the program, the audit disclosed. It also found that there is limited oversight or monitoring of the division, its policies and practices and whether the program is in line with the city's safety needs. [...]
The department has 17 helicopters and over 90 employees. [..] The city operates their helicopter fleet on a nearly "continuous basis" [..] The total translates to more than $2,900 per flight hour. [...]
Additional findings in the audit disclosed [..] 61% of the flight time was in fact dedicated to low-priority incidents like transportation, general patrols and ceremonial flights — like a fly-by at a local golf tournament, roundtrip transportation of high-ranking LAPD officers between stations and passenger shuttle flights for a "Chili Fly-In."
Living in LA, the LAPD helicopter noise really is incessant.
It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.
I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.
Down in SD at least, the sheriff's office helicopters serve many purposes. They'll use them for firefighting, hike rescues (often! according to their IG), first responder to an aviation accident, loudly shouting garbled messages through their loudspeaker, etc.
There's just enough high-speed/timely crime here that I prefer they use these over drones. There's some extra legal protections built into helicopters that drones don't get, like prison time if some idiot points a laser pointer.
I seriously doubt that physically rescuing hikers or delivering first-responders to plane crashes represent a large percentage of LAPD helicopter missions. I live in a nice suburb and there's one of them circling over it probably weekly.
I don't see why large drones can't do most of what these helicopters are doing. They're using needlessly expensive helicopters, too.
It's absolutely worth looking at the ROI on these flights and weighing that against the intrusion on our privacy/freedom. No doubt they'll always need drones and helicopters but I'd be surprised if there was any real need for them to be in the air that often. I think that's a question that should be asked everywhere but the LAPD in particular are terrible enough that it makes this a great place to start.
You're talking about technology that's only become realistic in the last couple years. Even then, there's probably nothing off-the-shelf that would serve the current need.
LAPD has been patrolling with helicopters for decades. I have yet to see a drone follow a car in high speed pursuit down the 5 at 100+ MPH.
As far as I'm aware, high speed drones tend to have quite short flight durations due to battery limitations. Drones that have the range to follow a fleeing suspect for a long time would probably have to be big enough that they could cause a fatal accident if they crash, and in that case I'd rather have a pilot on board. Better reaction time, no risk from jamming, much better field of view/awareness, decades of testing, etc.
> why do we allow high speed pursuit chases in the first place?
AFAIK they've changed their tactics in recent years, but growing up around LA these we're like sporting events on TV. It's a guilty pleasure, but almost everyone I know tuned-in and watched the chase.
Their popularity for viewers (even more so now with YouTube, but they’re long been a staple of live news and late night tv) and the fact that police like any excuse to do “badass” things are big parts of why they still happen. They’re a pretty bad idea. Endangering lives (including bystanders) over mostly relatively-minor crimes.
But people love ‘em, and if you point out what a bad idea they are people label you “soft on crime” (as happens with a lot of plainly good policy)
That depends on the drone. There are drones/UAVs that fly so high in the air you can't even see them seeing you from the ground. Even low flying drones would be very hard to hit from a car involved in a high speed chase, and it's not as if people can't shoot at helicopters which are both larger/easier targets and much more dangerous if brought down.
I was in Santa Monica - the dense part with all the alleyways - during a foot pursuit involving a heli. Felt like I was in vietnam. It was at night, they were pretty low, and that light felt like the sun coming into the building.
Ad in the bottom left covers the UI when expanding the menu out.
I'm sure it depends on screen resolution etc but I'd love to be able to click links to the data sources.
Overall an interesting idea. I'd love to know the data source for the cost of the operation of the aircraft. Would be really interesting to connect a database of all aircraft types then present the ability to watch the cost of like "all American Airlines flights currently flying" or "all US military aircraft".
LAPD flies quite recklessly especially downtown, where they aren't even clearing the buildings. News choppers fly much higher, well over the skyscrapers, and have no problems getting very tight shots on whatever subject there is down there.
If you follow them on ADS-B you see they really aren't used that frequently at all for calls and end up in holding patterns with nothing to do really before flying somewhere else for a new holding pattern, until their shift is up presumably.
This is the kind of government waste that needs to be highlighted. Police forces consume a massively disproportionate amount of resources from our cities.
Lawsuits are most of the money in LA. Juries love to think they're sticking it to the police, but it just comes from a different fund that extracts from a lot of other departments. The LA City Controller is making great attempts at outreach: https://controller.lacity.gov/data
During the summer of 2017 Denmark flew hourly surveillance helicopters and military SIGINT aircrafts over Copenhagen to stop Sweden-like gang shootings. It was expensive but worked.
What are the necessary capabilities? My city has no helicopters or drones. There's a medical chopper that flies over my house regularly, but it has an obvious purpose.
Unfortunately standard practice for LAPD is to engage in a dangerous police chase along with the helicopter, not to simply follow with a helicopter.
They don't really use them for hit and run. How could they? Think about how fast that crime occurs and how much time will pass between that incident and vectoring a helicopter, which might be tied up on other work.
Less than 20% of hit and run cases are even solved in California (1). I'm sure the rate is even lower in a city like LA.
It does, but I would be very surprised if the LAPD knew its place or cared to keep it there to prevent it from wandering into places that are totally unnecessary and expensive invasions of our privacy.
I was wondering because I remember the last time I lived in Los Angeles in 2009 I went to a Lakers championship parade and talked to one of the cops assigned to crowd control, and asked about it when a helicopter flew overhead. She told me it's a great job a lot of them try to get because even 20 years ago they were starting out at something like $215,000 a year and were not expected to have any flight experience. The city just trained up regular patrol officers and tripled their pay.
The way they fly you can tell they don't have a lot of flight experience. Really low compared to news choppers following the same pursuit. Juvenile even, at times (1-4)
Roughly a dollar a second which if you are a theater kid you know is about
$31,536,000 mil a year.
Honestly not that bad considering it provides a real service. I mean how much does the city spend on lawsuits against corrupt cops and other employees. According to the budget something like $300 MILLION on lawsuit payouts last year alone.
Who gives a $hit about the helicopters. Build an app that tracks the employees causing these lawsuits that are still keeping their jobs.
People know what to do to get away from the helicopter and they have been successful at it. Two chases in one week this past august the suspect shook off the helicopter and got away. It is as easy as driving under an overpass or into protected airspace. In one case this past month, they followed a suspect all the way into san diego and allowed them to cross the border into Mexico where they were lost.
Blue Thunder wasn't just B-movie conspiracy theory paranoia porn but also contained a warning about technology authoritarianism and invasion of privacy, and police over-militarization.
I find it interesting that the question is "why don't they use drones". My question is: why so much air surveillance? I live in Germany. The only times I hear a helicopter is if someone is being rescued or if someones missing. I rarely see them at all.
There are high speed police chases (100mph+) in Los Angeles — no exaggeration — on an almost daily basis. Air support is the primary defense tool for law enforcement.
It's so bad that the local TV stations have their own choppers and a dedicated on-screen UI tailored for the chases with GPS-based tracking and speed.
If you're lucky you can catch one of the many YouTube live streams. Here's one from....two days ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/uGiJU-FlpdE
They get away from time to time from the airship. Two in one week this past august and I don't think they ever caught the suspects. One drove under an overpass and fled on foot, the other entered LAX airspace which requires waiting on clearance from ATC and got away somehow after that. I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
> I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
Hitting a car going 100mph with a magnetic dart that and getting it to hit on a metal part, not a window or trim, and specially a steel panel, is not easy at all.
There's a lot more aluminum than steel on car exteriors these days.
This got me curious so I went out on the street and held a magnet to the front passenger door of the first 6 parked cars I came across. The magnet stuck to 4 of them. The ones it did not stick to are a Nissan Rogue and a Jeep Sahara 4xe.
Decided to scratch up some peoples' clear coats for a little science experiment?
Could I have damaged the cars even though I saw no signs of damage?
It would be nice if someone else with knowledge would chime in here. If this damages cars, then I want to know, so I can stop doing it in the future.
Unless the cars are perfectly washed and clayed, even running a clean finger over a car is likely to introduce scratches. I just wouldn’t ever touch someone’s car.
You can look up people even trying to detail their cars to make them cleaner and end up leaving “love marks.” It doesn’t matter how soft the thing you’re using is. It’s because the car has contaminants on it and by rubbing anything on the car, those contaminants end up scratching everything. It’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re trying to remove sand off your skin. You’re probably not aggressively rubbing it off or using much pressure but it still hurts. It’s the same with cars, it’s just that the rocks aren’t as visible to you. They will leave swirls and scratches though… which become noticeable.
I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail.
They already have darts for this that use adhesives to stick to any part of the vehicle and shoot out from the pursuing vehicles
OK, one with a big glob of bubblegum on it then.
What happens when they miss and hit you in the head instead?
The actual darts for this don't look that far off tbh: https://www.toledoblade.com/local/police-fire/2016/04/06/GPS...
It would have to be a very special dart. Cars are mostly aluminum and foam. A piercing dart would be dangerous and a magnet would really work.
Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.
Some steel body panels. Much of a car is made of plastic/urethan type materials, hoods are usually aluminum, some bodies are all aluminum....
These exist!
https://www.thedrive.com/news/police-tag-fleeing-cars-with-g...
https://www.starchase.com/products/vehicle-mounted-gps-launc...
Then why do you have so many car chases? That seems like an odd problem. There must be a reason.
I have only been to Germany once, but my assessment was that we have a very different population here.
Possible but it seems like the chases are not even a US problem but more a "certain places" problem. I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
> I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
Seriously? It's from people not wanting to be arrested and go to jail. If they get away, perfect. If they don't, well, they were going to jail anyways. Now they have a cool story to tell while in jail. These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign. These are people doing dirt, know it, and are willing to try something to avoid getting caught. It's really not complicated
I think they're asking why there's such a large population of people willing to commit crimes and then get into high speed chases.
The cause of the behavior (as phrased when asked) is not wanting to go to jail. Asking why people are in situations where they are committing crimes that could land them in jail is a totally different question. Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction.
There is this perception that if you drive fast and recklessly enough the police will quickly stop following you. It's a get-out-of-jail-free card in popular perception.
police will chase in the US for really any reason, kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine
john oliver did a whole thing on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw
> There are high speed police chases (100mph+) in Los Angeles — no exaggeration — on an almost daily basis.
How is anyone driving at that speeds in LA traffic?
Like an asshole. We've all seen them, even if not in a chase. It may not be 100mph+ the whole time, but when there's open air, they'll get there.
I wonder how much of the high-speed chase "scene" is actually fuelled by all the hoopla. (TV broadcasts of soccer/football matches tend not to show streakers on the field for this reason)
Personally I prefer Fox 11's coverage of these chases. The guy they have up there is fun to listen to and always sprinkles in comparisons to past chases.
This YouTube video is missing a Kavinsky soundtrack.
I mean in most other places people have simply realized that unless there is an immediate risk to life, the only thing high speed police chases do is create that very risk.
Nicely contrasts with all the news about the omnipresent license plate scanners - it's just pointless, don't take the risk, arrest them at your leisure.
Worth noting that many people who run from the police also have fake or stolen plates.
I don't get this gotcha. The license plate scanner associates a plate with a location and time, it doesn't care for who drives it. In a chase, you know the plate, you don't know the location. Seems perfect?
So your proposal is to just let the criminals run away? And that somehow won't embolden them further?
"Once this baby hits 88mph, we're home free!"
Air support is used to coordinate with law enforcement up ahead to deploy spikes to end the chase.
You are just repeating empty political talking points that simply don't work in the real world.
Basically, letting them run away and then setting up a raid at their house the next morning is safer for everyone. If you can follow them from altitude well enough to do that, you reduce risk dramatically relative to either interception or chase.
> They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.
Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry? PIT maneuvers are extraordinarily dangerous, especially at high speeds.
Buddy, most of these are stolen cars. Do you think they are driving them home and parking it in the driveway?
If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home.
>Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry?
I've heard cops say something similar on body cam footage.
If they're eluding cops at 100mph and being a danger to the public, it's because they're being chased by cops...
But well, it's America, having the risk of a stray cop bullet hitting you because just like car chases, shootous are inevitable, makes it safer!
just like so many things that work in every country but the US apparently
A lot of departments terminate chases very early
They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.
In many cases, the driver is not associated with the plates, with the car and/or plates being stolen.
John Oliver recently did a segment on police chases
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8
> I live in Germany. The only times I hear a helicopter is if someone is being rescued or if someones missing. I rarely see them at all.
Same for me, but I live in America.
The specific location matters a lot. The LA area is more population dense and bigger than might be obvious.
To put it in perspective, the GDP of the LA area is about 1/4 as much as the GDP of your entire country.
> bigger than might be obvious
That's underselling it a bit, IMO. You can look at an aerial map and observe that it's pretty big, but experiencing it in person ... it's enormous. It just goes, and goes, and goes, and goes ...
I suspect it has something to do with LA's large footprint. Comparing to where I'm from in Chicago, LA county is over 4x the land area with less than 2x the population:
https://www.comparea.org/r122576+r396479
Don't know how the math works out exactly, but if they don't have the workforce to cover their patrol area with squad cars, there's probably an argument to be made for covering gaps with areal support. Given that Chicago struggles with workforce shortages, I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if you had to cover 4x the area with half the tax base.
They bought them and spent a lot of money on supporting infrastructure and are therefore compelled to use them when they chase a middle aged drunken homeless man through a neighborhood.
Where in Germany though? Helicopters tend to be more popular to use for various purposes in very densely populated places, like Hong Kong or New York City, but you don't really see them much in rural areas except for emergencies.
At least for Berlin I can attest that helicopters, outside of the yellow ones for emergency care, are a very rare occurrence. I have yet so see a police helicopter outside of a large demonstration.
I live in a pop 200k city, hospital copters are a daily occurrence. Police? Never seen one, Hamburg, one of our biggest cities, apparently has 3.
Same for me. I live in a pop 1M city in America. Hospital choppers are fairly common. Police choppers rare.
Also, according to the tracker, there's only one airborne in LA right now, and it is a pretty large city. It's close to 100x bigger than a 200k city.
In a big city. Not rural at all.
It's not about results per dollar. It's about sending a message.
The police state needs to enforce its dominance.
Don't give them ideas.
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/audit-says-lapds-use...
$5 per person per year then. Or, the price of a can of coke per person per month.
Much of which flows directly back into the local economy through wages spent and maintnance paid.
Living in LA, the LAPD helicopter noise really is incessant.
It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.
I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.
As someone who lives in central LA and has them circle my neighborhood frequently, actually shaking my house, I think this is awesome.
These needs should be filled by drones. Way less noisy, dangerous and expensive.
Down in SD at least, the sheriff's office helicopters serve many purposes. They'll use them for firefighting, hike rescues (often! according to their IG), first responder to an aviation accident, loudly shouting garbled messages through their loudspeaker, etc.
There's just enough high-speed/timely crime here that I prefer they use these over drones. There's some extra legal protections built into helicopters that drones don't get, like prison time if some idiot points a laser pointer.
I seriously doubt that physically rescuing hikers or delivering first-responders to plane crashes represent a large percentage of LAPD helicopter missions. I live in a nice suburb and there's one of them circling over it probably weekly.
I don't see why large drones can't do most of what these helicopters are doing. They're using needlessly expensive helicopters, too.
LAPD doesn't conduct rescue operations or anything like that. Different helicopters are used from different agencies.
Idk, having a bunch of government surveillance drones doesn't really sound great... Maybe we just don't need this level of surveillance at all?
It's absolutely worth looking at the ROI on these flights and weighing that against the intrusion on our privacy/freedom. No doubt they'll always need drones and helicopters but I'd be surprised if there was any real need for them to be in the air that often. I think that's a question that should be asked everywhere but the LAPD in particular are terrible enough that it makes this a great place to start.
why LA is spending thousands/hour when drones exist is crazy.
You're talking about technology that's only become realistic in the last couple years. Even then, there's probably nothing off-the-shelf that would serve the current need.
LAPD has been patrolling with helicopters for decades. I have yet to see a drone follow a car in high speed pursuit down the 5 at 100+ MPH.
On the other hand, I have seen drones chase down F1 cars at 100+ MPH...
Realistically though, I agree with your sentiment. Solving this would drones would require a constant flock of something more akin to Predator drones.
The better question is - why do we allow high speed pursuit chases in the first place?
As far as I'm aware, high speed drones tend to have quite short flight durations due to battery limitations. Drones that have the range to follow a fleeing suspect for a long time would probably have to be big enough that they could cause a fatal accident if they crash, and in that case I'd rather have a pilot on board. Better reaction time, no risk from jamming, much better field of view/awareness, decades of testing, etc.
> why do we allow high speed pursuit chases in the first place?
AFAIK they've changed their tactics in recent years, but growing up around LA these we're like sporting events on TV. It's a guilty pleasure, but almost everyone I know tuned-in and watched the chase.
Their popularity for viewers (even more so now with YouTube, but they’re long been a staple of live news and late night tv) and the fact that police like any excuse to do “badass” things are big parts of why they still happen. They’re a pretty bad idea. Endangering lives (including bystanders) over mostly relatively-minor crimes.
But people love ‘em, and if you point out what a bad idea they are people label you “soft on crime” (as happens with a lot of plainly good policy)
The MQ-8 would be cheaper to operate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_MQ-8_Fire_Sco...
In what way would that be cheaper to operate? You'd just replace a pilot with a few pilots and a few teams of software engineers. Maybe fuel savings?
Pretty sure these can't be bought by municipalities. Would make more sense to operate them though.
Why do we need to follow a car in a high speed pursuit and force it to go 100mph on uncontrolled streets is the better question
The person “forc[ing] it to go 100mph” is in the car being chased.
Chased by what? It isn't a lion they are running from. It is a police interceptor egging them on to go 100mph.
I think they’re overwhelmingly being chased by a police vehicle after a lawful request to pull over and stop.
The fleeing driver is choosing to turn that lawful stop into felony fleeing/eluding if they choose to attempt to flee at triple digits.
This is very much an “it takes two to tango” situation.
Without both of:
- A driver willing to flee the cops.
- A cop willing to chase at dangerous speeds
The high-speed chase doesn’t happen. Both make it happen.
Couldn’t someone take out the drones pretty easily?
That depends on the drone. There are drones/UAVs that fly so high in the air you can't even see them seeing you from the ground. Even low flying drones would be very hard to hit from a car involved in a high speed chase, and it's not as if people can't shoot at helicopters which are both larger/easier targets and much more dangerous if brought down.
I was in Santa Monica - the dense part with all the alleyways - during a foot pursuit involving a heli. Felt like I was in vietnam. It was at night, they were pretty low, and that light felt like the sun coming into the building.
Ad in the bottom left covers the UI when expanding the menu out.
I'm sure it depends on screen resolution etc but I'd love to be able to click links to the data sources.
Overall an interesting idea. I'd love to know the data source for the cost of the operation of the aircraft. Would be really interesting to connect a database of all aircraft types then present the ability to watch the cost of like "all American Airlines flights currently flying" or "all US military aircraft".
sorry probably got covered by the ad - data source is the hourly from the city controller https://controller.lacity.gov/landings/lapd-helicopters which says $2,916 per flight hour
This was circulating recently and is sort of funny:
https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/1oolm68/lapd_he...
LAPD flies quite recklessly especially downtown, where they aren't even clearing the buildings. News choppers fly much higher, well over the skyscrapers, and have no problems getting very tight shots on whatever subject there is down there.
If you follow them on ADS-B you see they really aren't used that frequently at all for calls and end up in holding patterns with nothing to do really before flying somewhere else for a new holding pattern, until their shift is up presumably.
This is the kind of government waste that needs to be highlighted. Police forces consume a massively disproportionate amount of resources from our cities.
Lawsuits are most of the money in LA. Juries love to think they're sticking it to the police, but it just comes from a different fund that extracts from a lot of other departments. The LA City Controller is making great attempts at outreach: https://controller.lacity.gov/data
Looks like there's supposed to be a map, but it only loads the very top edge... occasionally redrawn.
Hm, now on reload it shows a whole map... but if you zoom in it resets it and zooms out by itself at intervals.
Seconded, I thought it was just me
What is the ROI?
During the summer of 2017 Denmark flew hourly surveillance helicopters and military SIGINT aircrafts over Copenhagen to stop Sweden-like gang shootings. It was expensive but worked.
Would using drones nowadays end up being much less expensive but with all the same necessary capabilities for police work?
What are the necessary capabilities? My city has no helicopters or drones. There's a medical chopper that flies over my house regularly, but it has an obvious purpose.
Being able to follow a car involved in a hit and run and intercept them when they stop without restoring to what could be a dangerous police chase.
Aerial surveillance has it's place.
Unfortunately standard practice for LAPD is to engage in a dangerous police chase along with the helicopter, not to simply follow with a helicopter.
They don't really use them for hit and run. How could they? Think about how fast that crime occurs and how much time will pass between that incident and vectoring a helicopter, which might be tied up on other work.
Less than 20% of hit and run cases are even solved in California (1). I'm sure the rate is even lower in a city like LA.
1. https://attorneyatlawmagazine.com/legal/opinion/dragged-and-...
> Aerial surveillance has it's place.
It does, but I would be very surprised if the LAPD knew its place or cared to keep it there to prevent it from wandering into places that are totally unnecessary and expensive invasions of our privacy.
This doesn't seem to work properly in Mac Safari. The map is blank except in a thin stripe at the top.
My first question was how much of this is labor, and from the chart provided at the bottom of the helpful link provided elsewhere (https://controller.lacity.gov/landings/lapd-helicopters), it appears to be around 60%.
I was wondering because I remember the last time I lived in Los Angeles in 2009 I went to a Lakers championship parade and talked to one of the cops assigned to crowd control, and asked about it when a helicopter flew overhead. She told me it's a great job a lot of them try to get because even 20 years ago they were starting out at something like $215,000 a year and were not expected to have any flight experience. The city just trained up regular patrol officers and tripled their pay.
The way they fly you can tell they don't have a lot of flight experience. Really low compared to news choppers following the same pursuit. Juvenile even, at times (1-4)
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/1oolm68/lapd_he...
2. https://www.threads.com/@kilodelta/post/C5m373ZOX9Q
3. https://preview.redd.it/jcfdph3aiczf1.jpeg?width=1164&format...
4. https://preview.redd.it/dl7lqa2blbzf1.jpeg?width=1206&format...
This is neat but also has serious implications for criminal enablement.
no it doesnt. this data is public all over the place. most notably https://www.flightaware.com/
Cool. And yours is simpler and doesn't require looking up what the identifiers are for LAPD in particular. Just own it.
I found the list of identifiers with a single google search. For any criminal who cares, it is a tiny amount of additional effort.
Why? Helicopters already are on ADS-B.
Roughly a dollar a second which if you are a theater kid you know is about $31,536,000 mil a year.
Honestly not that bad considering it provides a real service. I mean how much does the city spend on lawsuits against corrupt cops and other employees. According to the budget something like $300 MILLION on lawsuit payouts last year alone.
Who gives a $hit about the helicopters. Build an app that tracks the employees causing these lawsuits that are still keeping their jobs.
People know what to do to get away from the helicopter and they have been successful at it. Two chases in one week this past august the suspect shook off the helicopter and got away. It is as easy as driving under an overpass or into protected airspace. In one case this past month, they followed a suspect all the way into san diego and allowed them to cross the border into Mexico where they were lost.
Blue Thunder wasn't just B-movie conspiracy theory paranoia porn but also contained a warning about technology authoritarianism and invasion of privacy, and police over-militarization.