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.
The thing is: there shouldn't be. Car chases cause far more damage (including injury and deaths of bystanders) than the crimes that precede them do and "air support" is not a defense against that in any way.
Law enforcement operates in a position where they “can’t lose” an encounter. This is a major cause of rapid and unnecessary escalation with LEOs and the civilians they’ve stopped.
Very much so. Perhaps their training shouldn't explicitly use such language and work to increase that separation - LE training is notorious for teaching cops old and new that anyone/anything "not a cop" is not one of them, and is a threat or has threat potential.
Same reason that nearly every police response in the US is an armed response. Same reason police kill more Americans than terrorists do. US police culture is toxic and deadly. Several cities tightly restrict high-speed chases. That should be the norm.
My home town of Hamilton, Ontario (population 560k) recently made the news because a guy stole a bus, with passengers onboard, and started driving it through the city. It was newsworthy because he also dropped people off at their stops, and even rejected someone who tried to board with an expired bus pass. But what stood out for me in addition to all that was the police response. They quietly followed the bus, intentionally not using sirens to avoid “spooking” the guy. They waited for the right moment, boarded the bus and arrested him peacefully and without incident.
I recognize my little city is not like LA (which I’ve visited twice) - the types of crimes, the types of criminals and the prevalence of weapons are far different, although we also have our share of gun violence and murder. But we have also not militarized our police, and there’s very much a police culture of service to the community. Here, when a cop uses their weapon, it’s seen as a failure. This was a situation handled properly, and it made me proud.
Reminds me of the story where two guys went for a joyride in a Tram in Braunschweig (DE). They boarded a tram during the night, drove for a few stops (including letting passengers board & leave) and left the tram there.
The funniest part of the story is that they didn't commit any crime and were let go.
I'm Canadian and American, and have lived in both places and seen the stark differences myself. In the US, the police culture is certainly militarized and proud of it. Even in small towns you have days where the police roll out the biggest armored vehicles they have to show off, and that's their idea of a "community event", kids think its cool obviously, but it's really just "lets show off all of our high power toys".
Those high-powered toys by the cops are merely for showing off and to victimize the weak.
Those toys typically never come into play to protect the citizens.
Case in point: during the Uvalde school shooting incident in 2022, when a shooter (Salvador Ramos) went on a killing spree inside the school, then hundreds of cops gathered outside
with brand new body armor (gifted to them just months ago) and armed with automatic guns, but they never dared to go inside to tackle the shooter. Not only that, those cowardly cops actively prevented parents and state patrol officers from going in to rescue their kids. The cowardly cops were led by a cowardly police chief, who later gave excuses for the delayed response to the deadly situation and his mishandling of the police force, by claiming to have forgotten his walkie talkie!
Ultimately one of the border patrol officers and some US deputy marshalls (who had travelled 70 miles to reach the scene after getting an alert) managed to sneak in to the back, break the locked door, and used a tactical shield to corner and finally kill the shooter, thus ending his bloodbath (19 children and 2 teachers were tragically killed).
And if you think arming cowardly showoff cops with guns and armor is useless and potentially dangerous, you should know the Uvalde school shooter was a minor but he managed to buy the guns legally from a gun shop on credit!
That's how lax and evil the gun laws and resulting shootouts in USA are.
USA has more mass shootings and more school shootings than any other place in the world.
No wonder they facilitate and glorify high-speed car chases. It is all a thrillride for these adrenaline junkies high on power.
Restricted high speed chases lead to a lot more crime though there’s some car thief’s I’ve watched on insta and they avoid LA and stick to Oakland because of the chase laws you also have people in New York like squeeze benz, license, doolie, and a lot more who have made entire social media careers driving around recklessly and getting into crashes on freeways because they won’t get chased more than a mile there’s been a huge rise in “cutting up” in nyc because why not if you won’t get chased you can just remove your plate and do whatever.
Not sure why car chases are necessary to solve this problem. Just arrest these people in their homes. Those videos are enough evidence for arrest and conviction.
Start with the registered owner of the car and investigate from there. Follow it through the network of cameras that are already deployed around the city. If it was stolen from them, investigate the theft. In a large number of these chases the person is operating their own car.
Exactly, unless someone is in imminent danger there's basically no reason to do a high speed chase. Get the plate, track it on the thousands of ANPR cameras that exist, look up the owner and just knock on their door later on.
Like 99% of high speed chases only end when the culprit crashes their car, and often that's into someone else's car risking harm to innocent civilians.
That may be - it should be noted that criminals in the US are also much more violent and brazen then most of the rest of the planet. If your criminal population is packing heat the response tends to be much more aggressive. Its a bit cat and mouse.
This is a perfect summary of that "toxic and deadly" culture. Why are police treated as a dumb tool that will always respond to violence with more violence? Why is the onus on the criminals to deescalate the situation? Why doesn't the duty of enforcing the law come with a bigger burden to keeping the peace? And why do the police not have any culpability in violence they helped escalate?
Shooting people and high speed chases are bad tools for apprehending criminals. They are more likely to harm innocent people than criminals. Facing off with "violent and brazen" criminals doesn't change this, but also the fact that crime is down suggests US criminals are in fact, neither more violent nor more brazen than those in areas where police use less destructive methods.
This is not a fact. What is a fact is that many police departments stopped reporting crimes, so there are fewer crimes being reported, not that there are fewer crimes being committed.
There are myriad reasons why, but stemming the upward trend of reported violence makes politicians look better and we all know how honest politicians are.
Population density. In other countries they have a lot of motorcycle chases, and a lot more motorcycle based crime, but it's a crime of opportunity, which is created by highly dense and interwoven urban cores.
Berlin and Los Angeles _city_ both have 3.8 million residents. The greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area has 18 million residents. The greater Berlin Metropolitan area has 6 million residents.
It's not only dense but the scale is far larger than most European cities. Only Asian and South American cities outclass the insanity that is LA. Until you've been there it's hard to appreciate the scope of it.
The Greater LA areas has 34k square miles of area. Germany, the whole country, has 128k square miles. In other words, the LA area alone is a quarter the size of all of Germany.
A huge chunk of that is national parks and deserts. It's not all inhabited. Only about 25% is classified as urban with the overwhelming majority of that being concentrated in Los Angeles and it's surrounding cities.
This isn't a size measuring contest. I think Europeans forget how _young_ America is. That's the only unique part of this country. Give us a few thousand years and we'll be on par.
No it was a population density measuring contest and you were trying to argue that greater LA was more dense than greater Berlin, without defining greater Berlin in a rigorous way. The size of Germany relative to greater LA was brought up to attempt to put the population densities in perspective.
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
> These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign.
Although if you watched "Last Week Tonight" recently (S12 E28, 2025-11-02), Mr Oliver's long segment is about police chases and IIRC he covered more than a couple of cases where people were, in fact, being pulled over / chased for trivial matters which then lead to crashes, deaths, etc.
Of course they're not optional, but you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit. Principle of proportionality should apply, you shouldn't be risking the lives of the public over anything but the most serious offences where them getting away poses a greater threat to the public than potentially killing a bystander.
It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem. At least I would hope that the penalties for running away are very serious.
The police officers don't know why you are running away and can reasonably expect that there is something wrong other than an unbuckled seat belt -> a kidnapped person, tons of drugs in the trunk, a wanted murderer driving, etc.
Well at least in my country where chases are rare. I understand in US it is difficult since people are more eager to run away.
> It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem
Right, people are dumb. You can't just throw your hands in the air and declare a problem unsolvable because people are dumb and keep acting against their best interest; you acknowledge that fact and change tact accordingly. If it turns out that trying to pull people over for minor infractions causes 1% of those incidents to turn into violent chases then you should stop pulling people over for minor infractions and figure out a safer way to ticket them. At the very least you shouldn't chase after them in your car and add another dangerous vehicle to the road. It reflects a mindset of "get and punish the bad guys" being prioritized over "improve safety of your community," which pretty much sums up the culture problem with American police and criminal justice in general.
"you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit"
That would indeed be dumb, but once somebody dumb has decided to do that they're guilty of something much more serious and the car chase is completely justified.
> you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit.
That's the thing: normal people don't. Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
What about depressed people? What about stressed people? What about people with autism who overreact when spooked? What about people on the edge who didn't care about the consequences because of the life situation?
What about people who are convinced that police may kill them for mild violation as they saw that multiple times on the news and social media? The reaction to flee may be justified at the moment as it is life or death anyway, even if only in their heads.
There are a lot of "normal" people around who will act abnormally in a high stress situation.
Thank you for speaking to reality of situations that the majority of internet commenters never talk about. I think dang needs to put the HN member lock back on.
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.
Stealing cars (often at gunpoint) and driving them recklessly is an entertainment activity for young men with poor impulse control and little regard for human life. This kind of person makes decisions of comparable quality elsewhere in life that are probably incompatible with being middle class.
Can happen, but being miserable is a not a prerequisite to wanting to get high.
I think it fits a narrative to explain addictions away as something that happens to someone as a victim of their circumstances, but personal choices are a real input.
"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."
I'm going to guess... because we can? Police here are willing to chase for almost anything in most jurisdictions. I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
> I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
UK has stuff like [0] which contains a whole bunch of "is it worth it?" considerations. Also if a chase causes a death, the officer(s) can be prosecuted[1] - I suspect the nonsense of "qualified immunity" means there's no risk to a US officer for initiating a chase that ends in death.
> so why do americans have more high speed chases?
Off the top of my head: 1) US cops are more likely to harass, maim, kill you than most other places (whether you've crimed or not); 2) US legal system seems a little hinky when it comes to certain people; 3) "three strikes" (not sure if that's countrywide or state-level? pretty sure it's still around tho'?) can mean life for three trivial crimes; 4) car-centric country - lots of them and everywhere is designed for cars[0].
[0] Imagine a car chase around London[1] or some other wackily streeted city.
[1] No, the godawful nonsense Hollywood comes up with does not count.
California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies. The list is pretty reasonable IMO. No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
It's basically a list of violent crimes, the only one that seems out of pocket is selling PCP, meth, or cocaine to childre, which is bad but could arguably be less bad than the others on the list
Raping an unconscious person is not on the list of violent felonies. Neither is domestic violence with traumatic injury, assault with a deadly weapon, or felony battery with serious bodily injury.
> California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies.
But not all states are California.
> No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
William James Rummel begs to differ[0] - fraudulent use of a credit card ($80), forged check ($28.36), failure to return payment for non-performed work ($120.75) and voila, life sentence (albeit later reduced to time served on procedural grounds.)
[0] also references "Graham v. West Virginia, a 1912 case which involved an individual convicted of three separate counts of horse thievery total[l]ing $235" which ended up in a life sentence.
In summary, some states may have sensible 3 strike laws, some may not.
I would love to see more comprehensive stats to answer this question, rather than relying on cases studies you have to go back over one hundred years to find.
American police just like it. They start chase for any reason, even for a broken tail lamp. Also not a simple chaise, but one where they intentionally provoke a car crash, often with fatal results for innocent people.
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 wasn't driving at the time. Someone took my car."
There is generally no crime for owning a vehicle used in a crime. The violation belongs to the _driver_ and to no one else. Burden of proof can be extreme in US courts.
You don't need to be chasing them on the road. Attach a GPS tracker to the car and follow it with drone, collect surveillance footage and arrest them once they come to a stop.
They do have GPS dart launchers and other systems. They're fairly unreliable. It's difficult for the lead driver in a chase to deploy accurately and cars are typically dirty enough to make most adhesives ineffective particularly when deployed at highway speeds.
A hoodie is enough to defeat the drone surveillance, and regardless of what facial recognition technology you use, a jury still has to buy the output of that system.
For drones with less than a 6 foot wingspan that don't require a runway you've got maybe 30 minutes of flight time at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. So unless you know where they're going already you're not going to be able to effectively deploy it in the time necessary to capture them and you can't loiter long enough to track them with infrared.
The helicopter is an insurance policy. When you have a bunch of marked units doing twice the speed limit on a long enough chase they're going to hit something. Those crashes are devastating and lead to eye watering settlement amounts. The helicopter can safely chase most vehicles at almost any speed and the risk of them crashing with any civilian or even civilian property is effectively zero.
There seems to be a lot of variance in the percentage of police chases that involve stolen vehicles but the numbers seem to be in the range of 10% to 70% and even the low end of that isn't particularly low.
You also have the problem that if you steal a car and then run from the police the result is that they don't pursue you and send a ticket to the person you stole it from, that makes it a lot easier to steal a car, and then the percentage goes up.
True, but chases involving stolen vehicles (a non-trivial percentage of all chases) means that mailing a fine to the registered owner wouldn't be a universal solution.
> kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine
thing is, in Germany and many other European countries there's a mandate to register your place of residence with the authorities in a timely manner (i.e. 2 weeks after moving in).
Americans and Brits don't have that, so "mail them a fine" is most likely going to result in the letter not arriving where it should.
I can't speak to the UK but in California there are various rules around updating vehicle registration when you move. Enforcement is pretty lax unless you drive something with exceptionally high registration fees.
There's strong wording about updating voter registration when you move, but I doubt there's much in the way of actual law. If there is it's basically never enforced as far as I can tell.
Because our society is spoiled, averse to consequences, and addicted to pleasure. People cannot tolerate it when they don't get what they want. What they want (when being pulled over) is NOT to go to jail, hence, due their conditioning, they avoid the consequence. Up to and including bringing injury and death onto themselves and strangers.
It's insane this is downvoted when it's the truth. Again and again the person is running from something small, but that's not an indictment of the chase, it's proof of how freaking stupid and self-centered the subject is: they are willing to put dozens of lives at risk to avoid something like getting their car towed because they're driving on a suspended license. The officer chases them because they don't know why they're running (but it must be a good reason to risk picking up a felony), not because going after a suspended license is worth a chase.
We are seeing the result of a combination of factors including aversion to consequences and the inability to empathize with those they put at risk.
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)
In 2003, "Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn, along with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Chiefs’ Association and the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners sent a letter Feb. 26 to news directors of television stations asking them to consider reducing the amount of police car chase coverage they broadcast."
Officials asserted in their letter that live continuous coverage
causes dangerous police chases to be looked upon as entertainment,
and encourages suspects to flee in pursuit of instant fame.
“Dangerous suspects are acquiring instant celebrity status when they
recklessly evade police over our streets and highways. This form of
notoriety is life threatening and should not occur,” said Los Angeles
County Sheriff Lee Baca in the press release.
"There have been instances where drivers look out windows and wave. Many
[suspects] have made it abundantly clear that they’re enjoying the whole
thing,” said Julie Wong, director of communications for the mayor’s
office.
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.
Unfortunately, yes. Dropping a magnet onto a car and pulling it off, especially if not recently cleaned, will damage the paint to some degree. Maybe not enough for an average person to notice, but you really shouldn’t do this to other people’s cars.
Some people will get snide about anyone who cares about their car’s paint, but as someone who once bought a car I had to save a long time for and spent a lot of time with car care products I would be very sad if I saw you drop a magnet on to it and then pull it off without a second thought. Please don’t.
It won't really matter all that much, but it will have done more than 0 damage to the paintwork (since metal is hard and paint is soft). Worth noting that drivers are touchy and emotional, and can't be trusted not to murder you over perceived slights, so it's safest to stick to doing nothing. Stuff something under the windscreen wipers if you really must, and even that is risky.
As long as the car is dirty, then contact with it can damage the top coat. This is a lot more true if you need to drag or scrape the magnet to remove it.
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.
Cars spend a significant amount of time outside and they depreciate so quickly it just doesn't matter. One shouldn't expect a paint to stay perfect the same way we expect our skin to wear and age over the years.
I don't even know what a 5 stage detail means but I can safely say you are overreacting. A car is just a tool and a rando putting a fridge magnet or leaning against your car once in a while is just completely negligible compared to the amount of shit a paint is exposed to when driving it. Sand and dirt do not ask for your permission either.
Yeah we are talking pathological territory here. Car paints need less love than their owners need therapy if they have to "detail" their car every time a cat jump on the hood to enjoy the warmth.
> Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.
I never thought of my Olds Silhouette minivan as a high performance car. Neat.
The rubbery panels were great. I was at school pickup and another parent backed into it. They crushed the front fender to the firewall. Then they pulled up and it popped out.
They were freaked out but it was fine. And it's just a car.
Now this assumes that the LAPD/LASD/whomever actually cares to catch the suspect! In my (limited) experience with them, you could incinerate a full bus and they'd not blink an eye, but if you block the intersection at one of the many rush hours, that's a capital offense!
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.
That shouldn't matter, after all, even if the plate is legit, you can't just find a person's location from the database. They usually have some legal address or something, not live location.
So unless there's an immediate danger, there is no reason for chasing people and create dangerous situations. You can just follow them around from the severance cameras and catch them once they are no longer on the move. Even if you don't have disability for one reason or another, it still doesn't make much sense to engage in high-speed driving around people minding their own business.
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?
Perfect how? The license plate scanner can only tell that a particular plate number was in a particular place at a particular time. It doesn't know if the plate was fake or stolen, or who was driving the vehicle, or if there was contraband in the vehicle. Stopping fleeing vehicles is one of the most effective ways to catch people with outstanding arrest warrants and get illegal weapons off the streets.
I think the idea is, if you know where the car is and where it is going, you don't need to chase it openly on high traffic areas with high risk of accidents. You use restraint and take them at a safer place. (surely won't work all the time)
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.
"If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home."
I'm not sure that the cops pursuing people at those speeds is doing anything besides making the situation more dangerous. Police in the US are grossly undertrained, I wouldn't trust them to actually be competent at what is very technical and difficult driving.
One would think that basic firearm safety would be the bare minimum, since we pay them to carry a gun. However, I have had to vacate a shooting range 3 times due to police showing up and being unsafe with firearms. I have had this happen in 3 different ranges, where off-duty cops have shown up and proceeded to ignore basic safety rules like not flagging people with guns. I'm not dumb enough to try to give a cop a safety lecture, so I've always packed up my stuff and left. However, if they aren't even given enough training to not figure out to point their guns downrange instead of at the firing line, they aren't trained well enough to trust with something technical and difficult like a pit maneuver.
One of these times was at a CA range, they were socal cops. Training standards for police in the US are woefully low, most cops aren't able to hit the broad side of a barn given ideal circumstances. They agitate about how dangerous their job is, but they don't train like it is. They fire a few rounds a year and have absolutely horrendous marksmanship standards. Don't get fooled, your average cop has roughly zero idea on firearms safety or even how to use the darn things.
> If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home.
They would not even try to reach those speed if they weren't chased. A criminal who thinks he escaped the police will try to not attract attention. They would just follow the normal flow of the traffic and you can follow their path thanks to the millions of cameras and the helicopter mentionned earlier. We are not in the 70's anymore.
You can follow them from a distance they can't spot you so you can lock the road if they turn back and dispatch police force form in various exit points of an highway without starting an high speed chase.
High speed chase is about cops endangering the public for the thrill and adrenaline really. They do that because they like it, not because they need it to arrest criminals.
It's probably reasonable to take a step back here and ask: Why is this not a universal problem? It's not as if every juristication outside the US simply lets criminals run away.
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 ...
The greater LA area has Hollywood film and television and a lot of music stuff too. It has the 16th and 19th busiest container ports in the world (Los Angeles and Long Beach) [1]. It has the 11th busiest airport by passenger volume [2], and several other airports because that one isn't enough for the area. It has a pretty extensive computer industry. There's a lot of petroleum processing. There's a lot of agriculture. There's some financial services (many cities in the US are bigger in finance, but there's still a lot in the LA area). A pretty good amount of manufacturing. Several top tier universities. It drives a lot of tourism.
And then there's all the GDP that arises from the population itself: construction, healthcare, education, real estate.
If you take away the entertainment industry, it becomes a different place, but there's a lot of economic activity and most of it isn't film and tv and music production.
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're not usually doing surveillance on people, they're mostly used as a quick way to get eyes overhead when something else is happening--foot pursuit, high speed pursuit, just about anything really where an aerial perspective might be helpful. They can fly anywhere in LA pretty quickly.
> 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.
The difference between rich and poor is way bigger in the USA it's been growing and growing since Ronald Reagan, while in Europe it has stayed basically the same.
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.
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.
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."
That 46 million could be spent on education, transportation, aid for low-income families, the homeless, jobs programs, small business tax breaks, infrastructure renewal, public works, etc. According to the report, not only are they largely not used for anything productive, there's potential harms to both people and the environment. And as many have pointed out, the same work can be done with drones.
To drive this point further: The one stable causal relastionship relevant here is the one between inequality and crime. Reduce inequality in ways
0xbadcafebee suggested would reduce inequality - though probably not in sizes measureable after a few years.
The report is wrong. If you bother to watch LA news you'll see they are used a few times a night to track vehicles from the air. This frees up ground units and avoids high speed chases which saves lives.
It's fun to call this a waste of taxpayer dollars until you watch a carjacked vehicle recovered with kids inside.
Do you really need 17 helicopters and 90 employees for the occasional car chase? This feels wildly over the top. They could do that just fine with one third the resources.
Are you asserting that the report is lying, and that a majority of the flight hours aren't actually being used for all those mentioned low priority purposes? If so, is your assertion based on the helicopters being used a few times a night per television reports?
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.
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.
To those not familiar with LA or the USA, here’s a cultural time capsule from 2Pac circa 1996:
“ It's the, City of Angels and constant danger
South Central L.A., can't get no stranger
Full of drama like a soap opera, on the curb
Watchin' the ghetto bird helicopters, I observe”
Well the danger part has decreased a lot. It peaked at almost 100 per 10k people in the 90s, and now it's closer to 25. Still very high, but a lot of progress.
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 work with CHP helicopters as part of our fire district's rescue team. We pull a half dozen people a year off of one of the local trails (sometimes as "recovery"). Most of these are via helicopter. There are two helos for a huge area - Yolo county down to Santa Cruz county. By acreage it's a lot bigger than LA.
My point is, two small helicopters are more than enough to do that job as a side-gig from all the other CHP work they do.
Also, Cal Fire has its own air wing. LAPD helicopters are not equipped for firefighting.
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.
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.
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.
Most of the small high speed drones are that size to fit under professional licencing requirements, often so that one racing spec can be viable across a wider area.
Leading to significant competition in that size pushing down prices.
Rather than some inherent sized for safety idea.
Jamming might be interesting, I suspect that it's easy enough (and a much bigger crime) to follow a very loud jamming signal though.
Every practical metric a drone surpasses a helicopter; they are so much simpler to operate that you can easily offset any perceived downside with more drones. And you don't get a tested solution without trying it out.
> 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)
Kenneth Mejia, our progressive, data-driven controller audited LAPD helicopter use, and published his findings.
"The ASD program costs nearly $50 million annually while most of the flight time is not devoted to high priority events. Our audit found that the estimated annual cost to operate the helicopter program is $46.6 million (i.e., $127,805 per day or $2,916 per flight hour). There are 14 City departments whose annual budgets do not reach this amount;"
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
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".
It's just a matter of striking a balance between "what a waste" and "what a lack of law and order". So, like a pendulum swing, cut down all spending drastically, until people scream "where is government?" and then swing backwards, until they cry "what a waste". Keep swinging back and forth until you find the local minima. Wait, am I talking about gradient descent?
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)
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.
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.
That's if it's one helo at a time. If it spikes to 2+ then the numbers go up way faster. They have 16 total and I would assume 1/3rd can go up at a moments notice
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.
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
The thing is: there shouldn't be. Car chases cause far more damage (including injury and deaths of bystanders) than the crimes that precede them do and "air support" is not a defense against that in any way.
Law enforcement operates in a position where they “can’t lose” an encounter. This is a major cause of rapid and unnecessary escalation with LEOs and the civilians they’ve stopped.
I understand, but again, they shouldn't.
(This is why we want to abolish them)
Friendly reminder that LEOs are civilians as well— while they may dress like it, they are not military.
Very much so. Perhaps their training shouldn't explicitly use such language and work to increase that separation - LE training is notorious for teaching cops old and new that anyone/anything "not a cop" is not one of them, and is a threat or has threat potential.
Then why do you have so many car chases? That seems like an odd problem. There must be a reason.
Same reason that nearly every police response in the US is an armed response. Same reason police kill more Americans than terrorists do. US police culture is toxic and deadly. Several cities tightly restrict high-speed chases. That should be the norm.
My home town of Hamilton, Ontario (population 560k) recently made the news because a guy stole a bus, with passengers onboard, and started driving it through the city. It was newsworthy because he also dropped people off at their stops, and even rejected someone who tried to board with an expired bus pass. But what stood out for me in addition to all that was the police response. They quietly followed the bus, intentionally not using sirens to avoid “spooking” the guy. They waited for the right moment, boarded the bus and arrested him peacefully and without incident.
I recognize my little city is not like LA (which I’ve visited twice) - the types of crimes, the types of criminals and the prevalence of weapons are far different, although we also have our share of gun violence and murder. But we have also not militarized our police, and there’s very much a police culture of service to the community. Here, when a cop uses their weapon, it’s seen as a failure. This was a situation handled properly, and it made me proud.
Reminds me of the story where two guys went for a joyride in a Tram in Braunschweig (DE). They boarded a tram during the night, drove for a few stops (including letting passengers board & leave) and left the tram there.
The funniest part of the story is that they didn't commit any crime and were let go.
Story here (in German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/braunschweig-junge-ma...
I'm Canadian and American, and have lived in both places and seen the stark differences myself. In the US, the police culture is certainly militarized and proud of it. Even in small towns you have days where the police roll out the biggest armored vehicles they have to show off, and that's their idea of a "community event", kids think its cool obviously, but it's really just "lets show off all of our high power toys".
Those high-powered toys by the cops are merely for showing off and to victimize the weak. Those toys typically never come into play to protect the citizens.
Case in point: during the Uvalde school shooting incident in 2022, when a shooter (Salvador Ramos) went on a killing spree inside the school, then hundreds of cops gathered outside with brand new body armor (gifted to them just months ago) and armed with automatic guns, but they never dared to go inside to tackle the shooter. Not only that, those cowardly cops actively prevented parents and state patrol officers from going in to rescue their kids. The cowardly cops were led by a cowardly police chief, who later gave excuses for the delayed response to the deadly situation and his mishandling of the police force, by claiming to have forgotten his walkie talkie!
Ultimately one of the border patrol officers and some US deputy marshalls (who had travelled 70 miles to reach the scene after getting an alert) managed to sneak in to the back, break the locked door, and used a tactical shield to corner and finally kill the shooter, thus ending his bloodbath (19 children and 2 teachers were tragically killed).
And if you think arming cowardly showoff cops with guns and armor is useless and potentially dangerous, you should know the Uvalde school shooter was a minor but he managed to buy the guns legally from a gun shop on credit!
That's how lax and evil the gun laws and resulting shootouts in USA are.
USA has more mass shootings and more school shootings than any other place in the world.
No wonder they facilitate and glorify high-speed car chases. It is all a thrillride for these adrenaline junkies high on power.
You forgot the most insane part of this (or at least of the aftermath) - the police chief was re-elected shortly after!
Restricted high speed chases lead to a lot more crime though there’s some car thief’s I’ve watched on insta and they avoid LA and stick to Oakland because of the chase laws you also have people in New York like squeeze benz, license, doolie, and a lot more who have made entire social media careers driving around recklessly and getting into crashes on freeways because they won’t get chased more than a mile there’s been a huge rise in “cutting up” in nyc because why not if you won’t get chased you can just remove your plate and do whatever.
Not sure why car chases are necessary to solve this problem. Just arrest these people in their homes. Those videos are enough evidence for arrest and conviction.
add on to the fact that a city like NYC has a vast network of surveillance cameras
Who do you arrest? An abandoned car?
Start with the registered owner of the car and investigate from there. Follow it through the network of cameras that are already deployed around the city. If it was stolen from them, investigate the theft. In a large number of these chases the person is operating their own car.
If someone is tiktok famous for filming the evidence of their felonies, that's an enforcement problem.
Exactly, unless someone is in imminent danger there's basically no reason to do a high speed chase. Get the plate, track it on the thousands of ANPR cameras that exist, look up the owner and just knock on their door later on.
Like 99% of high speed chases only end when the culprit crashes their car, and often that's into someone else's car risking harm to innocent civilians.
The cars are usually stolen
That may be - it should be noted that criminals in the US are also much more violent and brazen then most of the rest of the planet. If your criminal population is packing heat the response tends to be much more aggressive. Its a bit cat and mouse.
This is a perfect summary of that "toxic and deadly" culture. Why are police treated as a dumb tool that will always respond to violence with more violence? Why is the onus on the criminals to deescalate the situation? Why doesn't the duty of enforcing the law come with a bigger burden to keeping the peace? And why do the police not have any culpability in violence they helped escalate?
Crime is down. Not because we have aggressive cops that shoot people a lot. https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-...
That's what happens when cities stop reporting crime statistics
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-d...
Murder is down in line with the rest of crime. What that tells you is that even crime that's hard to fail to report follows the general trend.
Down from a massive peak in 2020/2021 when cities tried the "lets not enforce crime" approach. Still elevated from pre 2020 levels.
Not trying to dispute your conclusions, but I'd be wary of using the peak Covid years as a reference.
Okay, and? As long as crime is below its peak level, there’s no need to apprehend criminals?
Shooting people and high speed chases are bad tools for apprehending criminals. They are more likely to harm innocent people than criminals. Facing off with "violent and brazen" criminals doesn't change this, but also the fact that crime is down suggests US criminals are in fact, neither more violent nor more brazen than those in areas where police use less destructive methods.
> also the fact that crime is down...
This is not a fact. What is a fact is that many police departments stopped reporting crimes, so there are fewer crimes being reported, not that there are fewer crimes being committed.
https://www.aol.com/thousands-police-depts-stop-reporting-00...
There are myriad reasons why, but stemming the upward trend of reported violence makes politicians look better and we all know how honest politicians are.
Its interesting how both police chases and swatting is super rare outside of the US.
Because they have so many car chases on the news. So people get the idea that car chases are a solution that people use to get out of trouble.
Seems like a vicious cycle, fed by the terrible news media.
Population density. In other countries they have a lot of motorcycle chases, and a lot more motorcycle based crime, but it's a crime of opportunity, which is created by highly dense and interwoven urban cores.
European cities are small? You don't hear about many chases in Berlin/Paris/London, do you?
Berlin and Los Angeles _city_ both have 3.8 million residents. The greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area has 18 million residents. The greater Berlin Metropolitan area has 6 million residents.
It's not only dense but the scale is far larger than most European cities. Only Asian and South American cities outclass the insanity that is LA. Until you've been there it's hard to appreciate the scope of it.
The Greater LA areas has 34k square miles of area. Germany, the whole country, has 128k square miles. In other words, the LA area alone is a quarter the size of all of Germany.
A huge chunk of that is national parks and deserts. It's not all inhabited. Only about 25% is classified as urban with the overwhelming majority of that being concentrated in Los Angeles and it's surrounding cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles#Urban_area...
This isn't a size measuring contest. I think Europeans forget how _young_ America is. That's the only unique part of this country. Give us a few thousand years and we'll be on par.
No it was a population density measuring contest and you were trying to argue that greater LA was more dense than greater Berlin, without defining greater Berlin in a rigorous way. The size of Germany relative to greater LA was brought up to attempt to put the population densities in perspective.
Well, and we always have to shit on the younger (and now bigger) brother
You'd be surprised to learn that geopolitics do not actually mimick family disputes
[flagged]
Oh come on.
If you wanna say Muslims (all those "dirty foreigners"), then spit it the fuck out.
Also completely off topic that comment.
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
> These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign.
Although if you watched "Last Week Tonight" recently (S12 E28, 2025-11-02), Mr Oliver's long segment is about police chases and IIRC he covered more than a couple of cases where people were, in fact, being pulled over / chased for trivial matters which then lead to crashes, deaths, etc.
These are trivial matters in that the penalties are minor, not that they are optional.
Of course they're not optional, but you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit. Principle of proportionality should apply, you shouldn't be risking the lives of the public over anything but the most serious offences where them getting away poses a greater threat to the public than potentially killing a bystander.
It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem. At least I would hope that the penalties for running away are very serious.
The police officers don't know why you are running away and can reasonably expect that there is something wrong other than an unbuckled seat belt -> a kidnapped person, tons of drugs in the trunk, a wanted murderer driving, etc.
Well at least in my country where chases are rare. I understand in US it is difficult since people are more eager to run away.
> It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem
Right, people are dumb. You can't just throw your hands in the air and declare a problem unsolvable because people are dumb and keep acting against their best interest; you acknowledge that fact and change tact accordingly. If it turns out that trying to pull people over for minor infractions causes 1% of those incidents to turn into violent chases then you should stop pulling people over for minor infractions and figure out a safer way to ticket them. At the very least you shouldn't chase after them in your car and add another dangerous vehicle to the road. It reflects a mindset of "get and punish the bad guys" being prioritized over "improve safety of your community," which pretty much sums up the culture problem with American police and criminal justice in general.
"you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit"
That would indeed be dumb, but once somebody dumb has decided to do that they're guilty of something much more serious and the car chase is completely justified.
> you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit.
That's the thing: normal people don't. Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
What about depressed people? What about stressed people? What about people with autism who overreact when spooked? What about people on the edge who didn't care about the consequences because of the life situation?
What about people who are convinced that police may kill them for mild violation as they saw that multiple times on the news and social media? The reaction to flee may be justified at the moment as it is life or death anyway, even if only in their heads.
There are a lot of "normal" people around who will act abnormally in a high stress situation.
You're literally just making up scenarios in your head.
Thank you for speaking to reality of situations that the majority of internet commenters never talk about. I think dang needs to put the HN member lock back on.
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.
Stealing cars (often at gunpoint) and driving them recklessly is an entertainment activity for young men with poor impulse control and little regard for human life. This kind of person makes decisions of comparable quality elsewhere in life that are probably incompatible with being middle class.
> Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction.
The latter is often a result of the former. People self-medicating to escape misery.
Can happen, but being miserable is a not a prerequisite to wanting to get high.
I think it fits a narrative to explain addictions away as something that happens to someone as a victim of their circumstances, but personal choices are a real input.
"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."
Can't we just blame GTA?
Except that people around the world generally don't want to go to prison, so why do americans have more high speed chases?
(assuming they do in fact have more per capita/car...)
I'm going to guess... because we can? Police here are willing to chase for almost anything in most jurisdictions. I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
> I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
UK has stuff like [0] which contains a whole bunch of "is it worth it?" considerations. Also if a chase causes a death, the officer(s) can be prosecuted[1] - I suspect the nonsense of "qualified immunity" means there's no risk to a US officer for initiating a chase that ends in death.
[0] https://www.college.police.uk/app/roads-policing/police-purs...
[1] e.g https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58889155
In Ireland, the police (and the public) look on the UK regime with envy.
After this case [0] the standing orders are that it's basically never worth it, you risk a prosecution no matter what the circumstances.
[0] https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/garda-charged-aft...
Lots of high capacity vehicular infra in LA.. I imagine most places just have ‘chases’.
Or.. https://youtu.be/RvV3nn_de2k?si=7bXkaIri1_o95Ofs
> so why do americans have more high speed chases?
Off the top of my head: 1) US cops are more likely to harass, maim, kill you than most other places (whether you've crimed or not); 2) US legal system seems a little hinky when it comes to certain people; 3) "three strikes" (not sure if that's countrywide or state-level? pretty sure it's still around tho'?) can mean life for three trivial crimes; 4) car-centric country - lots of them and everywhere is designed for cars[0].
[0] Imagine a car chase around London[1] or some other wackily streeted city.
[1] No, the godawful nonsense Hollywood comes up with does not count.
California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies. The list is pretty reasonable IMO. No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
It's basically a list of violent crimes, the only one that seems out of pocket is selling PCP, meth, or cocaine to childre, which is bad but could arguably be less bad than the others on the list
Raping an unconscious person is not on the list of violent felonies. Neither is domestic violence with traumatic injury, assault with a deadly weapon, or felony battery with serious bodily injury.
It takes a lot to earn strikes in California.
> California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies.
But not all states are California.
> No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
William James Rummel begs to differ[0] - fraudulent use of a credit card ($80), forged check ($28.36), failure to return payment for non-performed work ($120.75) and voila, life sentence (albeit later reduced to time served on procedural grounds.)
[0] also references "Graham v. West Virginia, a 1912 case which involved an individual convicted of three separate counts of horse thievery total[l]ing $235" which ended up in a life sentence.
In summary, some states may have sensible 3 strike laws, some may not.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rummel_v._Estelle
I would love to see more comprehensive stats to answer this question, rather than relying on cases studies you have to go back over one hundred years to find.
The population in big US cities is very heterogeneous. There isn’t one single culture.
In a city with large population, it only takes a few people willing to commit crimes to make the news.
https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+man
American police just like it. They start chase for any reason, even for a broken tail lamp. Also not a simple chaise, but one where they intentionally provoke a car crash, often with fatal results for innocent people.
You phrase it like the police can force you to run from them.
Because the police chase them.
Practice for GTA6
Don't forget to boycott Rockstar!
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
"I wasn't driving at the time. Someone took my car."
There is generally no crime for owning a vehicle used in a crime. The violation belongs to the _driver_ and to no one else. Burden of proof can be extreme in US courts.
You don't need to be chasing them on the road. Attach a GPS tracker to the car and follow it with drone, collect surveillance footage and arrest them once they come to a stop.
They do have GPS dart launchers and other systems. They're fairly unreliable. It's difficult for the lead driver in a chase to deploy accurately and cars are typically dirty enough to make most adhesives ineffective particularly when deployed at highway speeds.
A hoodie is enough to defeat the drone surveillance, and regardless of what facial recognition technology you use, a jury still has to buy the output of that system.
For drones with less than a 6 foot wingspan that don't require a runway you've got maybe 30 minutes of flight time at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. So unless you know where they're going already you're not going to be able to effectively deploy it in the time necessary to capture them and you can't loiter long enough to track them with infrared.
The helicopter is an insurance policy. When you have a bunch of marked units doing twice the speed limit on a long enough chase they're going to hit something. Those crashes are devastating and lead to eye watering settlement amounts. The helicopter can safely chase most vehicles at almost any speed and the risk of them crashing with any civilian or even civilian property is effectively zero.
> kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine
Except that the person trying to get away knows that too, so if all they're doing is buying themselves a bigger fine, why are they doing it?
The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work.
> The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work.
Except it's almost never that. The answer is that people are stupid and impulsive.
There seems to be a lot of variance in the percentage of police chases that involve stolen vehicles but the numbers seem to be in the range of 10% to 70% and even the low end of that isn't particularly low.
You also have the problem that if you steal a car and then run from the police the result is that they don't pursue you and send a ticket to the person you stole it from, that makes it a lot easier to steal a car, and then the percentage goes up.
True, but chases involving stolen vehicles (a non-trivial percentage of all chases) means that mailing a fine to the registered owner wouldn't be a universal solution.
There's a newer video more on topic of police chases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8
> kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine
thing is, in Germany and many other European countries there's a mandate to register your place of residence with the authorities in a timely manner (i.e. 2 weeks after moving in).
Americans and Brits don't have that, so "mail them a fine" is most likely going to result in the letter not arriving where it should.
I can't speak to the UK but in California there are various rules around updating vehicle registration when you move. Enforcement is pretty lax unless you drive something with exceptionally high registration fees.
There's strong wording about updating voter registration when you move, but I doubt there's much in the way of actual law. If there is it's basically never enforced as far as I can tell.
Because our society is spoiled, averse to consequences, and addicted to pleasure. People cannot tolerate it when they don't get what they want. What they want (when being pulled over) is NOT to go to jail, hence, due their conditioning, they avoid the consequence. Up to and including bringing injury and death onto themselves and strangers.
It's insane this is downvoted when it's the truth. Again and again the person is running from something small, but that's not an indictment of the chase, it's proof of how freaking stupid and self-centered the subject is: they are willing to put dozens of lives at risk to avoid something like getting their car towed because they're driving on a suspended license. The officer chases them because they don't know why they're running (but it must be a good reason to risk picking up a felony), not because going after a suspended license is worth a chase.
We are seeing the result of a combination of factors including aversion to consequences and the inability to empathize with those they put at risk.
28 seasons of Alarm for Cobra 11 tell me Germany is riddled with criminals running from Polizei on the Autobahn.
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)
In 2003, "Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn, along with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Chiefs’ Association and the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners sent a letter Feb. 26 to news directors of television stations asking them to consider reducing the amount of police car chase coverage they broadcast."
Intersting. Did this letter have any effect?
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.
Unfortunately, yes. Dropping a magnet onto a car and pulling it off, especially if not recently cleaned, will damage the paint to some degree. Maybe not enough for an average person to notice, but you really shouldn’t do this to other people’s cars.
Some people will get snide about anyone who cares about their car’s paint, but as someone who once bought a car I had to save a long time for and spent a lot of time with car care products I would be very sad if I saw you drop a magnet on to it and then pull it off without a second thought. Please don’t.
I'll avoid doing it from now on.
Also, the paint on cars isn't just cosmetic. It's what keeps the metal from getting wet and then rusting.
It won't really matter all that much, but it will have done more than 0 damage to the paintwork (since metal is hard and paint is soft). Worth noting that drivers are touchy and emotional, and can't be trusted not to murder you over perceived slights, so it's safest to stick to doing nothing. Stuff something under the windscreen wipers if you really must, and even that is risky.
A flexible fridge magnet is probably fine.
Seems like everyone here is assuming you used a 40lb neodymium magnet you dropped in the dirt first.
I like to assume the best in people.
As long as the car is dirty, then contact with it can damage the top coat. This is a lot more true if you need to drag or scrape the magnet to remove it.
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.
Cars spend a significant amount of time outside and they depreciate so quickly it just doesn't matter. One shouldn't expect a paint to stay perfect the same way we expect our skin to wear and age over the years.
I don't even know what a 5 stage detail means but I can safely say you are overreacting. A car is just a tool and a rando putting a fridge magnet or leaning against your car once in a while is just completely negligible compared to the amount of shit a paint is exposed to when driving it. Sand and dirt do not ask for your permission either.
> 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
Assuming this is true, it seems like something has gone badly wrong somewhere in this process.
Why can't cars have paint that survives being "leaned on"
I think the person you replied to probably just has a different definition of "completely ruined" than you or I.
Yeah we are talking pathological territory here. Car paints need less love than their owners need therapy if they have to "detail" their car every time a cat jump on the hood to enjoy the warmth.
Visible marks from over 20ft away. You tell me.
If we're taking it this far then driving on the highway is like sandblasting the paint with dust and you do that without even thinking about it.
[dead]
There is a thing called the grappler now. Seems like a reasonable tool: https://policebumper.com/
OK, one with a big glob of bubblegum on it then.
What happens when they miss and hit you in the head instead?
Probably the same thing when the police shoot an innocent bystander currently - absolutely nothing.
The actual darts for this don't look that far off tbh: https://www.toledoblade.com/local/police-fire/2016/04/06/GPS...
They already have darts for this that use adhesives to stick to any part of the vehicle and shoot out from the pursuing vehicles
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....
> Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.
I never thought of my Olds Silhouette minivan as a high performance car. Neat.
The rubbery panels were great. I was at school pickup and another parent backed into it. They crushed the front fender to the firewall. Then they pulled up and it popped out.
They were freaked out but it was fine. And it's just a car.
It’s more common than that. A lot of cars have aluminum panels now.
These exist!
https://www.thedrive.com/news/police-tag-fleeing-cars-with-g...
https://www.starchase.com/products/vehicle-mounted-gps-launc...
Now this assumes that the LAPD/LASD/whomever actually cares to catch the suspect! In my (limited) experience with them, you could incinerate a full bus and they'd not blink an eye, but if you block the intersection at one of the many rush hours, that's a capital offense!
> 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.
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.
That shouldn't matter, after all, even if the plate is legit, you can't just find a person's location from the database. They usually have some legal address or something, not live location.
So unless there's an immediate danger, there is no reason for chasing people and create dangerous situations. You can just follow them around from the severance cameras and catch them once they are no longer on the move. Even if you don't have disability for one reason or another, it still doesn't make much sense to engage in high-speed driving around people minding their own business.
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?
Perfect how? The license plate scanner can only tell that a particular plate number was in a particular place at a particular time. It doesn't know if the plate was fake or stolen, or who was driving the vehicle, or if there was contraband in the vehicle. Stopping fleeing vehicles is one of the most effective ways to catch people with outstanding arrest warrants and get illegal weapons off the streets.
I think the idea is, if you know where the car is and where it is going, you don't need to chase it openly on high traffic areas with high risk of accidents. You use restraint and take them at a safer place. (surely won't work all the time)
You don't know where it's going.
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 you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home."
I'm not sure that the cops pursuing people at those speeds is doing anything besides making the situation more dangerous. Police in the US are grossly undertrained, I wouldn't trust them to actually be competent at what is very technical and difficult driving.
One would think that basic firearm safety would be the bare minimum, since we pay them to carry a gun. However, I have had to vacate a shooting range 3 times due to police showing up and being unsafe with firearms. I have had this happen in 3 different ranges, where off-duty cops have shown up and proceeded to ignore basic safety rules like not flagging people with guns. I'm not dumb enough to try to give a cop a safety lecture, so I've always packed up my stuff and left. However, if they aren't even given enough training to not figure out to point their guns downrange instead of at the firing line, they aren't trained well enough to trust with something technical and difficult like a pit maneuver.
One of these times was at a CA range, they were socal cops. Training standards for police in the US are woefully low, most cops aren't able to hit the broad side of a barn given ideal circumstances. They agitate about how dangerous their job is, but they don't train like it is. They fire a few rounds a year and have absolutely horrendous marksmanship standards. Don't get fooled, your average cop has roughly zero idea on firearms safety or even how to use the darn things.
> If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home.
They would not even try to reach those speed if they weren't chased. A criminal who thinks he escaped the police will try to not attract attention. They would just follow the normal flow of the traffic and you can follow their path thanks to the millions of cameras and the helicopter mentionned earlier. We are not in the 70's anymore.
You can follow them from a distance they can't spot you so you can lock the road if they turn back and dispatch police force form in various exit points of an highway without starting an high speed chase.
High speed chase is about cops endangering the public for the thrill and adrenaline really. They do that because they like it, not because they need it to arrest criminals.
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!
It's probably reasonable to take a step back here and ask: Why is this not a universal problem? It's not as if every juristication outside the US simply lets criminals run away.
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.
Why are you countering his political talking points with your own?
just like so many things that work in every country but the US apparently
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 ...
That’s pretty much only because of Hollywood’s film industry. It isn’t comparable otherwise.
The greater LA area has Hollywood film and television and a lot of music stuff too. It has the 16th and 19th busiest container ports in the world (Los Angeles and Long Beach) [1]. It has the 11th busiest airport by passenger volume [2], and several other airports because that one isn't enough for the area. It has a pretty extensive computer industry. There's a lot of petroleum processing. There's a lot of agriculture. There's some financial services (many cities in the US are bigger in finance, but there's still a lot in the LA area). A pretty good amount of manufacturing. Several top tier universities. It drives a lot of tourism.
And then there's all the GDP that arises from the population itself: construction, healthcare, education, real estate.
If you take away the entertainment industry, it becomes a different place, but there's a lot of economic activity and most of it isn't film and tv and music production.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa...
The German eagerly commenting that, actually, it's different in Germany is becoming a defining cliche of HN comment sections.
Honestly I'll take that over the "street poops are so bad in SF" brigade any day of the week.
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're not usually doing surveillance on people, they're mostly used as a quick way to get eyes overhead when something else is happening--foot pursuit, high speed pursuit, just about anything really where an aerial perspective might be helpful. They can fly anywhere in LA pretty quickly.
We have more criminals and more crime in the US
> 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.
Relevant German song concerning this mentality:
Foyer des Arts - Hubschraubereinsatz (1982)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pAr1IMiP6A
Here is some video of the song that also shows the lyrics:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykRB9SVlDhU
The difference between rich and poor is way bigger in the USA it's been growing and growing since Ronald Reagan, while in Europe it has stayed basically the same.
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.
They're used in Berlin, though they're surprisingly quiet compared to the emergency care ones. Maybe flying higher? Here's their POV:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U3mncVE1TQ0
Unsurprisingly, the comments are mostly making fun of them for wasting tax money on hunting down some guys with spray bottles.
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.
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.
Los Angeles is a massive city. To cover that much ground given limited police it’s sort of necessary.
Too true. It's hard to understand just how gob-smackingly enormous the greater LA metroplex is - it's as large as some small countries.
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.
Actually a lot less than I expected.
https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/audit-says-lapds-use...
Hang on, LAPD with limited oversight? Someone bring back Daryl Gates! Man the Ramparts!
$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.
That 46 million could be spent on education, transportation, aid for low-income families, the homeless, jobs programs, small business tax breaks, infrastructure renewal, public works, etc. According to the report, not only are they largely not used for anything productive, there's potential harms to both people and the environment. And as many have pointed out, the same work can be done with drones.
To drive this point further: The one stable causal relastionship relevant here is the one between inequality and crime. Reduce inequality in ways 0xbadcafebee suggested would reduce inequality - though probably not in sizes measureable after a few years.
US Government (especially during Trump regime) has been actively defunding public schools, school lunches and libraries.
The report is wrong. If you bother to watch LA news you'll see they are used a few times a night to track vehicles from the air. This frees up ground units and avoids high speed chases which saves lives.
It's fun to call this a waste of taxpayer dollars until you watch a carjacked vehicle recovered with kids inside.
Do you really need 17 helicopters and 90 employees for the occasional car chase? This feels wildly over the top. They could do that just fine with one third the resources.
On top of that, police car chases are wildly harmful and usually started from things like minor traffic violations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8
Are you asserting that the report is lying, and that a majority of the flight hours aren't actually being used for all those mentioned low priority purposes? If so, is your assertion based on the helicopters being used a few times a night per television reports?
You know this is ridiculous, which is why you posted with a throwaway.
Obvious excessive spending should not be shrugged off by dividing the expense by the population of the area.
Obvious excessive costs need to be reined in. Tax money needs to be spent on the highest priorities, which this is not.
Some of us always post throwaway.
In an AI bot and troll infested world, expect quippy contrarian opinions posted with throwaways to be taken less seriously.
Every message on social media is a throwaway, unless if it has some tangible memorable impact on life.
Since when does a can of soda cost less than 50¢?
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.
> end up in holding patterns with nothing to do
Cynical-me assumes those are the ones running stingrays/imsi-catchers.
I don't see why a realistic theory that happens to point at an unpleasant possibility should be called "cynical".
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.
To those not familiar with LA or the USA, here’s a cultural time capsule from 2Pac circa 1996:
“ It's the, City of Angels and constant danger South Central L.A., can't get no stranger Full of drama like a soap opera, on the curb Watchin' the ghetto bird helicopters, I observe”
Pretty much still sums it up.
Well the danger part has decreased a lot. It peaked at almost 100 per 10k people in the 90s, and now it's closer to 25. Still very high, but a lot of progress.
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 work with CHP helicopters as part of our fire district's rescue team. We pull a half dozen people a year off of one of the local trails (sometimes as "recovery"). Most of these are via helicopter. There are two helos for a huge area - Yolo county down to Santa Cruz county. By acreage it's a lot bigger than LA.
My point is, two small helicopters are more than enough to do that job as a side-gig from all the other CHP work they do.
Also, Cal Fire has its own air wing. LAPD helicopters are not equipped for firefighting.
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.
People generally really don't like drones, but have come to accept helicopters
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.
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.
Helicopters aren't exactly robust under fire and are four orders of magnitude more valuable as a target.
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.
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.
Most of the small high speed drones are that size to fit under professional licencing requirements, often so that one racing spec can be viable across a wider area. Leading to significant competition in that size pushing down prices.
Rather than some inherent sized for safety idea.
Jamming might be interesting, I suspect that it's easy enough (and a much bigger crime) to follow a very loud jamming signal though.
Every practical metric a drone surpasses a helicopter; they are so much simpler to operate that you can easily offset any perceived downside with more drones. And you don't get a tested solution without trying it out.
> 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)
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.
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.
Kenneth Mejia, our progressive, data-driven controller audited LAPD helicopter use, and published his findings.
"The ASD program costs nearly $50 million annually while most of the flight time is not devoted to high priority events. Our audit found that the estimated annual cost to operate the helicopter program is $46.6 million (i.e., $127,805 per day or $2,916 per flight hour). There are 14 City departments whose annual budgets do not reach this amount;"
https://controller.lacity.gov/landings/lapd-helicopters
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
Wrong answers only?
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
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
It's just a matter of striking a balance between "what a waste" and "what a lack of law and order". So, like a pendulum swing, cut down all spending drastically, until people scream "where is government?" and then swing backwards, until they cry "what a waste". Keep swinging back and forth until you find the local minima. Wait, am I talking about gradient descent?
Publicly funded noise-pollution.
This doesn't seem to work properly in Mac Safari. The map is blank except in a thin stripe at the top.
What no Blue Thunder?
https://youtu.be/LXg5Pu-yZrE?si=DFYPLVCBjYVi7a_g
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.
We need an ICE spending tracker.
Not ICE, but a bunch of similar data at scale for the US https://usdebtclock.org/
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...
I must say I initially wondered why the LDAP protocol needed helicopters… then I re-read the title.
No, the helicopter tracker is implemented in LDAP.
Makes more sense, thanks!
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.
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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.
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.
That's if it's one helo at a time. If it spikes to 2+ then the numbers go up way faster. They have 16 total and I would assume 1/3rd can go up at a moments notice
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.
“Sweden-like gang shootings” is not a phrase I expected to come across