Ground the choppers

The LAPD's helicopter mania is both a policy disaster and a symbol of our malignant, badly functioning surveillance state.

Greetings all,

Hope everyone’s week is off to a solid start, or that it’s at least off to a better one than mine. I was kept up all night by an endlessly circling helicopter, a phenomenon that is all too well-known to anyone who lives in the metropolitan Los Angeles area, and by my unsettled kids, who were kept up by it too.¹ “I’m worried a murderer is going to come into our house,” my son told me as he and I tried to fall back to sleep at 3:45 AM to the backdrop of not-so-distant whirring blades.

I tried to tell him that there was no reason to worry, there was probably no murderer, and the helicopters were likely there for much dumber reasons than pursuing a criminal on the loose. Sadly, a call to the LAPD in the morning² could neither confirm nor deny that the department’s helicopters had been hovering around my neighborhood all night, much less offer any insight as to what they had been doing.

The helicopters seem to be coming around more frequently, what with the militarized, national guard-boosted response to anti-ICE protests that now seems to have been a trial run for Washington DC. But they’ve been a problem forever, especially to residents of the city’s black and Hispanic neighborhoods, which bear the brunt of the endless flybys. They’re an abomination.

As you can probably tell by now, the nuisance last night rekindled my all-consuming rage at the LAPD’s helicopter mania. This practice, of sending choppers to interminably circle a neighborhood, is at once 1) so unpleasant it can reasonably be considered psychically damaging, 2) an immense waste of fuel and taxpayer dollars, and 3) an onerous and unambiguous way for the LAPD to impart unto the populace it polices the knowledge that it is constantly being surveilled.

And because I am now so tired and aggrieved I cannot productively pursue all the things I was planning on doing today, everyone has to hear about surveillance helicopters instead now. Sorry!

An LAPD helicopter, and object of my scorn. Photo by Colin Sheridan.

Animated by the question of “How can piloting helicopters around LA at all hours of the day and night for what often appears to be no reason at all be defensible?”, I went down a rabbit hole many residents have no doubt ventured before, and not too far down at all, I came upon a document in which the city of LA itself had recently answered that question rather unambiguously: It’s not.

Kenneth Mejia, the city controller was elected in 2022 on a platform that promised to shine a light on the iniquities and inefficiencies of the city’s budget, and the LAPD in particular. His 2023 audit of the LAPD’s airborne operations—amazingly, the division’s first-ever audit in its six decades of existence—is a valuable resource.

First, it may surprise non-Angelenos to know that the LAPD flies its helicopters more than any other American city, and it does so continuously. There are 17 copters in the LAPD’s fleet, and just about every waking moment of the day and night, one or more of them are airborne in Los Angeles. More precisely, according to city statistics, on average each day, there are two helicopters active in LA airspace 20 hours apiece.

Those helicopters are, as you might imagine, pretty expensive. The LAPD’s Air Support Division (ASD) costs taxpayers nearly $50 million a year, between labor, fuel, and maintenance costs. It gets even better: The majority of the time, those helicopters aren’t involved in high-priority criminal cases at all. They are usually not pursuing a fleeing violent criminal or overseeing a high speed chase. No, a full 61% of the time, the helicopters are providing transportation, performing general patrols and “ceremonial flights”—according to city records, this means participating in things like, I shit you not, a “Chili Fly-In” and doing golf tournament fly-bys—or pursuing cases of low-priority crime.

Furthermore, and just to put the cherry on top, the report found that “there is no persuasive empirical evidence that shows a clear link between helicopter patrols and crime reduction.” Emphasis mine, because good lord.

The report continues (emphasis mine again, because, well, you’ll see):

Even when ASD does devote some of its flight time (39%) to high priority crime types, based on the data currently available, neither our office nor the LAPD can demonstrate that police helicopters actually deter crime in the City.

There is evidence, however, that helicopters can have a negative quality of life impact on the lives of residents who live in communities with frequent helicopter activity. Long-term noise exposure to aircrafts can lead to: decreased sleep quality, increased stress, cognitive impairment, reduced metabolism, and cardiovascular disease (i.e. heart attack, stroke, heart disease, etc.).

Finally, there’s also the environmental impact to consider. The audit found that ASD helicopters:

• “Burn approximately 47.6 gallons of fuel per hour

• Burn approximately 761,600 gallons of fuel per year (based on ASD flying 16,000 hours per year)

• Release approximately 7,427 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year”

It’s often said there are tradeoffs with policing, that certain liberties must be sacrificed for security. So on the one hand, sending a fleet of seventeen helicopters to hover over communities across the city terrorizes neighborhoods, burns hundreds of thousands of gallons of gasoline, stresses people out, impairs their ability to think, keeps them from getting a good night’s sleep and maybe even gives some of them a heart attack, but on the other hand there’s no evidence it has any impact on reducing or deterring crime whatsoever.

What the LAPD choppers do accomplish, and what is rather relevant to our specific political and technological moment, is a continuous and abrasive projection of authority. They thunderously signal that the police state is always hovering there, above us, conducting mass surveillance of however dubious utility.

In her 2019 book Race After Technology, the Princeton sociologist, Silicon Valley critic, (and noted luddite sympathizer) Ruha Benjamin describes how, growing up in a black neighborhood in LA, police helicopters helped her develop a visceral understanding of the surveillance state:

Some of my most vivid memories of growing up also involve the police. Looking out of the backseat window of the car as we passed the playground fence, boys lined up for police pat-downs; or hearing the nonstop rumble of police helicopters overhead, so close that the roof would shake while we all tried to ignore it. Business as usual. Later, as a young mom, anytime I went back to visit I would recall the frustration of trying to keep the kids asleep with the sound and light from the helicopter piercing the window’s thin pane. Like everyone who lives in a heavily policed neighborhood, I grew up with a keen sense of being watched. Family, friends, and neighbors—all of us caught up in a carceral web, in which other people’s safety and freedom are predicated on our containment.

Now, in the age of big data, many of us continue to be monitored and measured, but without the audible rumble of helicopters to which we can point.

A prescient observation, though now many are continuously subject to both at the same time. We’re of course in the middle of a moment in which the tech industry, which has developed numerous tools for automating surveillance, administering facial recognition, performing AI-powered target selection, and so on, has fused tightly with the state.³ We see this in militarized municipal police departments like the LAPD and NYPD, and in federal law enforcement agencies like the DHS, FBI, and ICE (now, thanks to the recent budget bill, by far the largest of them all), that are now being outfitted with Palantir contracts and directed to target migrants and the denizens of cities the current administration considers political opponents.

Like the copters—which, by the way, are circling *again*, right now, as I wrap up this post—a lot of the tech sold to law enforcement ultimately proves dubiously effective at best. But sometimes, as with the choppers, whether they’re effective policing technologies or not is probably beside the point. They are tools in the arsenal of projecting authority, of instilling fear, of generating pretexts for detainment, arrest, or deportation, often of those who are the most vulnerable.

Maybe that’s another reason that the choppers are keeping me up at night—in their crude, technologized drive to surveil, annoy, and dominate, they represent this moment so aptly and grimly.

Mejia’s 2023 audit suggested a raft of reforms to the airborne support division, to reduce inefficiencies, boost data collection and transparency, to begin to determine the efficacy of the program, and whether it can be “rightsized.” The report concluded, “with this audit, the City now has the information to better determine whether the City needs an airborne program that is this big, this costly, and this damaging to its environment.”

To me, the answer is clear. It does not. Ground the choppers.

Edited by Mike Pearl.

1. Editor’s note: My concentration was wrecked by an LAPD helicopter while I was editing this very article. -MP

2. If you live in LA you can call 213-485-2600 and ask what a helicopter is doing in your neighborhood and if there is indeed an LAPD helicopter there at the time, they’re supposed to tell you what it’s up to. It might be noted that the county has a comparable number of copters to the city, and the LAPD might not be able to give info on those.

3. Since the days of Benjamin’s childhood, the ways that civilians are monitored and measured have of course proliferated mightily. LA residents, especially nonwhite ones in “high crime” areas, are surveilled now not just by circling helicopters but by technologies developed and sold by tech companies like Peter Thiel’s Palantir, which sold predictive policing technologies to the LAPD, ShotSpotter, which monitors neighborhoods for gunshots, Flock, which uses computer vision to scan license plates, Cellebrite (data ingestion from mobile phones), ClearView (facial recognition), and on and on. Now, Palantir is also developing and managing databases of migrants for ICE. Some are ultimately rejected—LAPD’s Palantir predictive policing contract was cancelled after public outcry—but the hull of the broader project is stronger than ever.