Slashdot Mirror
LAPD Police Claim Helicopters Stop Crimes Before They Happen
HughPickens.com writes True Angelenos don't even bother to look up when one of the LAPD's 17 helicopters rattles their windows searching for a car-jacked Camry or an assault suspect hiding under a jacaranda but few doubt that more bad guys would get away without the nation's largest police helicopter fleet to help chase them. Now the LA Times reports that data shows that LA's helicopters are stopping crimes before they happen. Tapping into the data-driven policing trend, the department uses heat maps, technology and years of statistics to identify crime "hot spots." Pilots then use their downtime to fly over them, on the theory that would-be criminals tend to rethink their nefarious plans when there's "ghetto birds," as Ice Cube calls them, hovering overhead [explanatory video with annoying sound]. Months of data show that the number of serious crimes reported in the LAPD's Newton Division in South L.A. fell during weeks when the helicopters conducted more flights. During the week of Sept. 13, when the helicopter unit flew over Newton 65 times, the division recorded 90 crimes. A week later, the number of flights dropped to 40 and the number of reported crimes skyrocketed to 136, with rises seen among almost all types of crime, including burglary, car theft and thefts from vehicles. "It's extremely cutting edge," says Capt. Gary Walters, who heads the LAPD's air support unit. "It's different. It's nothing that we've ever done before with this specificity."
But Professor Geoffrey Alpert. a policing expert who has studied the use of police helicopters in Miami and Baltimore, says the choppers can deter crime in the short-term but criminals will likely return when they're not around (PDF). "You are deterring the criminals but you aren't getting rid of them and their intent. Those criminals could strike in a different time and place," says Alpert. "I mean that's the whole thing about random patrol. You see a police car and it's the same thing. You hide, he goes around the block and you go back to your breaking and entering."
But Professor Geoffrey Alpert. a policing expert who has studied the use of police helicopters in Miami and Baltimore, says the choppers can deter crime in the short-term but criminals will likely return when they're not around (PDF). "You are deterring the criminals but you aren't getting rid of them and their intent. Those criminals could strike in a different time and place," says Alpert. "I mean that's the whole thing about random patrol. You see a police car and it's the same thing. You hide, he goes around the block and you go back to your breaking and entering."
Is the LAPD so bad that they need a police force that exists just to keep them in line?
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I'd use a drone instead of a chinook and run a community program with the money saved on helicopter fuel .
Too bad "Host Chopper" is no longer around as it was a hilarious parody about a hosting company with a fucking chopper, I guess someone should create a LAPD Chopper parody since all they're doing is delaying the crime, not actually stopping it. As soon as the chopper is gone the criminals go on a rampage.: Here's a link to some of the content host chopper used to have: http://laughingsquid.com/host-...
That story sounds quite better than Minority Report, as the would-be criminals won't even get to commit crimes or be arrested, so even them benefit from the aerial surveillance.
Linux is for people who don't mind RTFM.
So criminals will wait until the police pass by before committing a crime. Pretty obvious. .
Translated LAPD Police tries to justify their bloated helicopter budget.....
Combine liberalized concealed carry with the police subsidizing the purchase of guns and ammo by law-abiding, poor concealed carry holders. Let them also use police shooting ranges for free as long as they're in good standing. Then, on the street, take a reflexively pro-CCW holder stance until the facts say otherwise.
Once we accept the premise that continuous, warrantless, aerial surveillance reduces crime, they'll tout the benefits of drones: no pilot, less fuel...missiles.
I think helicopters would work better than drones here because they're a visible and audible reminder of the police. I think seeing a police officer walking down the street would work as well. There are a bunch of impulsive people who will behave better, if they saw a cop earlier that night.
I know when I lived in a city with a constantly-circling police helicopter it was damned annoying at night. It wasn't terribly loud, but it was a varying, distant and then closer droning sound, like a lower-frequency version of a mosquito in the room. Maybe it discourages crime, but at the cost of the huge footprint it leaves on the city for criminals and non-criminals alike. It's also very expensive. I don't know the exact numbers, but for typical decent-sized helicopters used by a police force it's going to be well over $1000/hour to run them independent of the personnel. If they're doubling or tripling the number of flights and seeing half the number of crimes, you have to wonder if you could achieve the same thing by just having more (cheaper) cars on the street.
I also wonder if they're truly seeing a reduction in crime, or if it's just moving to areas where the helicopters don't happen to be circling.
Seems to me that 20 years or so ago, that was the idea of choice for solving crime - cops walking (note that walking and driving are NOT the same) a beat.
Worked where it was tried, but I think it was dropped when the Next Great Idea came along. Shame, really, since it actually would have gotten away from "the police is the enemy" notion that permeates entirely too much of our culture (with good reason, at time, but still a problem).
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Wouldn't the amount of downtime you have be reduced when there are more crimes happening? These variables are already linked because the amount of police helicopter hovering time is based on the amount of crimes happening. I'm not sure we should trust these stats.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
It depends on location, I bet. New York City, for example, starting implementing a lot of walking beats again about that time and they're still doing it as far as I know.
"I mean that's the whole thing about random patrol. You see a police car and it's the same thing. You hide, he goes around the block and you go back to your breaking and entering."
No fucking shit. Thank you Captain Obvious.
Perhaps I'm reading the tone wrong, but it seems like he's complaining. "Ugh, police oppressors! How dare they patrol neighborhoods and reduce violent crimes!"
Isn't this kind of exactly what we want cops to do? Wander around, see if anybody's being beaten or mugged, or just be a visible presence to let the bad guys know somebody's watching? You'd prefer they left?
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
cops walking (note that walking and driving are NOT the same) a beat
I've heard the same thing. I wonder if it's because walking is slower than driving (stop beating the guy for a second as the car passes), or if it's because seeing 'people' has more of an effect.
Worked where it was tried, but I think it was dropped when the Next Great Idea came along.
In the UK, I'd explain that with the ridiculous "targets" based policies.
Say you put a cop walking around in a really bad neighbourhood and suddenly crime there stops altogether. You think that's perfect. The people living there (except the criminals) think it's perfect. Life is good. Then someone higher up in the police force notices that this cop hasn't solved a single crime, and his target is to solve x crimes per month. So he is taken off the beat, crime returns, and he happily solves ten percent of the crimes and makes his target.
Are you trying to say that you think their use of helicopters is expensive?
It goes back further than that. Anyone remember that T.H.O.R program in the 80's that ended up putting a hole in the side of a skyscraper and killing all those people?
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
I think it would be a good idea to have helicopters flying above the whole city the whole, constantly covering every square inch and monitoring the behavior of the citizens. They should be painted black, and in order to keep noise levels at a minimum, it might be a good idea to make them special stealth helicopters who are hard to hear.
But we shouldn't stop there. LAPD should use portable brain scanners to question citizens randomly in some sort of improvised lie detector and loyalty tests. Another useful idea would be to implant RFID chips under the skin that allow LAPD to track the movements of all citizens in realtime. That could e.g. be done during vaccination campaigns. It would be very useful for tracking supects via helicopter.
Oh, and death squads would be cool.
Just some ideas in order to fight the spread of burglary and petty theft.
I think it was called Blue Thunder, starred Roy Scheider sometime in the 80's
If helicopters become commonplace over the skies of LA, will they still have the same preventative effects as they have now when their presence is more of a novelty?
Another factor is opportunity. These helicopters are likely to reduce moments of opportunity and increase fear of being detected as they could show up at any moment.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Because they are not racist. Also I think the people living in the ghetto's are happy to see less crime. When they mount guns on the helicopters and start shooting whenever they think they see a crime, that's when you'll get protest.
Thank you, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and so many others, for courageously defending humanity, my freedom and more!
In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, snooping into people's windows.
-- 1984, George Orwell
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
cops walking (note that walking and driving are NOT the same) a beat
I've heard the same thing. I wonder if it's because walking is slower than driving (stop beating the guy for a second as the car passes), or if it's because seeing 'people' has more of an effect.
Some of both, I think. Cars are very anonymous, and the driver will (hopefully) be concentrating on driving rather than observing.
A police officer on a bicycle can be a good halfway: they're still very much human (can speak and be heard, can stop immediately without blocking the road) but they can cover a wider area. Depending on local geography, they can get to some places faster than by car. About half the police I see around here (London, but not the centre) are on bicycles.
Nasa's report says "Suggets". The evidence is good as we have suspected for many years, but can these popsci article writers can't even be bothered to check the sources and just make up stuff.
I am sure when IFLS picks this up, they will report that not only is there an ocean but life is confirmed too.
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
I think I'll form a corporation to tender a proposal to the authorities to provide my world-famous crime-prevention rocks.
It's pretty obvious how effective they are. Neither I nor anyone else who has one of these has ever been victimized by crime. Hell, as far as I know, we've never even seen a criminal. Clearly, ne'er-do-wells and nefarious malcontents are strongly repelled by the magnetic forces projected by these stones. (I think it's magnetic, anyway. Who knows how that works? You just can't explain that.)
Anyway, I figure a modest delivery and support contract is an extremely cost-effective alternative to the clearly supersticious voodoo of these magic "helicopter" crime preventers. (Who the hell believes in that kind of woo, anyway? "Flying machines?" Feh.)
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
I think, if propelled with enough velocity, these crime-prevention rocks would work very well.
How about instead of trying to perfect crimestopping activity, we make non-criminal actions more appealing. First off, we'll have to end the War on Drugs, stop using our police and justice systems as revenue streams. If we stop manufacturing crime and turning productive members of society into criminals with no job prospects, then our already low crime rates would be even lower.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
I don't see how putting crooked cops in cars will stop that. They can still get out of the car and strong-arm people, no?
Have gnu, will travel.
Also in other news: You never get mugged or robbed while in a choke-hold of a patrol officer.
All this talk of choppers lately inspired me to rent Blue Thunder from Netflix.
Seems to me that 20 years or so ago, that was the idea of choice for solving crime - cops walking (note that walking and driving are NOT the same) a beat.
Worked where it was tried, but I think it was dropped when the Next Great Idea came along.
Beat cops work great in high density areas, it's expensive though and the high density areas are usually poor which means those programs usually get canceled despite their effectiveness.
We don't have time for rational solutions!
Quieter, cheaper, safer, fly longer, just better.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Yes; you don't try to cut the fence of the police state prison camp right where the guards are standing - and that is EXACTLY what LAPD is doing to poor (read: minority) neighborhoods.
Tired of the endless WHUMP-WHUMP-WHUMP? well, turn white and rich, Mr. and Mrs. Bootstrap!
The 'peaceful enjoyment of liberty' of hundreds of innocent citizens is being infringed to prevent a few car break-ins.
These copters are LOUD. And in these 'pre-crime' patrols, they make liberal use of their spotlight, essentially treating ordinary citizens as criminal suspects. They even invade Santa Monica (independently incorporated city), circling endlessly for 3 hours at a stretch in the middle the night, depriving entire neighborhoods'-worth of a restful night of sleep.
Oh, the best part, was on a radio interview show: The LAPD guy justified the practice on economic grounds! Wah, we just don''t have enough officers to patrol... Really? How much does a helicopter cost to operate? Maybe $300-500 per hour? Plus the two pigs along for the ride are getting salary. Could that money not be spent on neighborhood patrols on foot, or at least in squad cars?
It's ridiculous.
Beat cops work great in high density areas, it's expensive though and the high density areas are usually poor which means those programs usually get canceled despite their effectiveness.
Unfortunately, Los Angeles is effectively one giant suburban sprawl, so there aren't really many locations that are high density. Most of the "ghettos" and "barrios" of L.A. where once reasonable working- and middle-class neighborhoods in the 1950s and '60s.
Sure, at the expense of being as annoying as hell to many thousands of people, resulting in a measurable increase in premature deaths.
I used to live in LA Metro, there are definitely some areas that are dense enough for foot patrols. You don't necessarily have to have huge apartment buildings crammed together, just enough houses that walking around you can cover a decent number of them in a reasonable amount of time. Watts or portions of East LA for example.
It goes back further than that. Anyone remember that T.H.O.R program in the 80's that ended up putting a hole in the side of a skyscraper and killing all those people?
Different times. I think They should try it again. Just look how little collateral there is with modern avionics in drones. I'm sure firing 6000 rounds per minute from a 20mm rotary cannon in LA will work out much better with today's technology. Besides, that hole in the skyscraper wouldn't have happened if Roy Scheider hadn't stolen their thunder.
At the Sonic where I worked some 15 years ago, we gave a large discount to cops. The hope was they'd spend more of their lunch/dinner breaks at our drive-in and deter any ne'er-do-wells. We never thought of it as corruption, just being nice to public servants in exchange for some token presence/deterrence.
And a cop walking the beat does the same and costs a ton less. Stop using cops as ticket collectors use cops to prevent real crime and serve the community.
Jack of all trades,master of none
If those helicopters were seriously impacting criminal activity, I would think they would have been shot down by now. There are 17 helicopters, each very expensive and hard to acquire in both the time and financial senses. Hardware sufficient to drop helicopters with extreme prejudice, particularly low flying ones, is almost free by comparison. Also easy. I could build such a device in my garage. One way is basic model rocketry and the most trivial short-ranged IR or human-assisted video guidance. Even a cheap drone could bring a helicopter down with the proper payload, which wouldn't even have to be explosive. Chemical and mechanical means are practical. Or go really simple: a 50 caliber machine gun, ground-to-air. So it seems quite unlikely these copters are having any significant effect on serious crime.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Kind of like the Escape from NY theme....
If you want free, govt or projects type housing, you move out away from people and take the crime with you.
At the very least, it should save on helicopter fuel.
I mean, we're certainly not having to police the middle class neighborhoods like this really, except the ones not far away or in the traffic flow of the gangland project type areas.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
From the article is sounds like they are just looking at the number of flights and comparing it to the number of incidents in an area. There are lots of other items that they should be looking at in order to determine if the helicopters are actually doing something. Weather plays an important factor. Even what week it is can be important because maybe the weeks that had spikes in robberies and assaults were weeks in which people received paychecks or social assistance. Did they factor in actions by other groups in the police department when they were doing their fly overs? Sounds like they just got a few numbers that they can justify their program with and are boasting about it.
The report appears innocuous but is also justification for more air power.
Hidden from us is the effect of flattening hot crime spots and dispersing crime more evenly across the area. Short term reduction of crime in hot spots seems very real but would identify the hot spot and move crime to cooler spots.
It does little to solve the social and economic wreckage in many neighborhoods that makes crime the most profitable activity.
With deep database background searches no past criminal can get an "interesting" or well paying job. With 20-40% of the mail population in some areas there are rare honest jobs.
The multi million budget for one helicopter would better be spent on solving social problems. This is harder to do than I like but it needs to be done.
We are making some improvements with the decriminalization of marijuana but have failed to discuss a need to expunge non violent non repeat crimes from public employment screening. Simply financing tattoo removal would help some individuals.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
Nothing against the unit but the budget area and population make me wonder if more is justified.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
If you don't see any pink elephants in LA, it's because the helicopters keep them away.
Don't know why I want to feed the troll -- and explicitly not accepting the assertions I don't challenge here, but...
You talk about "traffic flow" -- but think about this for a minute. You're proposing to take a very high-population, dense chunk of city -- plugged into the rest of that city's transportation network -- and move it out into the middle of nowhere.
Have you looked at the level of car ownership in high-density areas recently -- particularly in lower-income high-density areas? How exactly do you expect folks to get to work or school when they're suddenly no longer in an area with transit access? (And without that, how do you expect folks to work, or go to school to improve their circumstances? Would you rather be buying the same number of heads worth of homeless shelter, and getting no tax base at all)?
Hell. I'm in the rich part (financial district) of downtown Chicago, and less than half my neighbors if that own cars if that; being in walking distance from work (and directly next to a stop for every single L line) is why people pay to live in the Loop. Owning a vehicle is expensive in a city -- heck, parking wherever you're going to is expensive in and of itself, as is having a place to park that vehicle at home (in my building, a parking spot costs about $30k to buy, or rents for upward of $200/mo). You can't take folks who can't afford decent housing unassisted, move them away from their jobs, and expect them all to be able to buy, maintain and fuel vehicles -- and park those vehicles near their jobs in the city -- when they were only barely making ends meet beforehand. It's insane.
There aren't many urban places like you describe in the US really.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
New York is another. Ultra-high-density communities may not be common in the US -- but the ones that do are exist are, well, kinda' a big deal.
But -- oh, yeah! -- we were talking about city planning as relates to lower-income folks. And the thing is, even though you and I might consider it impossible to get to work, buy groceries, &c. in much of the country without a car, there are still people doing that by necessity. My brother-in-law used to take his bicycle on the bus and sleep on a bench until his shift started, because the bus routes he needed shut down long before his shift started. When city planning is done in a way that assumes everyone is going to have a car, what you get is people left behind by the system. If you're lucky, they can manage to hold down jobs anyhow -- if you aren't, you have more folks who need safety-net features much more expensive than public transportation.