Why the Noise of L.A. Helicopters Never Stops

December 29, 2023 12:32 PM

The L.A.P.D. says it has the largest local airborne law-enforcement unit in the world. A recent audit found little evidence that its choppers deter crime.
posted by folklore724 (33 comments total)

Yeah, that sounds about right. Maybe if they'd put the expenditures of purchasing, maintaining, and operating just two of these fancy boy-toys into neighborhood programs they'd see some results. But then, the track record of L.A.P.D. in personally assisting the folks they're supposed to "Protect and Serve" isn't all that great, so maybe it's better they dont.
posted by BlueHorse at 12:45 PM on December 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

Numbers from the sky
posted by chavenet at 1:00 PM on December 29, 2023

ahh the little cop boys and their little cop toys, how they love them so.
posted by seanmpuckett at 1:00 PM on December 29, 2023 [7 favorites]

Helicopter policing is essentially reactive and not in any way community-oriented like most effective police services.

In 2021 there were two firearm murders in my neighborhood very late one night. At least one LAPD helicopter weas dispatched and circled the neighborhood very, very loudly, using infrared/night vision without spotlights, for what seemed like an hour. The lack of light made it seem like the helicopter was at a very, very low altitude. My housemate was uncharacteristically terrified.

The suspects were not caught or effectively herded by the LAPD chopper. Maybe they work for other crimes or situations, but they did not work for a murderer on foot at 2am in Atwater Village.
posted by infinitewindow at 1:07 PM on December 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

Niagara Falls, Canada, is another place where the noise of helicopters never stops -- tourist edition. I only noticed this in the days after 9/11, when all aircraft were grounded, and suddenly a blessed silence reigned over the region.
posted by Modest House at 1:08 PM on December 29, 2023

The noise of the helicopters really got to me during the first few weeks of the lockdown. Without the background din of cars they stood out much more. All dystopian movies of the eighties had helicopters for their police state and it makes sense when you spend time in LA.
posted by Uncle at 1:13 PM on December 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

It's gotten a lot better, but up to ten years ago, both the politicians, the police and the media loved to paint our neighborhood as a dangerous ghetto, actually too dangerous to go into in a normal car. So every time anything happened, we'd get both the police helicopters circling and doing nothing and the press helicopters filming nothing. If this had made any sense, the police would have cleared the airspace, but I bet they knew the press were helping them build the narrative. Specially at the height of this madness, I would get nightmares, dreaming I'd woken up to the whole area being fenced in and not being allowed out.

The other day, I saw two policemen on bike in the park, and I almost stopped them to say they shouldn't ride bikes on the footpath. It isn't that our neighborhood has changed much, there are still drug dealers and shootings, it's just that the police have changed their strategy to something more realistic.

I still get a bit nervous when the hospital helicopter flies over our house, though.
posted by mumimor at 1:28 PM on December 29, 2023 [9 favorites]

ahh the little cop boys and their little cop toys, how they love them so.
CWAAH.

Female LAPD Chopper Pilot Sues for Gender, Disability Discrimination.

posted by clavdivs at 1:36 PM on December 29, 2023

"Attention on the ground!"

I live in a jurisdiction which has a bear-in-the-air. Its most obvious action is aerial announcements broadcast to the citizenry below, either to watch for someone elderly who's wandered away, or for a thief fleeing from the nearby strip malls. Details of appearance are given also but for the most part you can't understand anything because of the overpowering sound of the rotors.

Once though I was in the park and this chopper came swooping in low, hovering right over a nearby house for a moment when he clearly said "Happy Birthday Elaine" and then flew away. I'd complain, but to whom?

Also when the topic comes up locally I like to speak up in a pilot voice to announce that "about a mile out we like to put on the music" or just suggest that these pilots oughta be playing some Wagner instead but nobody gets it. I do wonder if a convincing argument to end this waste of the city budget could be these sounds triggering PTSD. Even I find these sounds frightening, the combination of distorted-cop-voice and rotors.
posted by Rash at 1:48 PM on December 29, 2023 [10 favorites]

Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, my heart is within your hands,

Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, no one can understand,

I've been around the world so many times and now my heart is within you.

Los Angeles, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, no other place will do.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:11 PM on December 29, 2023

I wish this had been reported by someone who actually lives in LA.
posted by Ideefixe at 2:13 PM on December 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

One thing that makes San Francisco the better Californian city is our cops don't have helicopters. On rare occasions one will be working here (CHP?) and the sound is always quite an unpleasant surprise. I'm not sure we even have news or traffic helicopters anymore.
posted by Nelson at 2:15 PM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

Blue Thunder covered this in 1983
posted by kokaku at 2:27 PM on December 29, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't know how many people here know this, but the current state of the art for LEO FLIR cameras and systems are really alarmingly high tech, to the point that it displays a real time GPS enabled map overlayed on the FLIR display down to every address and property line that they're viewing and they can basically lock on to a specific vehicle or individual and track them based on positional and sensor data.

Like it's straight up dystopian Paul Verhoeven nonsense that we would have thought was terrifying back in the 80s and 90s.


So every time anything happened, we'd get both the police helicopters circling and doing nothing and the press helicopters filming nothing.

Yeah, I grew up in LA and I saw this nonsense many, many times.

One time I was up on the roof of my apartment building in the Adams Heights neighborhood (Near Crenshaw) and there was a car chase going on all over the West side between about West Hollywood and down as far as about Western or the infamous Florence and Normandy.

It was like the car being chased was hauling around a huge string of kites or balloons, except it was no less than 7-8 LEO and news helicopters all at their own flight levels all following around this one car like they were on leashes and it is the one of the most ridiculous things I've ever seen.


My other favorite LEO chopper story was from when I was like a 17-18 YO runaway homeless kid and I was living in a brownfield next to the 405 freeway. One night I got way, way too drunk on someone's dodgy homebrew hobo fruit wine and was stumbling back to my camp. I nearly made it back to camp and decided it was time to get Exorcist sick and managed to find a conveniently placed upside down shopping cart half buried in the weeds and dirt to hang on to.

Just as soon as I started throwing up I got lit up by the cop copter with the light of a thousand suns, which proceeded to orbit me and hurl unintelligible insults at me and some barely audible gibberish that I was trespassing for the next 15-20 minutes while I hung on to the cart, trying to flip then off with one hand and hang on with the other.
posted by loquacious at 3:19 PM on December 29, 2023 [17 favorites]

just one more copter bro. i promise bro just one more copter and it'll fix everything bro. bro. just one more copter.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 3:22 PM on December 29, 2023 [13 favorites]

San Francisco… every once in awhile, there are these red helicopters flying patterns over the city. No clue… As to PTSD noise, we get those damn waste of tax payer dollars Blue Angels terrorizing us with their way louder than helicopters fighter planes for a few days every October. Whenever there is a large event in Golden Gate Park, noisy news helicopters hover over the park. And for tourists there are both helicopter and noisy seaplane rides over the city. And for the nostalgic, remember when lines of eight helicopters flew over the Bay Area every few nights spraying out malathion to kill the evil Mediterranean fruit fly?
posted by njohnson23 at 3:29 PM on December 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

A recent audit found little evidence that its choppers deter crime.

oh no
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:43 PM on December 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

San Francisco… every once in awhile, there are these red helicopters flying patterns over the city. No clue…

1) Coast Guard helicopters that fly out of Air Station SF are red 2) both KGO and KRON have red news helicopters 3) there is at least one tour helicopter operating over SF that is red 4) REACH Air Medical has some solid red, and red and grey helicopters.

SFPD no longer has helicopters, something to be thankful for. Unlike Oakland PD, which has two; and East Bay Regional Parks, which also has two. All four helicopters are equipped with FLIR cameras. While it makes sense for EBPR to have helicopters for search and rescue in the hills, they also join in on surveillance of Oakland events such as the George Floyd protests.
posted by oneirodynia at 4:04 PM on December 29, 2023 [3 favorites]

With respect to how the FLIR cameras are dystopian police state gear, I didn't actually know that but I'm 100% not surprised. I expect the GPS integration is a bit glitchy sometimes.

My local police agency operates helicopters, which sometimes do inexplicable extended patrols at night not far from where I live, quartering and orbiting an "affordable housing" area it looks like. I expect for them also it's mostly a capital-intensive way of burning up 1000s of $$/hr and a means of something like competitive penis display.

Law enforcement in the US is so far from where you would want it to be, if you wanted something that was not mostly useful for oppressing people, that it's hard not to say "you can't get there from here." If a territorial entity as big as the lower 48 States survives the end of the current Republic, I expect it will have nationalized law enforcement. Though I won't expect it will be any better, for those on whom the law's being enforced.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 4:39 PM on December 29, 2023 [1 favorite]

I find the helicopter view of high speed automobile chases to be habit forming to watch. The CHP and LA copters should have live streaming.
posted by hortense at 6:53 PM on December 29, 2023

I guess one of the problems with keeping pilots on staff is that they need to maintain a certain number of flight hours to retain their license. Possibly similar for night-flying too. So even if nothing is going on, they'll be in the air a certain amount of time anyway. But yeah, its totally 'Blue Thunder'. I'm kind of surprised that Police on the ground have been tooling-up on surplus military kit but they haven't wangled any Apaches or C130 gunships for aerial crowd-control yet (maybe not possible without corporate sponsership; might be a budgetary step to far). ACAB too obvs.
posted by phigmov at 7:25 PM on December 29, 2023 [2 favorites]

I'm out in the burbs but in an area with some gang activity and near the freeway so at least a couple times a year there's a foot pursuit in the neighborhood with LASD (I presume) choppers flying low over the roofs with searchlights and blaring warnings to stay inside.

I have mixed feelings about normalizing loitering police surveillance drones (i.e., under the 4th amendment jurisprudence by which what's allowed depends in part on what the public comes to expect from current technology) but they already exist in some forms and ultimately are less disruptive and at least less palpably oppressive.
posted by snuffleupagus at 7:34 PM on December 29, 2023

Police helicopters are practically an L.A. tradition. A noisy, expensive tradition. Helicopters in general have been long established. I remember my dad tuning into KTLA during the infamous SLA standoff in 1974 because they operated the well publicized news helicopter (though I don't recall if they actually were allowed to broadcast from that airspace). I'm 99% sure there's an episode of Adam 12 extolling the virtues and necessity for police operating helicopters.

But find it difficult to believe in this day and age that such tasks can't be done far less expensively and more effectively with drones.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:47 PM on December 29, 2023

I'm pretty sure they fly over the poor neighborhoods at night on purpose to wake up/scare the kids and make sure they are too tired and anxious to escape poverty
posted by scose at 9:47 PM on December 29, 2023

Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure they don't. Jesus.
posted by 2N2222 at 9:50 PM on December 29, 2023 [4 favorites]

The concerns about the cost of LAPD's helicopters reminds me of cstross' short piece about the Edinburgh's police horses:

Lothian and Borders are unusual in that they're one of the police forces that still has horses — eight of them, at present. How much does it cost to maintain eight horses? Answer: around £480,000 a year, making them roughly as expensive as (if not more expensive than) a helicopter unit. Each horse requires a full-time officer, and they need exercise, stabling, and other facilities that run to £30,000 a year per animal — more than the price of a new pursuit car. (And why does Edinburgh's police force still have horses (instead of, say, another chopper)? Because after London this is the city where the Queen is in residence most often, and they're needed for ceremonial duties ...)

(Although he may have underestimated the price of a helicopter unit by a significant factor... "Los Angeles spends nearly $50m a year on its police helicopter program, or roughly $3,000 for every hour of flight", divided by the 17 aircraft is around $3m/helicopter/year)
posted by autopilot at 5:23 AM on December 30, 2023

Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure they don't. Jesus.

L.A. Cops Have a Helicopter Problem

[J]ustifications for law enforcement’s “eye in the sky” presence are thinly sourced. L.A. police often cite a single study about crime deterrence that was conducted in the 1960s by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, but even the original study’s authors have said it was flawed; it failed to include data from 1965, for example, when the Watts uprising occurred. Elsewhere, the theory has been debunked outright by later studies that have also shown that any money supposedly saved by conducting helicopter patrols is canceled out by their enormous expenses. But the “predictive” paths flown over supposedly high-crime areas still went up: In 2021, the number of these flights increased 30 percent compared to 2019. The result is more noise and air pollution in the city’s already most heavily policed neighborhoods. “From a young age, I’ve been unable to sleep at night as LAPD helicopters loudly prowl overhead,” Matyos Kidane of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, which is suing L.A.’s sheriff’s department for its flight records, told CBS News in February. (L.A.’s city controller office is conducting its own audit of LAPD helicopter use.) Data reported by UCLA’s Carceral Ecologies Lab showed that helicopters are lowest and loudest in census blocks that are more than 40 percent Black, subjecting those residents to unwarranted stress, trauma, and sleep deprivation — in addition to blanketing those neighborhoods with toxic airborne pollutants. Which is why the coalition would prefer police helicopters simply be grounded.

Los Angeles police flights cost $3,000 an hour, audit finds

The controller’s analysis of air operations from 2018 through 2022 found that there are typically two helicopters flying for 20 hours a day every day of the year, logging an average of 16,000 hours of flight time each year. The helicopters burn an estimated 761,600 gallons of fuel yearly, releasing more than 7,400 metric tons of carbon dioxide, according to the report, which said this output was equivalent to over 19m miles driven by gas-powered cars.

“Our audit’s findings strongly suggest that the LAPD’s current use of helicopters causes significant harm to the community without meaningful or reliable assessment of the benefits it may or may not deliver,” said the report from controller Kenneth Mejia, who was elected last year on promises to scrutinize LAPD spending.

posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 6:02 AM on December 30, 2023 [7 favorites]

Um, yeah, I'm pretty sure they don't. Jesus.

Since you disagree so vehemently, I'm now curious to know how many of those choppers buzz rich neighborhoods. It should be possible to trace flight paths over ZIP codes correlated by income. Betcha you're wrong! ;)
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 8:49 AM on December 30, 2023 [4 favorites]

fuckin' skycops!

this has been your bombastic lowercase pronouncement for the day and the final bombastic lowercase pronouncement of 2023. see you next year!
posted by bombastic lowercase pronouncements at 9:00 AM on December 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

With respect to how the FLIR cameras are dystopian police state gear, I didn't actually know that but I'm 100% not surprised. I expect the GPS integration is a bit glitchy sometimes.

I was having trouble finding clear video I've seen of some of these more modern systems in general, and what I saw is anecdotal - but the few videos I saw it was a smooth as silk and basically full on augmented reality kind of smooth.

Like there was no lag or stutter at all for the parcel map overlaid on the FLIR camera view and it was so smooth and tight that it looked like it was just painted on the ground no matter how fast they panned the camera or how they were flying.

I think we can safely assume this is a solved problem especially considering the state of the art for aviation GPS systems, and we can also probably safely assume that LEO aviation customers likely have access to GPS modes that are better than even civilian aviation grade GPS and closer to military/defense grade.
posted by loquacious at 1:47 PM on December 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

Since you disagree so vehemently, I'm now curious to know how many of those choppers buzz rich neighborhoods. It should be possible to trace flight paths over ZIP codes correlated by income. Betcha you're wrong!

That they're loud and obnoxious, polluting and expensive isn't what scose said.

Look, if you think "they fly over the poor neighborhoods at night on purpose to wake up/scare the kids and make sure they are too tired and anxious to escape poverty", I'm going to demand you have proof of this nonsense. Because this is pretty wild conspiracy theory territory comparable to the contention that the LAPD was giving out fireworks during the covid lockdown because something something crackdown on the poor folks. Which you may recall was something that also found some folks around here really wanting to believe.

And yes, they do buzz richer neighborhoods when they chase people there. For a myriad of reasons, they don't typically find themselves chasing people to Bel Aire or Brentwood. Though it has been known to happen on some very well publicized occasions.
posted by 2N2222 at 5:00 PM on December 30, 2023 [1 favorite]

For a myriad of reasons, they don't typically find themselves chasing people to Bel Aire or Brentwood

might want to look into that myriad a bit more deeply
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 9:52 AM on December 31, 2023

I've lived about 500' away from the LAPD heliport in downtown L.A. for 25 years. (I've spent way too much time thinking about helicopters in L.A., is what I'm saying.) The sound of something big happening in L.A. is, for me, the sound of helicopters taking off and landing for hours on end.
The helicopters aren't flying anywhere to pick people up or drop them off. They're not chasing down bad guys and then hopping out to grab somebody, they're doing surveillance with a big spotlight and a high-tech camera. That's it the vast majority of the time they're in the air.
About 99.99% of what the copters do, could be done by medium-size UAV's for a fraction of the price. Whenever this is mentioned in the local press or the twitters, I see two distinct reactions: from police, "oh noes you can't defund the police! you antifa criminal!!" (they don't even dispute that the same surveillance could be done with UAV's/drones), and from the very-online-left, some version of, "stop LAPD spying!!" (with no apparent thought given to the fact that the "spying" is already occurring, at $3k/hr flight time). Yes, I know, there are other problems with UAV's, but those problems are mostly present with helicopters as well.
In other words, never much serious discussion.
I'm very thankful that Kenneth Mejia is carrying through with his campaign promise to audit this stuff and put a (non-helicopter-based) spotlight on it. (I voted for him.) It's another giant money pit in the L.A. budget. Well, it's a side-pit in the ginormous bottomless LAPD budget pit.
Did I mention the time recently where I saw 4 police officers and 2 business-improvement-district security guards spend nearly an hour harassing one homeless dude? Guy was sitting in front of one of the abandoned Starbucks in Little Tokyo. Just sitting there. The city (our city? my city??) spent, I dunno, maybe $500 (in salaries) to tell one person to move along. I know that's not unique in the U.S., just always jarring to see in a city that many think of as "progressive".
posted by ButteryMales at 1:25 PM on January 1 [3 favorites]