There are holes, however, gaps in the urban fabric where a certain street will disappear for several blocks before reappearing farther on. I remembered the other tactical flight officer mentioning that we had been flying over a part of the city that was out of sync with the city’s grid, and now her comment actually made sense: the streets there were resistant to these street-counting techniques, as if falling outside the navigational wizardry of the police department. It’s not just the city’s grid or its transportation infrastructure that can affect burglars or the police who track them; something as immaterial as the mathematics of the city’s street-numbering system can affect the ability of the police to interrupt crimes that might be occurring.
In a short essay called “Every Move Will Be Recorded,” historian Grégoire Chamayou recounts a hypothetical system of urban surveillance devised by an eighteenth-century police officer named Jacques François Guillauté. In a book about police reform written for King Louis XV of France, Guillauté proposed thoroughly and rigorously updating the Parisian address system. This would require a behemoth piece of machinery that operated a bit like an oversize index-card file—or what Chamayou describes as a “huge archiving machine linked to a map in a central room”—and some arithmetical cartography.
“Paris was to be divided into distinct districts,” Chamayou writes, “each receiving a letter, and each being subdivided into smaller sub-districts. In each sub-district each street had accordingly to receive a specific name. On each street, each house had to receive a number, engraved on the front of the house—which was not the case at the time. Each floor of each building was also to have a number engraved on the wall. On each floor, each door should be identified with a letter … In short, the whole city was to be reorganized according to the principles of a rationalized addressing system.” An intimidating and nearly unpoliceable tangle of streets would, at a stroke, take on newfound three-dimensional clarity. Nearly every room in every building would be assigned its place in an abstract model that could then be studied by the king, looking down upon his territory as if he were a set of all-powerful eyes floating in space. A police helicopter, of sorts, before the dawn of aviation.
But police use many techniques other than counting streets to find burglars, Burdette continued. He explained that if a helicopter crew responding to a burglar alarm sees something like a big piece of plywood leaning up against the outside wall at the site, then “that tells me right away that there is a possibility of a tunnel job.” Someone has carved, knocked, or drilled a hole through the wall—a “tunnel,” in police speak, means any deliberately created hole, whether or not it’s belowground—and tried to mask the activity by putting up this little piece of camouflage. This might work at street level for your average pedestrian or even a police rookie, he said, “but we, as experienced aircrews, know to look for things like that. That’s the sort of thing that an experienced officer in an aircrew can see and then alert officers on the ground, to defeat a lot of really savvy suspects.
“When I came on the job,” Burdette added, “my impression of a burglary is that they walk up and kick the door in, or they smash the window and there you go. But most of our burglaries are not like that. Windows aren’t used nearly as frequently as you would think. Doors aren’t used nearly as frequently as you would think. There are a lot of tunnel jobs. There are a lot of roof jobs. There are a lot of very creative ways of gaining access to restaurants or residences—including driving a car through the wall.” Burglars, Burdette had learned while patrolling the city from above, were constantly innovating new ways of using the built environment.
“I’ve seen people take tools and cut out the back of the Dumpster,” he said. “What they then do is pull the Dumpster up to the side of a building and chip away at the wall for several days. They just pull the materials and debris back into the Dumpster with them so that we can’t detect it. You can look underneath it and you can look all around it, but you won’t see anything because the Dumpster is up against the wall. In that Dumpster they’ve got a place that’s quiet where they can tunnel in peace. But then, sometimes, their goal is not even to get into that building—it’s to get into the building that’s in the strip mall three doors down from there, but they know that the building they’re tunneling into is for lease now.” Then, inadvertently likening burglary to a computer game, Burdette said, “That’s just the first level. During the next couple of days, they’ll tunnel through the inside walls until they get to that last business.” All along, the steadily filling Dumpster outside has been acting as their makeshift base of operations.
All these holes and tunnels would be hidden from aerial view, but Burdette explained how being airborne is a real asset: “Burglars look for opportunities. I might see a business where they’ve got a whole bunch of stuff stacked up behind their building. Well, they’re just inviting a roof job. We have senior lead officers in all the divisions, and they work closely with the local business owners. So I’ll make a note and say, ‘Hey, could you tell that property owner it might not be a bad idea to clean up back there?’ Because a person can climb on top of all those pallets they’re storing back there, and they can do a roof job. A pallet is a ladder to a burglar. They’ll just set it vertically and then stack another one on top of it, and then they’re off and running—off and climbing. For anything like that, you look at it from above and you go, ‘Okay, if I were a burglar, that’s how I would get into that place.’”
On a separate visit to the Air Support Division, I sat down with another tactical flight officer, Mark Burdine, to learn about some of the burglary calls he had responded to over the years. Roof jobs, Burdine explained to me, aren’t uncommon, but they tend to happen around one or two in the morning, after the city’s gone to sleep and there is little risk of a neighbor’s spotting the activity. One case in particular had struck him for its ingenuity and the difficulty of spotting, let alone interrupting, the crime.
A small crew of burglars had gotten into an office building through the roof, accessing the building by its ventilation system; they crawled in and, crucially, closed the vents behind them, leaving no trace on the roof that someone might be inside. Now out of sight, moving deeper into the building like ninjas, they lowered themselves into the main office by removing a panel from the drop ceiling. Then they turned all the motion detectors away from the room itself, rotating them to face the walls. Next they burglarized the place: computers, laptops, cameras, valuables left in desk drawers, whatever else they could get ahold of.
Even after they accidentally tripped an alarm deeper in the building, the police didn’t hear anything about it because the security company hired to watch the building’s CCTV monitors was based in Texas. By the time they noticed what was happening and had made the right calls to the local business owners and then to the LAPD, nearly half an hour had gone by, giving the burglars ample time to escape.