Examples such as this showed that having an eye in the sky does not make the LAPD invincible, nor can an eagle-eyed tactical flight officer—whether it’s Cole Burdette or Mark Burdine—accurately deduce everything happening inside a structure. After all, Mission: Impossible–like burglary crews accessing office buildings through air ducts, then rappelling deeper inside by way of a drop ceiling, are hard to detect from nine hundred feet above the streets.
However, new technologies are on the way. An Orlando, Florida, company called L-3 CyTerra has developed a “stepped frequency continuous wave” handheld radar system called the RANGE-R. This device, about the size of a walkie-talkie, allows users to see through walls—or ceilings. It is primarily marketed as a tool of great value for search-and-rescue operations, where firefighters might use it to locate someone inside a burning building or even trapped beneath rubble after an earthquake. However, the RANGE-R is also enthusiastically pitched as a near-miraculous device no SWAT team should be without, offering police a tool for determining “the presence and location of assailants or hostages inside a building prior to entry,” the company boasts.
The RANGE-R made national news for all the wrong reasons, however, when, back in February 2013, U.S. marshals used one of the units to determine whether a suspect was inside his home in Wichita, Kansas. The man’s subsequent arrest was later disputed in court on the basis that using radar to, in effect, watch him inside his own home was a form of unconstitutional “entry.” Its use should thus require a warrant. This argument was based on an earlier Supreme Court case, Kyllo v. United States, where the court determined that using thermal-imaging cameras to scan a suspect’s home for signs of a marijuana-growing operation was only legal with the appropriate search warrant. The court did not agree, however, that radar should be subjected to the same limitations, and police use of a RANGE-R remains perfectly legal and does not require a warrant.
While RANGE-R radar technology is not—for the time being—used by the LAPD Air Support Division, attaching a high-powered unit to the undercarriage of a police helicopter and using it to peer inside high-rises, suburban homes, industrial warehouses, and even into the sewers beneath city streets would give police a powerful new level of resolution in their 3-D view of the city. Cops don’t (yet) have X-ray vision, but something approximating that technology is on its way.
* * *
At nearly 10:30 p.m. I was in the police helicopter circling over a house near the banks of the Los Angeles River. In the dark I couldn’t see any real detail below and couldn’t make out exactly where we were. The moving map on the monitor in the front seat had our position accurately marked, but the pilot and tactical flight officer were arguing over whether they had even flown to the right location. Finally, the pilot decided simply to turn on the spotlight, a blinding, 30-million-candlepower inferno justifiably known as the Nightsun.
There, shining in the LAPD’s own artificial daylight, was The Brady Bunch house.
“You remember The Waltons?” the pilot then said, and we were off again, tracking down not criminals but the bygone sites of prime-time TV. The police radio was still quiet, the city’s criminals apparently taking an evening off. Over the next hour or so, we would go on to visit the Bat Cave; we flew over the downtown set from Back to the Future, the crashed airplane from War of the Worlds, and Charlie Chaplin’s old mansion near USC; then we headed back over to that icon of the city, the HOLLYWOOD sign. There, the pilot switched on the Nightsun, and it blazed against the sign’s giant white letters; he even circled the helicopter a few times so that I could take a few photos from the backseat. Nearby, they remembered, was Madonna’s old mansion—so we flew there, too, even using the Nightsun again as if it were our last chance to do so. They lit up nearly every window of this imposing complex in the Hills as they told me a bit about the home’s history, including its connection to gangster Bugsy Siegel and the Luciano crime family. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be inside the house that night, every curtain suddenly blazing as if it were noon as the sky filled with the rhythmic chop of an unexpected helicopter, like an all-out home invasion under way—but, just like that, we left the neighborhood.
I had to remind myself that I was there for an actual reason—doing research for a book, not just gawking at celebrity houses and famous locations—so I began to ask them about the equipment they used: the devices and gadgets on board that literally made the city look different from above, whether it was the forward-looking infrared camera (FLIR), the possible acquisition of RANGE-R technology, or their image-stabilized binoculars.
They showed me how the FLIR worked. This required me to lean considerably far forward, all but pulling myself into the front seat with the tactical flight officer, who inched a little out of the way to help me see. We headed for the darker parts of Los Angeles, flying broadly northwest over the deep canyons of the Hollywood Hills—Laurel Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Dixie Canyon—deliberately looking for a good place to test the camera’s infrared sensitivity. If a human body was down there emitting heat, the camera would find it—but even here we were having bad luck. Nobody was out walking the dog, it seemed, or even sneaking a late-night cigarette, so we continued on over the dark bulk of the mountains until the Getty Museum came into view. The officers realized we’d be better off heading for the ocean, so we made a beeline for Santa Monica—and the effect was unbelievable.
Almost at once, the FLIR monitor mounted in front of the tactical flight officer began to light up with the strangely beautiful thermal flare of human life: white-glowing forms walking along the beach, lying on dark blankets next to one another, even sitting around in a circle somewhere just south of the Santa Monica Pier. We flew on, quite low to the water, as they explained some of the basics of infrared visualization, and I watched as apparently sleeping forms—white-hot—came into sharp focus, curled up beneath lifeguard structures. There was nowhere to hide, I saw; you could be concealed behind the trunk of a tree yet an eerie glow would still surround you, shining like a halo. It was almost moving: a night flight with the LAPD had inadvertently opened my eyes to this extraordinary human glow, as dense knots of blood vessels burned hot in the coastal night like road flares. This all but supernatural vision of animal life is not only being used more and more to track suspects from above—or, technically, to track their thermal side effects—but it also plays an increasingly vital role in capturing suspects before they can get away.
As I looked down out of the helicopter window, the beach was nothing but blackness, silky and absolute, with not a human being in sight; but when I peered back at the monitor, lights were everywhere. They were like fireflies, these humans huddled around one another and listening to the sea.
My time with the Air Support Division had revealed the extent to which pilots and tactical flight officers can identify and, more crucially, interrupt the city’s illicit routes and hiding places. Back at ground level, however, I’d become interested in how the city’s freeway infrastructure could be used by criminals not just as a possible route of escape from police capture, but as an urban-scale tool for helping them design better crimes.
In an interesting article published by The New Yorker, author Tad Friend implies that the high-speed chase is, in many ways, a more authentic use of L.A.’s sprawling road network; by comparison, the daily commute was embarrassingly impotent, an automotively timid use of this extraordinary landscape whose very premise is not safety and convenience but personal liberation. Friend suggests that fleeing from the police—often at lethal speeds—while being broadcast live on local television is, well, it’s sort of what the city is for. To focus on L.A.’s legendary traffic is to miss a larger and much stranger point: that crime is often a more effective way to use the fabric of the city.