Loya realized that he could jump into his car and wait a few minutes, effectively hiding in plain sight, before calmly driving away. “I’d go straight across the parking lot toward the Rite Aid or the CVS or whatever, where my car was actually parked. I’d literally be thirty-five feet away, looking at them. If they had just looked straight ahead into the parking lot, they would have seen me,” he told me. “That’s mostly how I got away.”
Loya is an architectural enthusiast. In our conversation, he spoke at length about the design of building interiors, including a series of intriguing observations about prison floor plans. Loya described the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles—the same jail seen on the cover of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz—as a paragon of architectural disorientation. It is built in the shape of a V angled across its site, which means that as you walk around inside, it can be extremely difficult to maintain a sense of direction or even to know how you are positioned to the larger city outside. Even your official entry into the prison deliberately seems to have misalignment and confusion built in.
“When they first drive you in,” Loya began, “you go around in circles underground before you get put into an elevator at the center of the building. When you finally get out of the elevator—and, remember, the building is at an angle to the street—you are so lost!” He laughed as he said this, as if amazed by the spatial ingenuity of the prison’s designers. “I’m really good at keeping track of orientation. I’m really good at knowing where I am—north, south—even indoors. But every time I got moved, I was so turned around. It was like my interior compass was just spinning. Where am I in this building? But they’re designed that way.” It’s as if the jail’s original architect had been aware of burglars’ spatial superpowers, Loya suggested, and had sought to disarm them by any means necessary. “It’s just another level of anxiety, of you being off your game, of them making it challenging for you to navigate and orient yourself in that space. It’s part of the intention of prisons to make you feel incidental. They want to make it as tough as possible. You’re not grounded, and you don’t know where you are.”
For Loya, linguist George Lakoff’s book Metaphors We Live By took on an unexpected spatial resonance, revealing ways in which the built environment could be read or understood as a series of metaphors or signs. He said that after being released from prison, he spent a lot of time taking long walks around the suburban landscape of Southern California. He began noticing that every twenty-five feet, he would hit a driveway; he’d then walk eight feet across the driveway before hitting another stretch of grass; then another twenty-five feet to the next driveway, and so on, seemingly forever, “and the uniformity of that totally echoed the uniformity of the prison environment,” he said to me, “where I had my cell and my seven feet of wall and then a door. And I remember thinking, ‘Oh my God, man.’” He laughed at the utter despair of it all, having gone from one system of containment to another. How would you get away or escape from this?
“You can’t get away from the aircraft,” LAPD tactical flight officer Cole Burdette explained. The police use helicopters for a reason, he reminded me, and you’re not going to outrun them on the ground, whether you’re on foot or you’re driving a Ford Mustang. The Air Support Division has tracked fleeing suspects halfway to San Francisco, he pointed out, before the drivers simply gave up, whether due to exhaustion or an empty gas tank. There’s no realistic outer limit for a chase, he said; you can’t just leave Los Angeles and expect Air Support to throw up their hands and turn around at the city border. They’ll follow you to Arizona if they have to.
Burdette used this point to launch into a long discussion of how helicopter crews successfully track people who try to get away on foot. Most people don’t realize the kinds of trails they leave behind them, he said, let alone the ease with which their probable routes can be deduced from above. He lumped this under the idea that even cops flying around the city in a helicopter need to be street-savvy: they have to be able to think like a perpetrator, to predict what he or she might do next. You have to be able to see what they see and you have to imagine what sorts of decisions they might make—whether they turned left or right at a certain corner, or if they ducked behind a tree or maybe even slipped into another building. Occasionally something altogether new happens. Think of the bank bandits who, while fleeing Los Angeles police back in September 2012, started throwing handfuls of cash out the windows of their SUV, hoping to clog the road behind them with local residents running out to collect free money. That sort of behavior can be hard to predict.
To illustrate his point, Burdette told me the story of a recent night flight. A burglary had been reported; the burglar was last seen standing in someone’s driveway. By the time Burdette’s helicopter got there, the burglar was nowhere to be found. So where did he go?
Next, in a series of spatial deductions, Burdette had to study the built landscape below and guess what most likely occurred down there. Writer Nate Berg has described L.A. as “a vast landscape of pursuit potential,” with getaway routes and police surveillance details all colliding to form complex knots on the ground. Burdette’s narration of this from the helicopter’s point of view sounded more like someone trying to beat the next level in a computer game, outthinking the terrain from above.
“We could see the driveway,” Burdette began, “which was the spot where this guy was last seen. Now, you look at the size of the fences on either side of the house. That’s almost like a tunnel for him. It would make no sense for him to try to make it over one of those walls. It would slow him down too much, and it would be too hard. But, now, if you run into the backyard and you’re feeling stressed—if you follow that tunnel—what are you going to see? The first thing you’ll see is there’s a doghouse right there. If you run and hit that doghouse, you could probably make it over that fairly short fence out back. So now you’re in the next person’s yard. Okay—let’s look and see what we have here. Look at that abandoned garage out back, the one that looks like it was on fire a few years ago. It’s only got three sides on it; that’d be a pretty good spot for him to go.”
As Burdette and his pilot zeroed in on this abandoned garage, based solely on spatial reasoning, the radio buzzed: a nearby homeowner had just called 911, having seen someone slink into a half-burned garage behind their house. Bingo: Burdette had the right place. He turned on the FLIR—the helicopter’s forward-looking infrared camera—and sure enough, there was a heat signature, a white blur crouched inside among the wood framing. When a patrol car arrived seconds later and officers were in place to contain the area, the game was up.
It’s all about containment, Burdette emphasized: “If we have an aircraft overhead, it really limits their abilities. It doesn’t mean that they can’t still move or that they won’t try to run, but it’s much more of a challenge now. We try to shrink down the size of their world. We try to contain it and to control it.”