For Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times, stories such as Burdette’s also signal a spatial and conceptual shift in contemporary urban policing. It is moving, Hawthorne explained to me, from the chase to the manhunt. He meant that while the widely televised arrest of O. J. Simpson had been a chase, albeit conducted at little more than walking speed, the search for LAPD officer Christopher Dorner—or even for the younger of the two Boston Marathon bombers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev—had been a manhunt. In a chase, the suspect’s location is clearly known; the police simply have to stop, intercept, and capture him or her. In a manhunt, however, the suspect could be anywhere; what’s required is an intensive search through the landscape, a literal hunt with a human being as its target.
To Hawthorne, the chase and the manhunt are fundamentally different ways of using the landscape. One is the active pursuit of a suspect moving through the environment, usually at high speed but more or less continuously visible to the pursuers; in the other, someone has deliberately made him-or herself invisible to view, hidden somewhere in the city or terrain, leaving the police to deploy advanced forensic expertise and new technologies of visibility to discover them. Getting away in the former case simply means moving through the built environment more effectively than the police; think of the example set by Herman Lamm. In the latter example, getting away means blending in so well that you successfully avoid detection.
The Dorner case provides a particularly chilling example. Christopher Dorner had been fired from the LAPD in what he claimed was racially motivated revenge for his having reported a case of police brutality. After publicly declaring, in a rambling and often incoherent manifesto posted on his Facebook page, “unconventional and asymmetric warfare” against the entire L.A. police department, Dorner ambushed two separate teams of police officers in their patrol cars, killing one of them and murdering two civilians. Then he disappeared. His actions sparked a massive, nationally televised manhunt, including a surveillance drone, stretching nearly from the U.S./Mexico border to the mountains outside Los Angeles. Dorner was eventually located hiding inside a cabin—a structure he had technically burglarized—where, surrounded by SWAT teams, he shot himself in the head. At no point was Dorner really chased, however; instead, it was a manhunt, spatial detective work, an urgent attempt to find one man amid the Rhode Island–size landscape of Greater Los Angeles.
Finding both Dorner and Tsarnaev required the activation of every territorial aspect of urban police authority, from preemptive roadblocks and unmanned aerial vehicles to FLIR-enabled helicopter patrols. One of the most memorable moments in the Tsarnaev manhunt came when the Boston PD released FLIR footage shot by a police helicopter; the heavily zoomed-in shot depicted the strange, flickering white light of Tsarnaev’s circulatory system glowing from within his hiding spot beneath a boat cover in the Boston suburb of Watertown. This was as much about police bragging rights as it was an open taunt to anyone else who might try to get away. Its message: if you have a circulatory system, the police can see you.
No sooner does one side develop a new technology or technique, however, than the other side ups its game, in an endless arms race over who controls the built environment. Criminals are quickly developing ways to stay ahead of the game even against FLIR, with a range of DIY techniques of thermal camouflage. Burdette explained some of this to me, focusing on methods he had recently seen (these techniques failed, as Burdette would not otherwise have noticed them): “People are definitely catching on. They’ll rub mud all over themselves, like that movie Predator, or they’ll wrap themselves up in pool covers to mask their heat signature.”
I laughed. “Does that work?” I asked, highly skeptical.
I was expecting him to laugh along with me, but after only a slight hesitation, he said, “It does work—except a little bit of light starts to shine out of each end. Once they’ve been in there for a while, the temperature builds up, like it starts to cook a little. That’s how we find them.” Remember that when Burdette says “light” here, it is just a metaphor: he is talking about heat generated by someone’s circulatory system being given a visual signature by advanced technology. This vision of criminals wrapping themselves up in pool covers like human burritos to avoid police helicopter patrols seemed almost too absurd to be real. But Burdette insisted he had seen this; it was just part of the ongoing cat-and-mouse game between cops and the people who flee from them.
Even the region’s flight paths have come to influence how criminals use the city, he explained. The heavily restricted airspace around LAX has made the area near the airport a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. LAPD helicopters cannot always approach LAX due to air-traffic-control safety concerns, Burdette said; it is surrounded by what he called “very challenging airspace.” All those planes streaming down into the city, dropping off tourists and air cargo, exert a kind of geometric effect on crimes in the city: their flight patterns limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the getaway routes of criminals. Next time you fly into LAX, save a thought for the crimes your flight might be affecting far below.
I had gone into these conversations—with Joe Loya, with Christopher Hawthorne, with the LAPD, even with many of the figures we met earlier in this book, including Jack Dakswin and Special Agent William J. Rehder—expecting to find something like a Top Ten Tips for the Ultimate Getaway waiting for me at the end. But what I learned instead should have been obvious from the beginning: the best getaways are often the Hollywood ones—which are as unrealistic as their fictional context would indicate. In real life, getaways are not so tidy. Different techniques work at different times, for different reasons. Sometimes you have to drive away as fast as possible. Other times you don’t need to go anywhere at all; you can just sit in your car until the pressure fades away. You can wrap yourself in a pool cover. You can convince your judge and jury that you never set foot in the building—or even that the type of structure you broke into falls outside your state’s burglary laws. You can escape through tunnels or you can jump through bedroom windows; you can get away on foot or by public bus. It varies.
Some successful getaways do leave a trace. Think of an ingenious June 1995 bank heist in Berlin, Germany, where, unbeknownst to the bank’s managers or the city’s police, burglars had dug an escape tunnel for themselves beneath the target vault; rather than enter the bank through this tunnel, however, they saved it for the getaway. Taking over the bank the old-fashioned way, they locked down the business and held a group of hostages upstairs in the lobby. After the burglars received $3.6 million in ransom money, they headed downstairs into the basement, as if to have a meeting and discuss their next steps—but the hostages began to hear “an odd clamor, like pickaxes chipping at concrete,” the Washington Post reported. Only moments later, police raided the bank. When the authorities, prepared for a possibly fatal shoot-out, descended into the basement, they instead found nothing but an empty room with a hole bashed through the floor. “The hole led to a 384-foot tunnel,” the Post explained. “Running about 10 feet beneath the surface, the tunnel had been shored up with timber and steel plates. It emerged in a garage, where police assume the robbers had a getaway car waiting.” Sure enough, they got away.