NASA’s answer at the time was yes—albeit specifically in the fight against auto theft, and even more specifically limited to L.A.’s West Valley and University divisions. Nonetheless, NASA optimistically concluded not that helicopters should replace ground-based policing but that “the helicopter-car patrol team affects almost three times as many arrests as the city as a whole per reported offense.” A similar study has not since been undertaken, with the effect that evaluation of the performance of aerial police patrols, to a fairly large extent, relies even today on the good word of a crime study published in 1970. A May 2013 investigation by Los Angeles public radio station KPCC came to a slightly more damning conclusion: the Air Support Division “reviews its statistics every couple of months, but it never analyzes those numbers to determine the helicopters’ effectiveness,” instead leaving it up to the vagaries of self-assessment to say whether the division is still doing a good job.
Nevertheless, fast-forward half a century since the NASA study, and L.A. now has the largest police helicopter force in the world. Is there something about Los Angeles—how it was designed or the topography it covers—that leads to certain kinds of crimes, as well as to a particular method of policing? In the 1990s, for example, L.A. became the bank robbery capital of the world, as well as a city globally known for its televised car chases. Could there be a connection between the two?
My primary guide for understanding the Air Support Division was Tactical Flight Officer Cole Burdette, whom I unfortunately never had an opportunity to fly with. Burdette is originally from Michigan, though he is now thoroughly an Angeleno. He is observant, focused, and extremely detail oriented; he would frequently restart entire paragraphs of explanation about something until he got the exact narrative sequence correct, and only then would he move on to his next point or answer. Those answers were also astonishingly exact in their geographic references: he would bring up precise intersections and even business addresses somewhere out there in the sprawl of the city, and he never once referred to a map. Each pinpoint location would then serve a specific role in Burdette’s ensuing explanations—sometimes even five or ten minutes later—as he attempted to make clear why a certain crime or event had unfolded in one way and not another.
It was obvious right away that Burdette had turned himself into a kind of one-man atlas of the city, possessing a vision of Los Angeles that rivals—in fact, exceeds—that of any urban geographer, city planner, or local architect. His knowledge of the terrain is both geographically extensive and highly granular, the product of thousands of hours of flight time, reconciling the constantly moving map of the city displayed on his helicopter’s monitor with the actual streets tangled below. Dressed in his olive-green flight uniform and sporting a military-style haircut, Burdette walked me through the Air Support Division HQ on a quick tour, our final destination a classroom-like space lined with whiteboards where we could talk about burglary and the city.
Los Angeles is a fundamentally different kind of place, he explained, from New York or Chicago—or even San Francisco—with their skyscrapers and deep, canyon-like streets. Those dense clusters of high-rises and towers make thorough aerial patrols nearly impossible, as well as potentially dangerous and economically unnecessary. Out here in Los Angeles, however, you simply cannot see the whole city if you rely solely on ground patrols. Limiting yourself to roads—that is, thinking merely in two dimensions, like a driver—is clearly not going to work. As a cop trying to anticipate how burglars might use the city, you have to think three-dimensionally. Volumetrically. You have to think in a fundamentally different spatial way about the city laid out below, including how neighborhoods are actually connected and what the most efficient routes might be between them. After all, this is how criminals think, Burdette explained, and this is how they pioneer new geographic ways to escape from you.
I asked him, if he could redesign the city from the perspective of an LAPD tactical flight officer, what he would add or change to make his job easier. Burdette exhaled. What would be great, he finally said, would be a consistent application of the city’s numbering system, from neighborhood to neighborhood, and then, as if channeling Mike Davis, to paint large identifying numbers on the roofs of building complexes, such as schools and hospitals. If those sorts of buildings could be numbered in a clockwise direction, starting with the entry building, he explained, then the job of a helicopter crew in directing officers to a specific structure deep in the sprawl of the city would be almost infinitely easier. When I asked what he meant when he said that a more consistent application of the city’s grid would be useful, he told me about the rules of four.
The idea of studying the urban and architectural—even numerical—visions of police is by no means new or unique to my own research. Thomas More’s Utopia is a foundational text in the peculiar genre of describing the ideal metropolis; it is equal parts political theory and moral treatise, with a strong undercurrent of speculative design. What is the perfect city? More asks. What would it look like and how would it work? As it happens, one of the book’s earliest passages is a reflection on how to prevent not just crime but specifically theft and robbery in a perfect society.
Prior to writing Utopia, Thomas More was undersheriff of London. He was a cop. It should come as no surprise, then, to see that an LAPD tactical flight officer or, for that matter, an FBI special agent might also dabble in large-scale spatial thinking, where visionary law enforcement becomes its own strange form of architectural or urban design. After all, they belong to a distinguished lineage: More’s Utopia shows that police visions of the metropolis are integral to the Western literary tradition. Indeed, the possibility that a twenty-first-century Utopia might yet be written by a retired police helicopter pilot or by an FBI bank-crime investigator is oddly compelling, even if, as with More’s own classic text, it is unlikely that every aspect of their ideal city would appeal to everyone’s taste.
Using the rules of four, Burdette told me, he could navigate to basically any building in Los Angeles. It was as if some secret code had been found hidden within the city’s addressing system, an occult arithmetic uncovered by police helicopter crews to cast a spell over the metropolis below. In reality, the rules of four fall somewhere between a rule of thumb and an algorithm, and they allow for nearly instantaneous yet accurate aerial navigation. Using them, Burdette explained, he and his pilot could fly from edge to edge of the entire metropolis, reading the streets below like the scanning arm of a hard drive—then swooping down into that shining grid wherever a crime had occurred.
“The way the parcels work in the city of Los Angeles,” Burdette began, “is that Main Street and First Street are the hub of the city.” This is also where the LAPD built its headquarters, a huge new building I was able to visit later for a meeting with detectives from the Burglary Special Section. The LAPD is thus literally at the very center of the metropolis, its numerological heart: it is the zero point from which everything else emanates, with Los Angeles a kind of giant mandala built by the police, airborne lords of the spiderweb.
Street numbers get bigger heading south from police headquarters, and it works arithmetically. “If it’s the fourth house south of the corner on the west side of the street,” Burdette explained, speaking very carefully and watching to be sure I was following him, “then the address is going to be an odd number. The rules of four mean that I can do four times four—it’s the fourth house, times four—which is sixteen. But, because the numbers on that side of the street are odd, we know we’re going to be looking at either fifteen or seventeen. So, if the address is south of Thirty-Eighth Street and it’s the fourth house on the west side of the street, then it’s going to be 3815 or 3817. It is going to be that address. If it’s on the other side of the street, it’s going to be even—it’s going to be 3816 or 3818.”