I find it interesting that the question is "why don't they use drones". My question is: why so much air surveillance? I live in Germany. The only times I hear a helicopter is if someone is being rescued or if someones missing. I rarely see them at all.
There are high speed police chases (100mph+) in Los Angeles — no exaggeration — on an almost daily basis. Air support is the primary defense tool for law enforcement.
It's so bad that the local TV stations have their own choppers and a dedicated on-screen UI tailored for the chases with GPS-based tracking and speed.
Same reason that nearly every police response in the US is an armed response. Same reason police kill more Americans than terrorists do. US police culture is toxic and deadly. Several cities tightly restrict high-speed chases. That should be the norm.
My home town of Hamilton, Ontario (population 560k) recently made the news because a guy stole a bus, with passengers onboard, and started driving it through the city. It was newsworthy because he also dropped people off at their stops, and even rejected someone who tried to board with an expired bus pass. But what stood out for me in addition to all that was the police response. They quietly followed the bus, intentionally not using sirens to avoid “spooking” the guy. They waited for the right moment, boarded the bus and arrested him peacefully and without incident.
I recognize my little city is not like LA (which I’ve visited twice) - the types of crimes, the types of criminals and the prevalence of weapons are far different, although we also have our share of gun violence and murder. But we have also not militarized our police, and there’s very much a police culture of service to the community. Here, when a cop uses their weapon, it’s seen as a failure. This was a situation handled properly, and it made me proud.
I'm Canadian and American, and have lived in both places and seen the stark differences myself. In the US, the police culture is certainly militarized and proud of it. Even in small towns you have days where the police roll out the biggest armored vehicles they have to show off, and that's their idea of a "community event", kids think its cool obviously, but it's really just "lets show off all of our high power toys".
Reminds me of the story where two guys went for a joyride in a Tram in Braunschweig (DE). They boarded a tram during the night, drove for a few stops (including letting passengers board & leave) and left the tram there.
The funniest part of the story is that they didn't commit any crime and were let go.
Restricted high speed chases lead to a lot more crime though there’s some car thief’s I’ve watched on insta and they avoid LA and stick to Oakland because of the chase laws you also have people in New York like squeeze benz, license, doolie, and a lot more who have made entire social media careers driving around recklessly and getting into crashes on freeways because they won’t get chased more than a mile there’s been a huge rise in “cutting up” in nyc because why not if you won’t get chased you can just remove your plate and do whatever.
Not sure why car chases are necessary to solve this problem. Just arrest these people in their homes. Those videos are enough evidence for arrest and conviction.
Exactly, unless someone is in imminent danger there's basically no reason to do a high speed chase. Get the plate, track it on the thousands of ANPR cameras that exist, look up the owner and just knock on their door later on.
Like 99% of high speed chases only end when the culprit crashes their car, and often that's into someone else's car risking harm to innocent civilians.
That may be - it should be noted that criminals in the US are also much more violent and brazen then most of the rest of the planet. If your criminal population is packing heat the response tends to be much more aggressive. Its a bit cat and mouse.
This is a perfect summary of that "toxic and deadly" culture. Why are police treated as a dumb tool that will always respond to violence with more violence? Why is the onus on the criminals to deescalate the situation? Why doesn't the duty of enforcing the law come with a bigger burden to keeping the peace? And why do the police not have any culpability in violence they helped escalate?
You don't think that is a response to their knowledge that cops will often shoot and kill them on sight along with the incredibly harsh criminal punishment?
In the EU if you get caught doing a crime, yeah you will get charged and punished, maybe take a billy club to the leg during an arrest, but nothing too extreme and you go to jail for a bit, maybe pay some fines, but you live and learn. In the US there is a good chance you get shot right away, if you aren't shot the cops will likely beat you and abuse you doing the arrest, the prosecutor and court will try and dump a decade+ long sentence on you even if there was no violence involved and the material value is only a few days worth of work, and the prison is a horrible environment by designed that often fucks people up mentally.
Harsh punishment for crimes is rarely a very good deterrent against crime, it just makes people who were desperate enough to resort to crime more desperate and determined to escape capture. If I had a decent bank account I could probably get most charges lowered to something acceptable in the US, but most people committing low level crimes usually don't have lawyer money and will have their life ruined with a ridiculous sentence.
Possible but it seems like the chases are not even a US problem but more a "certain places" problem. I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
> I genuinely wonder what the cause of this behavior is.
Seriously? It's from people not wanting to be arrested and go to jail. If they get away, perfect. If they don't, well, they were going to jail anyways. Now they have a cool story to tell while in jail. These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign. These are people doing dirt, know it, and are willing to try something to avoid getting caught. It's really not complicated
Population density. In other countries they have a lot of motorcycle chases, and a lot more motorcycle based crime, but it's a crime of opportunity, which is created by highly dense and interwoven urban cores.
Berlin and Los Angeles _city_ both have 3.8 million residents. The greater Los Angeles Metropolitan area has 18 million residents. The greater Berlin Metropolitan area has 6 million residents.
It's not only dense but the scale is far larger than most European cities. Only Asian and South American cities outclass the insanity that is LA. Until you've been there it's hard to appreciate the scope of it.
Because our society is spoiled, averse to consequences, and addicted to pleasure. People cannot tolerate it when they don't get what they want. What they want (when being pulled over) is NOT to go to jail, hence, due their conditioning, they avoid the consequence. Up to and including bringing injury and death onto themselves and strangers.
It's insane this is downvoted when it's the truth. Again and again the person is running from something small, but that's not an indictment of the chase, it's proof of how freaking stupid and self-centered the subject is: they are willing to put dozens of lives at risk to avoid something like getting their car towed because they're driving on a suspended license. The officer chases them because they don't know why they're running (but it must be a good reason to risk picking up a felony), not because going after a suspended license is worth a chase.
We are seeing the result of a combination of factors including aversion to consequences and the inability to empathize with those they put at risk.
its a breakdown of community, with capitalism largely to blame. In small towns, this type of behavior is less likely when you know the sheriff or judge and feel like they are a part of your social sphere. In a large city, any red-light-flashing cop is just an NPC that spawed and will take your in-game credits. I think this is the result - for many of us - when each person we see every day is likely someone we'll never see again. The megacity is just a huge machine with sharp gears and lurking dangers you have to evade.
There is this perception that if you drive fast and recklessly enough the police will quickly stop following you. It's a get-out-of-jail-free card in popular perception.
American police just like it. They start chase for any reason, even for a broken tail lamp. Also not a simple chaise, but one where they intentionally provoke a car crash, often with fatal results for innocent people.
"I wasn't driving at the time. Someone took my car."
There is generally no crime for owning a vehicle used in a crime. The violation belongs to the _driver_ and to no one else. Burden of proof can be extreme in US courts.
You don't need to be chasing them on the road. Attach a GPS tracker to the car and follow it with drone, collect surveillance footage and arrest them once they come to a stop.
True, but chases involving stolen vehicles (a non-trivial percentage of all chases) means that mailing a fine to the registered owner wouldn't be a universal solution.
> kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine
thing is, in Germany and many other European countries there's a mandate to register your place of residence with the authorities in a timely manner (i.e. 2 weeks after moving in).
Americans and Brits don't have that, so "mail them a fine" is most likely going to result in the letter not arriving where it should.
I can't speak to the UK but in California there are various rules around updating vehicle registration when you move. Enforcement is pretty lax unless you drive something with exceptionally high registration fees.
There's strong wording about updating voter registration when you move, but I doubt there's much in the way of actual law. If there is it's basically never enforced as far as I can tell.
I wonder how much of the high-speed chase "scene" is actually fuelled by all the hoopla. (TV broadcasts of soccer/football matches tend not to show streakers on the field for this reason)
In 2003, "Los Angeles Mayor Jim Hahn, along with Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca, the California Highway Patrol, the Los Angeles Police Chiefs’ Association and the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners sent a letter Feb. 26 to news directors of television stations asking them to consider reducing the amount of police car chase coverage they broadcast."
Officials asserted in their letter that live continuous coverage
causes dangerous police chases to be looked upon as entertainment,
and encourages suspects to flee in pursuit of instant fame.
“Dangerous suspects are acquiring instant celebrity status when they
recklessly evade police over our streets and highways. This form of
notoriety is life threatening and should not occur,” said Los Angeles
County Sheriff Lee Baca in the press release.
"There have been instances where drivers look out windows and wave. Many
[suspects] have made it abundantly clear that they’re enjoying the whole
thing,” said Julie Wong, director of communications for the mayor’s
office.
The thing is: there shouldn't be. Car chases cause far more damage (including injury and deaths of bystanders) than the crimes that precede them do and "air support" is not a defense against that in any way.
Genuine question. What do you think the alternative is?
Let's say for argument's sake, that it was relatively well known that you could just drive away rapidly from a police encounter and successfully escape. Do you think that would affect the number of people who made that decision to do that?
I can see both sides of this, but I'm curious what yours is.
That is the case in many countries and as far as I know many states in US (for non-violent crime). Doesn’t result in a lot of people trying it because most people understand if the police knows who you are it won’t help to drive away and the people who are dumb/high/psychotic to not understand this they will do it regardless of wether the cops chase or not.
So either we just use drones to track people while they escape at normal speeds or we use the pre existing panopticon to do so, or we use normal police detective work. Frankly even helicopters but with out police chasing is noticeably better from an over all lives lost perspective.
Did you know that (pre covid) about half of all police deaths were due to car crashes? Even from a view point which completely ignores non-cops: chases are a terrible plan.
Law enforcement operates in a position where they “can’t lose” an encounter. This is a major cause of rapid and unnecessary escalation with LEOs and the civilians they’ve stopped.
Very much so. Perhaps their training shouldn't explicitly use such language and work to increase that separation - LE training is notorious for teaching cops old and new that anyone/anything "not a cop" is not one of them, and is a threat or has threat potential.
They get away from time to time from the airship. Two in one week this past august and I don't think they ever caught the suspects. One drove under an overpass and fled on foot, the other entered LAX airspace which requires waiting on clearance from ATC and got away somehow after that. I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
> I don't know why they don't just shoot a magnetic dart at the car with a gps tracker on it.
Hitting a car going 100mph with a magnetic dart that and getting it to hit on a metal part, not a window or trim, and specially a steel panel, is not easy at all.
This got me curious so I went out on the street and held a magnet to the front passenger door of the first 6 parked cars I came across. The magnet stuck to 4 of them. The ones it did not stick to are a Nissan Rogue and a Jeep Sahara 4xe.
> Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.
I never thought of my Olds Silhouette minivan as a high performance car. Neat.
The rubbery panels were great. I was at school pickup and another parent backed into it. They crushed the front fender to the firewall. Then they pulled up and it popped out.
They were freaked out but it was fine. And it's just a car.
Now this assumes that the LAPD/LASD/whomever actually cares to catch the suspect! In my (limited) experience with them, you could incinerate a full bus and they'd not blink an eye, but if you block the intersection at one of the many rush hours, that's a capital offense!
I mean in most other places people have simply realized that unless there is an immediate risk to life, the only thing high speed police chases do is create that very risk.
Nicely contrasts with all the news about the omnipresent license plate scanners - it's just pointless, don't take the risk, arrest them at your leisure.
That shouldn't matter, after all, even if the plate is legit, you can't just find a person's location from the database. They usually have some legal address or something, not live location.
So unless there's an immediate danger, there is no reason for chasing people and create dangerous situations. You can just follow them around from the severance cameras and catch them once they are no longer on the move. Even if you don't have disability for one reason or another, it still doesn't make much sense to engage in high-speed driving around people minding their own business.
I don't get this gotcha. The license plate scanner associates a plate with a location and time, it doesn't care for who drives it. In a chase, you know the plate, you don't know the location. Seems perfect?
Perfect how? The license plate scanner can only tell that a particular plate number was in a particular place at a particular time. It doesn't know if the plate was fake or stolen, or who was driving the vehicle, or if there was contraband in the vehicle. Stopping fleeing vehicles is one of the most effective ways to catch people with outstanding arrest warrants and get illegal weapons off the streets.
Basically, letting them run away and then setting up a raid at their house the next morning is safer for everyone. If you can follow them from altitude well enough to do that, you reduce risk dramatically relative to either interception or chase.
> They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.
Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry? PIT maneuvers are extraordinarily dangerous, especially at high speeds.
It's probably reasonable to take a step back here and ask: Why is this not a universal problem? It's not as if every juristication outside the US simply lets criminals run away.
Personally I prefer Fox 11's coverage of these chases. The guy they have up there is fun to listen to and always sprinkles in comparisons to past chases.
That's underselling it a bit, IMO. You can look at an aerial map and observe that it's pretty big, but experiencing it in person ... it's enormous. It just goes, and goes, and goes, and goes ...
The greater LA area has Hollywood film and television and a lot of music stuff too. It has the 16th and 19th busiest container ports in the world (Los Angeles and Long Beach) [1]. It has the 11th busiest airport by passenger volume [2], and several other airports because that one isn't enough for the area. It has a pretty extensive computer industry. There's a lot of petroleum processing. There's a lot of agriculture. There's some financial services (many cities in the US are bigger in finance, but there's still a lot in the LA area). A pretty good amount of manufacturing. Several top tier universities. It drives a lot of tourism.
And then there's all the GDP that arises from the population itself: construction, healthcare, education, real estate.
If you take away the entertainment industry, it becomes a different place, but there's a lot of economic activity and most of it isn't film and tv and music production.
I suspect it has something to do with LA's large footprint. Comparing to where I'm from in Chicago, LA county is over 4x the land area with less than 2x the population:
Don't know how the math works out exactly, but if they don't have the workforce to cover their patrol area with squad cars, there's probably an argument to be made for covering gaps with areal support. Given that Chicago struggles with workforce shortages, I can only imagine how much worse it'd be if you had to cover 4x the area with half the tax base.
They're not usually doing surveillance on people, they're mostly used as a quick way to get eyes overhead when something else is happening--foot pursuit, high speed pursuit, just about anything really where an aerial perspective might be helpful. They can fly anywhere in LA pretty quickly.
> My question is: why so much air surveillance? I live in Germany. The only times I hear a helicopter is if someone is being rescued or if someones missing.
Where in Germany though? Helicopters tend to be more popular to use for various purposes in very densely populated places, like Hong Kong or New York City, but you don't really see them much in rural areas except for emergencies.
At least for Berlin I can attest that helicopters, outside of the yellow ones for emergency care, are a very rare occurrence. I have yet so see a police helicopter outside of a large demonstration.
They bought them and spent a lot of money on supporting infrastructure and are therefore compelled to use them when they chase a middle aged drunken homeless man through a neighborhood.
The difference between rich and poor is way bigger in the USA it's been growing and growing since Ronald Reagan, while in Europe it has stayed basically the same.
On average, the city spent an average of $46.6 million on the program, the audit disclosed. It also found that there is limited oversight or monitoring of the division, its policies and practices and whether the program is in line with the city's safety needs. [...]
The department has 17 helicopters and over 90 employees. [..] The city operates their helicopter fleet on a nearly "continuous basis" [..] The total translates to more than $2,900 per flight hour. [...]
Additional findings in the audit disclosed [..] 61% of the flight time was in fact dedicated to low-priority incidents like transportation, general patrols and ceremonial flights — like a fly-by at a local golf tournament, roundtrip transportation of high-ranking LAPD officers between stations and passenger shuttle flights for a "Chili Fly-In."
That 46 million could be spent on education, transportation, aid for low-income families, the homeless, jobs programs, small business tax breaks, infrastructure renewal, public works, etc. According to the report, not only are they largely not used for anything productive, there's potential harms to both people and the environment. And as many have pointed out, the same work can be done with drones.
To drive this point further: The one stable causal relastionship relevant here is the one between inequality and crime. Reduce inequality in ways
0xbadcafebee suggested would reduce inequality - though probably not in sizes measureable after a few years.
The report is wrong. If you bother to watch LA news you'll see they are used a few times a night to track vehicles from the air. This frees up ground units and avoids high speed chases which saves lives.
It's fun to call this a waste of taxpayer dollars until you watch a carjacked vehicle recovered with kids inside.
Do you really need 17 helicopters and 90 employees for the occasional car chase? This feels wildly over the top. They could do that just fine with one third the resources.
Just LA city police service an area about half the size of Rhode Island. If you count all the surrounding areas LA has mutual aid agreements with, it would be the 6th largest state by population.
LA Sheriffs are responsible for an area larger than Delaware and Rhode Island combined.
They also assist in rescue operations, transporting SWAT and crisis negotiators to scenes, flying snake venom antidotes from the airport to the hospital, and dozens of other things.
I'd say 17 helicopters and 90 employees is pretty lean given that they have a crew ready to go within 5 minutes 24/7.
Are you asserting that the report is lying, and that a majority of the flight hours aren't actually being used for all those mentioned low priority purposes? If so, is your assertion based on the helicopters being used a few times a night per television reports?
LAPD flies quite recklessly especially downtown, where they aren't even clearing the buildings. News choppers fly much higher, well over the skyscrapers, and have no problems getting very tight shots on whatever subject there is down there.
If you follow them on ADS-B you see they really aren't used that frequently at all for calls and end up in holding patterns with nothing to do really before flying somewhere else for a new holding pattern, until their shift is up presumably.
Living in LA, the LAPD helicopter noise really is incessant.
It's hilarious to hear flying cops try to be intimidating through when dispersing illegal concerts or singling individuals out in non-violent crowds. It's impotent posturing and an obvious waste of money. They really don't need to send 5 squad cars and a helicopter for noise complaints.
I will say though that the loudspeaker on those things are surprisingly clear, even through the buzzing of a helicopter.
Down in SD at least, the sheriff's office helicopters serve many purposes. They'll use them for firefighting, hike rescues (often! according to their IG), first responder to an aviation accident, loudly shouting garbled messages through their loudspeaker, etc.
There's just enough high-speed/timely crime here that I prefer they use these over drones. There's some extra legal protections built into helicopters that drones don't get, like prison time if some idiot points a laser pointer.
I seriously doubt that physically rescuing hikers or delivering first-responders to plane crashes represent a large percentage of LAPD helicopter missions. I live in a nice suburb and there's one of them circling over it probably weekly.
I don't see why large drones can't do most of what these helicopters are doing. They're using needlessly expensive helicopters, too.
I work with CHP helicopters as part of our fire district's rescue team. We pull a half dozen people a year off of one of the local trails (sometimes as "recovery"). Most of these are via helicopter. There are two helos for a huge area - Yolo county down to Santa Cruz county. By acreage it's a lot bigger than LA.
My point is, two small helicopters are more than enough to do that job as a side-gig from all the other CHP work they do.
Also, Cal Fire has its own air wing. LAPD helicopters are not equipped for firefighting.
In SD, we have cal fire helicopters, sheriff helicopters with water tanks, SD City Fire Department has their own, and I just learned SDGE (electric utility) has their own firefighting helicopter.
It's absolutely worth looking at the ROI on these flights and weighing that against the intrusion on our privacy/freedom. No doubt they'll always need drones and helicopters but I'd be surprised if there was any real need for them to be in the air that often. I think that's a question that should be asked everywhere but the LAPD in particular are terrible enough that it makes this a great place to start.
I was in Santa Monica - the dense part with all the alleyways - during a foot pursuit involving a heli. Felt like I was in vietnam. It was at night, they were pretty low, and that light felt like the sun coming into the building.
That depends on the drone. There are drones/UAVs that fly so high in the air you can't even see them seeing you from the ground. Even low flying drones would be very hard to hit from a car involved in a high speed chase, and it's not as if people can't shoot at helicopters which are both larger/easier targets and much more dangerous if brought down.
You're talking about technology that's only become realistic in the last couple years. Even then, there's probably nothing off-the-shelf that would serve the current need.
LAPD has been patrolling with helicopters for decades. I have yet to see a drone follow a car in high speed pursuit down the 5 at 100+ MPH.
As far as I'm aware, high speed drones tend to have quite short flight durations due to battery limitations. Drones that have the range to follow a fleeing suspect for a long time would probably have to be big enough that they could cause a fatal accident if they crash, and in that case I'd rather have a pilot on board. Better reaction time, no risk from jamming, much better field of view/awareness, decades of testing, etc.
Most of the small high speed drones are that size to fit under professional licencing requirements, often so that one racing spec can be viable across a wider area.
Leading to significant competition in that size pushing down prices.
Rather than some inherent sized for safety idea.
Jamming might be interesting, I suspect that it's easy enough (and a much bigger crime) to follow a very loud jamming signal though.
Every practical metric a drone surpasses a helicopter; they are so much simpler to operate that you can easily offset any perceived downside with more drones. And you don't get a tested solution without trying it out.
> why do we allow high speed pursuit chases in the first place?
AFAIK they've changed their tactics in recent years, but growing up around LA these we're like sporting events on TV. It's a guilty pleasure, but almost everyone I know tuned-in and watched the chase.
Their popularity for viewers (even more so now with YouTube, but they’re long been a staple of live news and late night tv) and the fact that police like any excuse to do “badass” things are big parts of why they still happen. They’re a pretty bad idea. Endangering lives (including bystanders) over mostly relatively-minor crimes.
But people love ‘em, and if you point out what a bad idea they are people label you “soft on crime” (as happens with a lot of plainly good policy)
To those not familiar with LA or the USA, here’s a cultural time capsule from 2Pac circa 1996:
“ It's the, City of Angels and constant danger
South Central L.A., can't get no stranger
Full of drama like a soap opera, on the curb
Watchin' the ghetto bird helicopters, I observe”
Well the danger part has decreased a lot. It peaked at almost 100 per 10k people in the 90s, and now it's closer to 25. Still very high, but a lot of progress.
I was wondering because I remember the last time I lived in Los Angeles in 2009 I went to a Lakers championship parade and talked to one of the cops assigned to crowd control, and asked about it when a helicopter flew overhead. She told me it's a great job a lot of them try to get because even 20 years ago they were starting out at something like $215,000 a year and were not expected to have any flight experience. The city just trained up regular patrol officers and tripled their pay.
The way they fly you can tell they don't have a lot of flight experience. Really low compared to news choppers following the same pursuit. Juvenile even, at times (1-4)
This is the kind of government waste that needs to be highlighted. Police forces consume a massively disproportionate amount of resources from our cities.
Lawsuits are most of the money in LA. Juries love to think they're sticking it to the police, but it just comes from a different fund that extracts from a lot of other departments. The LA City Controller is making great attempts at outreach: https://controller.lacity.gov/data
Ad in the bottom left covers the UI when expanding the menu out.
I'm sure it depends on screen resolution etc but I'd love to be able to click links to the data sources.
Overall an interesting idea. I'd love to know the data source for the cost of the operation of the aircraft. Would be really interesting to connect a database of all aircraft types then present the ability to watch the cost of like "all American Airlines flights currently flying" or "all US military aircraft".
Kenneth Mejia, our progressive, data-driven controller audited LAPD helicopter use, and published his findings.
"The ASD program costs nearly $50 million annually while most of the flight time is not devoted to high priority events. Our audit found that the estimated annual cost to operate the helicopter program is $46.6 million (i.e., $127,805 per day or $2,916 per flight hour). There are 14 City departments whose annual budgets do not reach this amount;"
It's just a matter of striking a balance between "what a waste" and "what a lack of law and order". So, like a pendulum swing, cut down all spending drastically, until people scream "where is government?" and then swing backwards, until they cry "what a waste". Keep swinging back and forth until you find the local minima. Wait, am I talking about gradient descent?
What are the necessary capabilities? My city has no helicopters or drones. There's a medical chopper that flies over my house regularly, but it has an obvious purpose.
Unfortunately standard practice for LAPD is to engage in a dangerous police chase along with the helicopter, not to simply follow with a helicopter.
They don't really use them for hit and run. How could they? Think about how fast that crime occurs and how much time will pass between that incident and vectoring a helicopter, which might be tied up on other work.
Less than 20% of hit and run cases are even solved in California (1). I'm sure the rate is even lower in a city like LA.
It does, but I would be very surprised if the LAPD knew its place or cared to keep it there to prevent it from wandering into places that are totally unnecessary and expensive invasions of our privacy.
Blue Thunder wasn't just B-movie conspiracy theory paranoia porn but also contained a warning about technology authoritarianism and invasion of privacy, and police over-militarization.
During the summer of 2017 Denmark flew hourly surveillance helicopters and military SIGINT aircrafts over Copenhagen to stop Sweden-like gang shootings. It was expensive but worked.
Roughly a dollar a second which if you are a theater kid you know is about
$31,536,000 mil a year.
Honestly not that bad considering it provides a real service. I mean how much does the city spend on lawsuits against corrupt cops and other employees. According to the budget something like $300 MILLION on lawsuit payouts last year alone.
Who gives a $hit about the helicopters. Build an app that tracks the employees causing these lawsuits that are still keeping their jobs.
People know what to do to get away from the helicopter and they have been successful at it. Two chases in one week this past august the suspect shook off the helicopter and got away. It is as easy as driving under an overpass or into protected airspace. In one case this past month, they followed a suspect all the way into san diego and allowed them to cross the border into Mexico where they were lost.
That's if it's one helo at a time. If it spikes to 2+ then the numbers go up way faster. They have 16 total and I would assume 1/3rd can go up at a moments notice
