[BadBadJellyBean]

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.

[shoddydoordesk]

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.

If you're lucky you can catch one of the many YouTube live streams. Here's one from....two days ago: https://www.youtube.com/live/uGiJU-FlpdE

[BadBadJellyBean]

Then why do you have so many car chases? That seems like an odd problem. There must be a reason.

[Zigurd]

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.

[adriand]

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.

[captainkrtek]

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".

[vee-kay]

Those high-powered toys by the cops are merely for showing off and to victimize the weak. Those toys typically never come into play to protect the citizens.

Case in point: during the Uvalde school shooting incident in 2022, when a shooter (Salvador Ramos) went on a killing spree inside the school, then hundreds of cops gathered outside with brand new body armor (gifted to them just months ago) and armed with automatic guns, but they never dared to go inside to tackle the shooter. Not only that, those cowardly cops actively prevented parents and state patrol officers from going in to rescue their kids. The cowardly cops were led by a cowardly police chief, who later gave excuses for the delayed response to the deadly situation and his mishandling of the police force, by claiming to have forgotten his walkie talkie!

Ultimately one of the border patrol officers and some US deputy marshalls (who had travelled 70 miles to reach the scene after getting an alert) managed to sneak in to the back, break the locked door, and used a tactical shield to corner and finally kill the shooter, thus ending his bloodbath (19 children and 2 teachers were tragically killed).

And if you think arming cowardly showoff cops with guns and armor is useless and potentially dangerous, you should know the Uvalde school shooter was a minor but he managed to buy the guns legally from a gun shop on credit!

That's how lax and evil the gun laws and resulting shootouts in USA are.

USA has more mass shootings and more school shootings than any other place in the world.

No wonder they facilitate and glorify high-speed car chases. It is all a thrillride for these adrenaline junkies high on power.

[KarlKode]

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.

Story here (in German): https://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/braunschweig-junge-ma...

[nenxk]

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.

[jeltz]

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.

[nenxk]

The problem with the YouTubers posting these vids are they hide their faces and most of the cars are either stolen or borrowed and even when they aren’t they don’t have any plates so let’s say the police see a video there’s not a whole lot they can do they can get a warrant for the channels owners info but they still have to prove that the person uploading the videos was actually driving the car and not just editing the videos their other option is to figure out the cars owner but they still have to prove that the owner was the one driving which is hard and in many cases of atleast the popular channels they don’t even own the cars it’s not impossible to pin it on someone but it’s not worth their time to build a case like that for reckless driving they have many more important cases. If it was a few one off instances then I could see it but it’s became increasingly popular if you go on Instagram you can find thousands of accs uploading these videos and only a few ever get arrested and most of the time like in squeeze Benz’s case it’s for unrelated crimes. With these videos becoming popular and more people catching on that they can just drive recklessly without being pulled over there’s thousands more teens driving like this without ever posting about it nypd doesn’t have the time to track down 100s of cars each day just because they drove fast and didn’t pull over hell look at how long it took them to track down Luigi who was NYs most wanted there for a bit.

[WUMBOWUMBO]

add on to the fact that a city like NYC has a vast network of surveillance cameras

[ACCount37]

Who do you arrest? An abandoned car?

[unethical_ban]

If someone is tiktok famous for filming the evidence of their felonies, that's an enforcement problem.

[Philip-J-Fry]

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.

[tarr11]

The cars are usually stolen

[boringg]

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.

[slg]

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?

[AngryData]

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.

[Zigurd]

Crime is down. Not because we have aggressive cops that shoot people a lot. https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-...

[notreallytho]

That's what happens when cities stop reporting crime statistics

https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-d...

[closeparen]

Okay, and? As long as crime is below its peak level, there’s no need to apprehend criminals?

[squidgyhead]

Because they have so many car chases on the news. So people get the idea that car chases are a solution that people use to get out of trouble.

Seems like a vicious cycle, fed by the terrible news media.

[ripberge]

I have only been to Germany once, but my assessment was that we have a very different population here.

[BadBadJellyBean]

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.

[dylan604]

> 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

[zimpenfish]

> These are not people getting pulled over because they rolled a stop sign.

Although if you watched "Last Week Tonight" recently (S12 E28, 2025-11-02), Mr Oliver's long segment is about police chases and IIRC he covered more than a couple of cases where people were, in fact, being pulled over / chased for trivial matters which then lead to crashes, deaths, etc.

[samdoesnothing]

I think they're asking why there's such a large population of people willing to commit crimes and then get into high speed chases.

[stickfigure]

https://www.google.com/search?q=florida+man

[themafia]

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.

[cenamus]

European cities are small? You don't hear about many chases in Berlin/Paris/London, do you?

[themafia]

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.

[marcinzm]

The Greater LA areas has 34k square miles of area. Germany, the whole country, has 128k square miles. In other words, the LA area alone is a quarter the size of all of Germany.

[victorbjorklund]

The US is less densely populated than most European countries. It is in fact the 180th most densely populated country in the world.

[gosub100]

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.

[aerostable_slug]

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.

[gosub100]

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.

[tokai]

Its interesting how both police chases and swatting is super rare outside of the US.

[almost_usual]

The US is still cowboy country in many ways.

[9cb14c1ec0]

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.

[almosthere]

Practice for GTA6

[hackable_sand]

Don't forget to boycott Rockstar!

[ponector]

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.

[SauntSolaire]

You phrase it like the police can force you to run from them.

[twelvedogs]

police will chase in the US for really any reason, kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine

john oliver did a whole thing on it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8ygQ2wEwJw

[themafia]

"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.

[dns_snek]

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.

[themafia]

They do have GPS dart launchers and other systems. They're fairly unreliable. It's difficult for the lead driver in a chase to deploy accurately and cars are typically dirty enough to make most adhesives ineffective particularly when deployed at highway speeds.

A hoodie is enough to defeat the drone surveillance, and regardless of what facial recognition technology you use, a jury still has to buy the output of that system.

For drones with less than a 6 foot wingspan that don't require a runway you've got maybe 30 minutes of flight time at a top speed of 30 miles per hour. So unless you know where they're going already you're not going to be able to effectively deploy it in the time necessary to capture them and you can't loiter long enough to track them with infrared.

The helicopter is an insurance policy. When you have a bunch of marked units doing twice the speed limit on a long enough chase they're going to hit something. Those crashes are devastating and lead to eye watering settlement amounts. The helicopter can safely chase most vehicles at almost any speed and the risk of them crashing with any civilian or even civilian property is effectively zero.

[AnthonyMouse]

> kinda dumb when they have your plates they can just mail you a fine

Except that the person trying to get away knows that too, so if all they're doing is buying themselves a bigger fine, why are they doing it?

The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work.

[idle_zealot]

> The answer to that could be because they stole the car, or because there's a body in the back, in which case mailing them a fine doesn't work.

Except it's almost never that. The answer is that people are stupid and impulsive.

[AnthonyMouse]

There seems to be a lot of variance in the percentage of police chases that involve stolen vehicles but the numbers seem to be in the range of 10% to 70% and even the low end of that isn't particularly low.

You also have the problem that if you steal a car and then run from the police the result is that they don't pursue you and send a ticket to the person you stole it from, that makes it a lot easier to steal a car, and then the percentage goes up.

[domoregood]

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.

[mschuster91]

> 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.

[inferiorhuman]

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.

[imalerba]

There's a newer video more on topic of police chases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8

[jayd16]

Because the police chase them.

[rasz]

28 seasons of Alarm for Cobra 11 tell me Germany is riddled with criminals running from Polizei on the Autobahn.

[chrisweekly]

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)

[jjwiseman]

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.

[shmeeed]

Intersting. Did this letter have any effect?

[Avshalom]

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.

[CPLX]

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.

[victorbjorklund]

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.

[Avshalom]

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.

[samtho]

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.

[Avshalom]

I understand, but again, they shouldn't.

(This is why we want to abolish them)

[ultrarunner]

Friendly reminder that LEOs are civilians as well— while they may dress like it, they are not military.

[FireBeyond]

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.

[asdff]

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.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

[mapt]

There's a lot more aluminum than steel on car exteriors these days.

[hollerith]

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.

[brian-armstrong]

Decided to scratch up some peoples' clear coats for a little science experiment?

[bahmboo]

There is a thing called the grappler now. Seems like a reasonable tool: https://policebumper.com/

[asdff]

OK, one with a big glob of bubblegum on it then.

[dylan604]

What happens when they miss and hit you in the head instead?

[deadbolt]

Probably the same thing when the police shoot an innocent bystander currently - absolutely nothing.

[BoorishBears]

The actual darts for this don't look that far off tbh: https://www.toledoblade.com/local/police-fire/2016/04/06/GPS...

[BoorishBears]

They already have darts for this that use adhesives to stick to any part of the vehicle and shoot out from the pursuing vehicles

[efnx]

It would have to be a very special dart. Cars are mostly aluminum and foam. A piercing dart would be dangerous and a magnet would really work.

[Esophagus4]

These exist!

https://www.thedrive.com/news/police-tag-fleeing-cars-with-g...

https://www.starchase.com/products/vehicle-mounted-gps-launc...

[asdff]

Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.

[bluedino]

Some steel body panels. Much of a car is made of plastic/urethan type materials, hoods are usually aluminum, some bodies are all aluminum....

[WarOnPrivacy]

> 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.

[Aurornis]

It’s more common than that. A lot of cars have aluminum panels now.

[Balgair]

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!

[dilippkumar]

> There are high speed police chases (100mph+) in Los Angeles — no exaggeration — on an almost daily basis.

How is anyone driving at that speeds in LA traffic?

[dylan604]

Like an asshole. We've all seen them, even if not in a chase. It may not be 100mph+ the whole time, but when there's open air, they'll get there.

[stefan_]

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.

[TravisLS]

Worth noting that many people who run from the police also have fake or stolen plates.

[mrtksn]

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.

[stefan_]

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?

[nradov]

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.

[lukan]

I think the idea is, if you know where the car is and where it is going, you don't need to chase it openly on high traffic areas with high risk of accidents. You use restraint and take them at a safer place. (surely won't work all the time)

[shoddydoordesk]

So your proposal is to just let the criminals run away? And that somehow won't embolden them further?

"Once this baby hits 88mph, we're home free!"

Air support is used to coordinate with law enforcement up ahead to deploy spikes to end the chase.

You are just repeating empty political talking points that simply don't work in the real world.

[mapt]

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.

[shoddydoordesk]

Buddy, most of these are stolen cars. Do you think they are driving them home and parking it in the driveway?

If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home.

>Why not just open up on them with antitank weaponry?

I've heard cops say something similar on body cam footage.

[zrobotics]

"If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home."

I'm not sure that the cops pursuing people at those speeds is doing anything besides making the situation more dangerous. Police in the US are grossly undertrained, I wouldn't trust them to actually be competent at what is very technical and difficult driving.

One would think that basic firearm safety would be the bare minimum, since we pay them to carry a gun. However, I have had to vacate a shooting range 3 times due to police showing up and being unsafe with firearms. I have had this happen in 3 different ranges, where off-duty cops have shown up and proceeded to ignore basic safety rules like not flagging people with guns. I'm not dumb enough to try to give a cop a safety lecture, so I've always packed up my stuff and left. However, if they aren't even given enough training to not figure out to point their guns downrange instead of at the firing line, they aren't trained well enough to trust with something technical and difficult like a pit maneuver.

One of these times was at a CA range, they were socal cops. Training standards for police in the US are woefully low, most cops aren't able to hit the broad side of a barn given ideal circumstances. They agitate about how dangerous their job is, but they don't train like it is. They fire a few rounds a year and have absolutely horrendous marksmanship standards. Don't get fooled, your average cop has roughly zero idea on firearms safety or even how to use the darn things.

[prmoustache]

> If you are eluding the cops at 100mph you are a danger to the public, they are not going to let you go home.

They would not even try to reach those speed if they weren't chased. A criminal who thinks he escaped the police will try to not attract attention. They would just follow the normal flow of the traffic and you can follow their path thanks to the millions of cameras and the helicopter mentionned earlier. We are not in the 70's anymore.

You can follow them from a distance they can't spot you so you can lock the road if they turn back and dispatch police force form in various exit points of an highway without starting an high speed chase.

High speed chase is about cops endangering the public for the thrill and adrenaline really. They do that because they like it, not because they need it to arrest criminals.

[netsharc]

If they're eluding cops at 100mph and being a danger to the public, it's because they're being chased by cops...

But well, it's America, having the risk of a stray cop bullet hitting you because just like car chases, shootous are inevitable, makes it safer!

[bildung]

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.

[bluedino]

A lot of departments terminate chases very early

[shoddydoordesk]

They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.

[wredcoll]

Why are you countering his political talking points with your own?

[twelvedogs]

just like so many things that work in every country but the US apparently

[sokoloff]

In many cases, the driver is not associated with the plates, with the car and/or plates being stolen.

[dylan604]

John Oliver recently did a segment on police chases

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8

[JLO64]

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.

[dudeinjapan]

This YouTube video is missing a Kavinsky soundtrack.

[Aurornis]

> 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.

Same for me, but I live in America.

The specific location matters a lot. The LA area is more population dense and bigger than might be obvious.

To put it in perspective, the GDP of the LA area is about 1/4 as much as the GDP of your entire country.

[rootusrootus]

> bigger than might be obvious

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 ...

[littlestymaar]

> The LA area is more population dense

LA is absolutely not “dense” by any European standard though.

[sneak]

That’s pretty much only because of Hollywood’s film industry. It isn’t comparable otherwise.

[toast0]

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_container_port...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_busiest_airports_by_pa...

[h14h]

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:

https://www.comparea.org/r122576+r396479

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.

[jjwiseman]

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.

[aleph_minus_one]

> 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.

Relevant German song concerning this mentality:

Foyer des Arts - Hubschraubereinsatz (1982)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2pAr1IMiP6A

Here is some video of the song that also shows the lyrics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykRB9SVlDhU

[nmeofthestate]

The German eagerly commenting that, actually, it's different in Germany is becoming a defining cliche of HN comment sections.

[Teever]

Honestly I'll take that over the "street poops are so bad in SF" brigade any day of the week.

[sharts]

Los Angeles is a massive city. To cover that much ground given limited police it’s sort of necessary.

[PeterHolzwarth]

Too true. It's hard to understand just how gob-smackingly enormous the greater LA metroplex is - it's as large as some small countries.

[embedding-shape]

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.

[c0balt]

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.

[chmod775]

They're used in Berlin, though they're surprisingly quiet compared to the emergency care ones. Maybe flying higher? Here's their POV:

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/U3mncVE1TQ0

Unsurprisingly, the comments are mostly making fun of them for wasting tax money on hunting down some guys with spray bottles.

[Semaphor]

I live in a pop 200k city, hospital copters are a daily occurrence. Police? Never seen one, Hamburg, one of our biggest cities, apparently has 3.

[rootusrootus]

Same for me. I live in a pop 1M city in America. Hospital choppers are fairly common. Police choppers rare.

Also, according to the tracker, there's only one airborne in LA right now, and it is a pretty large city. It's close to 100x bigger than a 200k city.

[Semaphor]

It’s not that much bigger than Hamburg, though. But I guess Hamburg is denser.

[BadBadJellyBean]

In a big city. Not rural at all.

[asdff]

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.

[potato3732842]

It's not about results per dollar. It's about sending a message.

[Nextgrid]

The police state needs to enforce its dominance.

[jurschreuder]

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.

[throwaway48476]

Don't give them ideas.

[mgraczyk]

We have more criminals and more crime in the US