LAPD helicopter tracker with real-time operating costs

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

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 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)

> 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?

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.

This YouTube video is missing a Kavinsky soundtrack.

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.

> 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 ...

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

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.

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.

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.

In a big city. Not rural at all.

The police state needs to enforce its dominance.

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.

You know this is ridiculous, which is why you posted with a throwaway.

Obvious excessive spending should not be shrugged off by dividing the expense by the population of the area.

Obvious excessive costs need to be reined in. Tax money needs to be spent on the highest priorities, which this is not.

Since when does a can of soda cost less than 50¢?

I don't see why a realistic theory that happens to point at an unpleasant possibility should be called "cynical".

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.

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.

LAPD doesn't conduct rescue operations or anything like that. Different helicopters are used from different agencies.

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.

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.