Track LAPD police helicopters in real-time and see how much taxpayer money is being spent on air support operations.
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By BadBadJellyBean 2025-11-2122:4813 reply 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.
By shoddydoordesk 2025-11-2122:528 reply 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
By BadBadJellyBean 2025-11-2123:1212 reply Then why do you have so many car chases? That seems like an odd problem. There must be a reason.
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.
By captainkrtek 2025-11-2217:131 reply 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".
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.
By T3OU-736 2025-11-2312:53 ```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 does not appear to be true. The investagiom reporting shows that the shooter bought the guns after he turned 18 - the legal age to purchase them (long guns, aka rifles - different from pistols) in the state of Texas.
Buying things on credit seems like a reasonable way to do business in general - are you suggesting that all deadly weapons should be sold for cash to increase the difficulty of legally acquiring them and so lowering the frequency of mass shootings?
By FireBeyond 2025-11-2220:58 You forgot the most insane part of this (or at least of the aftermath) - the police chief was re-elected shortly after!
By KarlKode 2025-11-2217:25 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...
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.
By WUMBOWUMBO 2025-11-2220:33 add on to the fact that a city like NYC has a vast network of surveillance cameras
By victorbjorklund 2025-11-2222:16 I’m 90% of the cases the police knows who the driver is.
By vel0city 2025-11-2220:26 Start with the registered owner of the car and investigate from there. Follow it through the network of cameras that are already deployed around the city. If it was stolen from them, investigate the theft. In a large number of these chases the person is operating their own car.
By unethical_ban 2025-11-2217:09 If someone is tiktok famous for filming the evidence of their felonies, that's an enforcement problem.
By Philip-J-Fry 2025-11-2214:071 reply 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.
By tarr11 2025-11-2216:35 The cars are usually stolen
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.
By AngryData 2025-11-2221:31 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.
By slg 2025-11-2217:48 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?
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-...
By notreallytho 2025-11-2214:481 reply That's what happens when cities stop reporting crime statistics
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-d...
Murder is down in line with the rest of crime. What that tells you is that even crime that's hard to fail to report follows the general trend.
Down from a massive peak in 2020/2021 when cities tried the "lets not enforce crime" approach. Still elevated from pre 2020 levels.
By throw-the-towel 2025-11-2220:11 Not trying to dispute your conclusions, but I'd be wary of using the peak Covid years as a reference.
By closeparen 2025-11-2216:201 reply Okay, and? As long as crime is below its peak level, there’s no need to apprehend criminals?
By lukeschlather 2025-11-2217:271 reply Shooting people and high speed chases are bad tools for apprehending criminals. They are more likely to harm innocent people than criminals. Facing off with "violent and brazen" criminals doesn't change this, but also the fact that crime is down suggests US criminals are in fact, neither more violent nor more brazen than those in areas where police use less destructive methods.
By alksdjf89243 2025-11-2220:45 > also the fact that crime is down...
This is not a fact. What is a fact is that many police departments stopped reporting crimes, so there are fewer crimes being reported, not that there are fewer crimes being committed.
https://www.aol.com/thousands-police-depts-stop-reporting-00...
There are myriad reasons why, but stemming the upward trend of reported violence makes politicians look better and we all know how honest politicians are.
By squidgyhead 2025-11-222:40 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.
I have only been to Germany once, but my assessment was that we have a very different population here.
By BadBadJellyBean 2025-11-2123:202 reply 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
By zimpenfish 2025-11-225:291 reply > 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.
By closeparen 2025-11-226:181 reply These are trivial matters in that the penalties are minor, not that they are optional.
Of course they're not optional, but you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit. Principle of proportionality should apply, you shouldn't be risking the lives of the public over anything but the most serious offences where them getting away poses a greater threat to the public than potentially killing a bystander.
It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem. At least I would hope that the penalties for running away are very serious.
The police officers don't know why you are running away and can reasonably expect that there is something wrong other than an unbuckled seat belt -> a kidnapped person, tons of drugs in the trunk, a wanted murderer driving, etc.
Well at least in my country where chases are rare. I understand in US it is difficult since people are more eager to run away.
By idle_zealot 2025-11-2213:36 > It goes the other way as well. It is dumb to run away from police when they stop you for minor infraction and face a very high chance of getting caught and getting into a major problem
Right, people are dumb. You can't just throw your hands in the air and declare a problem unsolvable because people are dumb and keep acting against their best interest; you acknowledge that fact and change tact accordingly. If it turns out that trying to pull people over for minor infractions causes 1% of those incidents to turn into violent chases then you should stop pulling people over for minor infractions and figure out a safer way to ticket them. At the very least you shouldn't chase after them in your car and add another dangerous vehicle to the road. It reflects a mindset of "get and punish the bad guys" being prioritized over "improve safety of your community," which pretty much sums up the culture problem with American police and criminal justice in general.
By nmeofthestate 2025-11-2217:00 "you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit"
That would indeed be dumb, but once somebody dumb has decided to do that they're guilty of something much more serious and the car chase is completely justified.
By speakfreely 2025-11-2213:522 reply > you shouldn't be starting a high speed pursuit over a seat belt violation, or for someone going 5 over the speed limit.
That's the thing: normal people don't. Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
What about depressed people? What about stressed people? What about people with autism who overreact when spooked? What about people on the edge who didn't care about the consequences because of the life situation?
What about people who are convinced that police may kill them for mild violation as they saw that multiple times on the news and social media? The reaction to flee may be justified at the moment as it is life or death anyway, even if only in their heads.
There are a lot of "normal" people around who will act abnormally in a high stress situation.
By closeparen 2025-11-2318:14 Driving on public roads carries a responsibility to respond reasonably in all kinds of stressful situations. People incapable of handling a traffic stop should not be licensed.
By SauntSolaire 2025-11-2220:541 reply You're literally just making up scenarios in your head.
By ashtakeaway 2025-11-2219:55 Thank you for speaking to reality of situations that the majority of internet commenters never talk about. I think dang needs to put the HN member lock back on.
By zimpenfish 2025-11-2311:16 > Violent criminals, people with active arrest warrants, and people carrying highly illegal/dangerous things in their vehicles are the types that run from traffic stops.
I beg you to watch the John Oliver segment where he gives several counter-examples to this narrative.
By samdoesnothing 2025-11-220:152 reply 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.
The cause of the behavior (as phrased when asked) is not wanting to go to jail. Asking why people are in situations where they are committing crimes that could land them in jail is a totally different question. Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction.
By closeparen 2025-11-226:58 Stealing cars (often at gunpoint) and driving them recklessly is an entertainment activity for young men with poor impulse control and little regard for human life. This kind of person makes decisions of comparable quality elsewhere in life that are probably incompatible with being middle class.
By bigfatkitten 2025-11-225:451 reply > Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction.
The latter is often a result of the former. People self-medicating to escape misery.
By Aurornis 2025-11-2216:28 Can happen, but being miserable is a not a prerequisite to wanting to get high.
I think it fits a narrative to explain addictions away as something that happens to someone as a victim of their circumstances, but personal choices are a real input.
By lukan 2025-11-227:46 "Asking why people are in situations where they are committing crimes that could land them in jail is a totally different question. Typically, poverty. Also common, addiction."
Can't we just blame GTA?
Except that people around the world generally don't want to go to prison, so why do americans have more high speed chases?
(assuming they do in fact have more per capita/car...)
I'm going to guess... because we can? Police here are willing to chase for almost anything in most jurisdictions. I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
By zimpenfish 2025-11-225:441 reply > I bet there are restrictions on what constitutes a chasable offense in the rest of the world.
UK has stuff like [0] which contains a whole bunch of "is it worth it?" considerations. Also if a chase causes a death, the officer(s) can be prosecuted[1] - I suspect the nonsense of "qualified immunity" means there's no risk to a US officer for initiating a chase that ends in death.
[0] https://www.college.police.uk/app/roads-policing/police-purs...
[1] e.g https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-58889155
By dmurray 2025-11-229:44 In Ireland, the police (and the public) look on the UK regime with envy.
After this case [0] the standing orders are that it's basically never worth it, you risk a prosecution no matter what the circumstances.
[0] https://m.independent.ie/irish-news/courts/garda-charged-aft...
By seemaze 2025-11-226:30 Lots of high capacity vehicular infra in LA.. I imagine most places just have ‘chases’.
By georgeecollins 2025-11-226:57 By zimpenfish 2025-11-225:371 reply > so why do americans have more high speed chases?
Off the top of my head: 1) US cops are more likely to harass, maim, kill you than most other places (whether you've crimed or not); 2) US legal system seems a little hinky when it comes to certain people; 3) "three strikes" (not sure if that's countrywide or state-level? pretty sure it's still around tho'?) can mean life for three trivial crimes; 4) car-centric country - lots of them and everywhere is designed for cars[0].
[0] Imagine a car chase around London[1] or some other wackily streeted city.
[1] No, the godawful nonsense Hollywood comes up with does not count.
By Rebelgecko 2025-11-226:432 reply California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies. The list is pretty reasonable IMO. No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
It's basically a list of violent crimes, the only one that seems out of pocket is selling PCP, meth, or cocaine to childre, which is bad but could arguably be less bad than the others on the list
By zimpenfish 2025-11-2212:342 reply > California's 3 strikes law only applies to "serious" felonies.
But not all states are California.
> No one is getting life in prison for littering or insurance fraud
William James Rummel begs to differ[0] - fraudulent use of a credit card ($80), forged check ($28.36), failure to return payment for non-performed work ($120.75) and voila, life sentence (albeit later reduced to time served on procedural grounds.)
[0] also references "Graham v. West Virginia, a 1912 case which involved an individual convicted of three separate counts of horse thievery total[l]ing $235" which ended up in a life sentence.
In summary, some states may have sensible 3 strike laws, some may not.
By aerostable_slug 2025-11-228:19 Raping an unconscious person is not on the list of violent felonies. Neither is domestic violence with traumatic injury, assault with a deadly weapon, or felony battery with serious bodily injury.
It takes a lot to earn strikes in California.
By samdoesnothing 2025-11-2222:08 Are you suggesting criminals in other cities and countries do want to go to jail? Like, the reason there aren't high speed chases in Amsterdam is because Amsterdesian criminals actually enjoy life in the clink?
By Aurornis 2025-11-225:22 The population in big US cities is very heterogeneous. There isn’t one single culture.
In a city with large population, it only takes a few people willing to commit crimes to make the news.
By stickfigure 2025-11-225:48
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.
European cities are small? You don't hear about many chases in Berlin/Paris/London, do you?
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.
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.
A huge chunk of that is national parks and deserts. It's not all inhabited. Only about 25% is classified as urban with the overwhelming majority of that being concentrated in Los Angeles and it's surrounding cities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_Los_Angeles#Urban_area...
This isn't a size measuring contest. I think Europeans forget how _young_ America is. That's the only unique part of this country. Give us a few thousand years and we'll be on par.
By lukeschlather 2025-11-2217:321 reply No it was a population density measuring contest and you were trying to argue that greater LA was more dense than greater Berlin, without defining greater Berlin in a rigorous way. The size of Germany relative to greater LA was brought up to attempt to put the population densities in perspective.
By FireBeyond 2025-11-2223:16 Measuring methods are also very different. I've had this argument before here.
Looking at the population of greater Melbourne has you looking at suburbs like Werribee, Frankston, Boronia, etc., which everyone would consider as a part of Melbourne (suburbs, outer, but very much a part of the core).
On the flip side, the "Seattle Metropolitan Area" consists of:
Mt Rainier. Bainbridge Island. Glacier Peak in Mt Baker Snoqualmie National Forest. Mt Vernon. Olympia. North Bend.
No Western Washingtonian is calling any of those locations "a suburb of Seattle".
Well, and we always have to shit on the younger (and now bigger) brother
By cassepipe 2025-11-2215:11 You'd be surprised to learn that geopolitics do not actually mimick family disputes
By cenamus 2025-11-2211:05 Oh come on.
If you wanna say Muslims (all those "dirty foreigners"), then spit it the fuck out.
Also completely off topic that comment.
By victorbjorklund 2025-11-2222:20 The US is less densely populated than most European countries. It is in fact the 180th most densely populated country in the world.
Its interesting how both police chases and swatting is super rare outside of the US.
By almost_usual 2025-11-2221:04 The US is still cowboy country in many ways.
By 9cb14c1ec0 2025-11-220:13 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.
By almosthere 2025-11-228:001 reply Practice for GTA6
By hackable_sand 2025-11-2213:16 Don't forget to boycott Rockstar!
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.
By SauntSolaire 2025-11-2220:58 You phrase it like the police can force you to run from them.
By twelvedogs 2025-11-220:145 reply 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
"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.
By themafia 2025-11-2211:50 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.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-226:361 reply > 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.
By idle_zealot 2025-11-2213:391 reply > 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.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-2219:02 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.
By domoregood 2025-11-226:49 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.
By imalerba 2025-11-2216:49 There's a newer video more on topic of police chases https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8
By mschuster91 2025-11-2210:501 reply > 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.
By inferiorhuman 2025-11-2212:43 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.
By jayd16 2025-11-2218:16 Because the police chase them.
By rasz 2025-11-227:58 28 seasons of Alarm for Cobra 11 tell me Germany is riddled with criminals running from Polizei on the Autobahn.
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.
By aerostable_slug 2025-11-2219:111 reply 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.
By gosub100 2025-11-2221:13 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.
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.
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.
By Avshalom 2025-11-2219:39 I understand, but again, they shouldn't.
(This is why we want to abolish them)
By ultrarunner 2025-11-2219:251 reply Friendly reminder that LEOs are civilians as well— while they may dress like it, they are not military.
By FireBeyond 2025-11-2220:56 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.
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.
By victorbjorklund 2025-11-2222:15 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.
By Avshalom 2025-11-2221:30 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.
By chrisweekly 2025-11-2123:141 reply 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.By shmeeed 2025-11-2220:16 Intersting. Did this letter have any effect?
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.
By brian-armstrong 2025-11-2123:392 reply Decided to scratch up some peoples' clear coats for a little science experiment?
Could I have damaged the cars even though I saw no signs of damage?
It would be nice if someone else with knowledge would chime in here. If this damages cars, then I want to know, so I can stop doing it in the future.
Unfortunately, yes. Dropping a magnet onto a car and pulling it off, especially if not recently cleaned, will damage the paint to some degree. Maybe not enough for an average person to notice, but you really shouldn’t do this to other people’s cars.
Some people will get snide about anyone who cares about their car’s paint, but as someone who once bought a car I had to save a long time for and spent a lot of time with car care products I would be very sad if I saw you drop a magnet on to it and then pull it off without a second thought. Please don’t.
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-226:401 reply Also, the paint on cars isn't just cosmetic. It's what keeps the metal from getting wet and then rusting.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-2223:111 reply Aren’t all modern cars galvanised?
By AnthonyMouse 2025-11-232:041 reply The unpainted parts.
By hollerith 2025-11-2217:23 I'll avoid doing it from now on.
By tom_ 2025-11-223:51 It won't really matter all that much, but it will have done more than 0 damage to the paintwork (since metal is hard and paint is soft). Worth noting that drivers are touchy and emotional, and can't be trusted not to murder you over perceived slights, so it's safest to stick to doing nothing. Stuff something under the windscreen wipers if you really must, and even that is risky.
By nandomrumber 2025-11-225:52 A flexible fridge magnet is probably fine.
Seems like everyone here is assuming you used a 40lb neodymium magnet you dropped in the dirt first.
I like to assume the best in people.
Unless the cars are perfectly washed and clayed, even running a clean finger over a car is likely to introduce scratches. I just wouldn’t ever touch someone’s car.
You can look up people even trying to detail their cars to make them cleaner and end up leaving “love marks.” It doesn’t matter how soft the thing you’re using is. It’s because the car has contaminants on it and by rubbing anything on the car, those contaminants end up scratching everything. It’s like when you’re at the beach and you’re trying to remove sand off your skin. You’re probably not aggressively rubbing it off or using much pressure but it still hurts. It’s the same with cars, it’s just that the rocks aren’t as visible to you. They will leave swirls and scratches though… which become noticeable.
I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail.
> I’ve had people just lean against my car when it wasn’t completely clean and completely ruin the paint requiring an entire 5 stage detail
Assuming this is true, it seems like something has gone badly wrong somewhere in this process.
Why can't cars have paint that survives being "leaned on"
I think the person you replied to probably just has a different definition of "completely ruined" than you or I.
By prmoustache 2025-11-2211:18 Yeah we are talking pathological territory here. Car paints need less love than their owners need therapy if they have to "detail" their car every time a cat jump on the hood to enjoy the warmth.
By bradlys 2025-11-224:14 Visible marks from over 20ft away. You tell me.
By dns_snek 2025-11-228:36 If we're taking it this far then driving on the highway is like sandblasting the paint with dust and you do that without even thinking about it.
By prmoustache 2025-11-2211:15 Cars spend a significant amount of time outside and they depreciate so quickly it just doesn't matter. One shouldn't expect a paint to stay perfect the same way we expect our skin to wear and age over the years.
I don't even know what a 5 stage detail means but I can safely say you are overreacting. A car is just a tool and a rando putting a fridge magnet or leaning against your car once in a while is just completely negligible compared to the amount of shit a paint is exposed to when driving it. Sand and dirt do not ask for your permission either.
By brian-armstrong 2025-11-221:15 As long as the car is dirty, then contact with it can damage the top coat. This is a lot more true if you need to drag or scrape the magnet to remove it.
By s5300 2025-11-220:43 [dead]
By bahmboo 2025-11-224:33 There is a thing called the grappler now. Seems like a reasonable tool: https://policebumper.com/
By BoorishBears 2025-11-220:15 They already have darts for this that use adhesives to stick to any part of the vehicle and shoot out from the pursuing vehicles
By deadbolt 2025-11-226:35 Probably the same thing when the police shoot an innocent bystander currently - absolutely nothing.
By BoorishBears 2025-11-220:15 The actual darts for this don't look that far off tbh: https://www.toledoblade.com/local/police-fire/2016/04/06/GPS...
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.
Outside certain high performance cars, most cars have steel body panels.
By bluedino 2025-11-2123:11 Some steel body panels. Much of a car is made of plastic/urethan type materials, hoods are usually aluminum, some bodies are all aluminum....
By WarOnPrivacy 2025-11-221:30 > 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.
By Aurornis 2025-11-224:55 It’s more common than that. A lot of cars have aluminum panels now.
By Balgair 2025-11-221:14 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!
By dilippkumar 2025-11-2122:551 reply > 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?
By dylan604 2025-11-2123:28 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.
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.
Worth noting that many people who run from the police also have fake or stolen plates.
By mrtksn 2025-11-228:22 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.
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)
By nradov 2025-11-2217:36 You don't know where it's going.
By shoddydoordesk 2025-11-2123:076 reply 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.
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.
By shoddydoordesk 2025-11-2123:244 reply 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.
By zrobotics 2025-11-223:33 "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.
By prmoustache 2025-11-2211:22 > 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.
By netsharc 2025-11-2123:55 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!
By bildung 2025-11-2211:41 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.
By shoddydoordesk 2025-11-2123:17 They could learn a few things from the Georgia State Patrol, the undisputed world champions of the PIT.
By wredcoll 2025-11-221:14 Why are you countering his political talking points with your own?
By twelvedogs 2025-11-220:15 just like so many things that work in every country but the US apparently
By sokoloff 2025-11-2123:12 In many cases, the driver is not associated with the plates, with the car and/or plates being stolen.
By dylan604 2025-11-2123:33 John Oliver recently did a segment on police chases
By JLO64 2025-11-2123:17 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.
By dudeinjapan 2025-11-2123:43 This YouTube video is missing a Kavinsky soundtrack.
> 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.
By rootusrootus 2025-11-2123:34 > 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 ...
By littlestymaar 2025-11-2311:11 > The LA area is more population dense
LA is absolutely not “dense” by any European standard though.
That’s pretty much only because of Hollywood’s film industry. It isn’t comparable otherwise.
By toast0 2025-11-225:29 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...
By h14h 2025-11-2123:38 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.
By jjwiseman 2025-11-220:53 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.
By aleph_minus_one 2025-11-2213:24 > 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:
By nmeofthestate 2025-11-2217:021 reply The German eagerly commenting that, actually, it's different in Germany is becoming a defining cliche of HN comment sections.
By Teever 2025-11-2217:22 Honestly I'll take that over the "street poops are so bad in SF" brigade any day of the week.
Los Angeles is a massive city. To cover that much ground given limited police it’s sort of necessary.
By PeterHolzwarth 2025-11-227:04 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.
By embedding-shape 2025-11-2122:563 reply 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.
By chmod775 2025-11-2210:12 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.
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.
By rootusrootus 2025-11-2123:371 reply 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.
By Semaphor 2025-11-2315:19 It’s not that much bigger than Hamburg, though. But I guess Hamburg is denser.
By BadBadJellyBean 2025-11-2123:00 In a big city. Not rural at all.
By asdff 2025-11-2122:55 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.
By jurschreuder 2025-11-2214:46 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.
By potato3732842 2025-11-2123:341 reply It's not about results per dollar. It's about sending a message.
By Nextgrid 2025-11-2123:44 The police state needs to enforce its dominance.
By throwaway48476 2025-11-2123:44 Don't give them ideas.
By mgraczyk 2025-11-2219:44 We have more criminals and more crime in the US
By 0xbadcafebee 2025-11-2122:342 reply https://www.cbsnews.com/losangeles/news/audit-says-lapds-use...
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."By tclancy 2025-11-2212:25 Hang on, LAPD with limited oversight? Someone bring back Daryl Gates! Man the Ramparts!
By throwaway5465 2025-11-2123:253 reply $5 per person per year then. Or, the price of a can of coke per person per month.
Much of which flows directly back into the local economy through wages spent and maintnance paid.
By 0xbadcafebee 2025-11-226:533 reply 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.
By bildung 2025-11-2211:45 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.
By 0xbadcafebee 2025-11-2218:041 reply On top of that, police car chases are wildly harmful and usually started from things like minor traffic violations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wVFXUkFx5Y8
Helicopters avoid car chases by allowing them to follow the car until it gets to a destination or runs out of gas.
Even if they "usually" start from a minor traffic violation (which they do not), the majority of individuals who run have outstanding felony warrants or are engaged in committing another crime.
By 0xbadcafebee 2025-11-2318:111 reply > Helicopters avoid car chases by allowing them to follow the car until it gets to a destination or runs out of gas.
So, the thing that we could do cheaper and easier with drones, we should continue to do with vastly more expensive helicopters.... why?
> Even if they "usually" start from a minor traffic violation (which they do not),
Except that both independent journalists, and every major law enforcement agency, has been saying they do, for 30 years.
> the majority of individuals who run have outstanding felony warrants or are engaged in committing another crime- San Francisco Chronicle "Fast and Fatal" Investigation reported that 82% of car chases that resulted in a death started as a pursuit over a traffic stop or a non-violent offense. (https://github.com/sfchronicle/police_pursuits) (https://journalistsresource.org/media/police-chases-how-they-did-it-san-francisco-chronicle/) - A 2025 NY State Attorney General's Office report on improving policing and public safety cited data suggesting that many chases are for minor reasons and highlighted data on the high risk of negative outcomes. (https://ag.ny.gov/sites/default/files/reports/improvingpolicingandpublicsafety.pdf) - A 2020 California Highway Patrol report detailed that half of all police pursuits in California during 2019 were initiated for four non-violent reasons: speeding (20.7%), stolen vehicles (13.6%), license/registration violations (8.8%), and red light violations (7.5%). (https://www.chp.ca.gov/siteassets/files/police_pursuits_sb_719_-2020.pdf) - A 2010 article from an FBI bulletin noted that "the majority of police pursuits involve a stop for a traffic violation". (https://leb.fbi.gov/articles/featured-articles/evidence-based-decisions-on-police-pursuits-the-officers-perspective) - A 1998 Bureau of Justice Statistics analysis of over 952 pursuits in Dade County found that 512 (over 50%) were initiated for a traffic violation. (https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/police-vehicle-pursuits-2012-2013)So what? That doesn't justify vehicular homicide, either of bystanders or the perpetrators, not to mention property damage.
You could stop a suspect from running by firing a rocket launcher. But there's a substantial risk associated with what that rocket is going to hit, so we don't do that! A car is a 2-ton missile, and you have multiple of them careening wildly through the street. The risk is insanely out of balance with the objective. There are much less dangerous methods to find and apprehend suspects, and law enforcement agencies have said the same.
If you haven't watched the John Oliver episode that I linked above (YouTube link), I highly recommend it, because it goes over all this in detail.
By mike_d 2025-11-247:27 You literally just made the case for helicopters.
I don't believe you are very familiar with LA airspace, but it will be one of the last places drones ever make sense.
By mike_d 2025-11-235:42 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.
By aapoalas 2025-11-2214:26 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?
By vee-kay 2025-11-2219:40 US Government (especially during Trump regime) has been actively defunding public schools, school lunches and libraries.
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.
By throwaway5465 2025-11-223:091 reply Some of us always post throwaway.
By unethical_ban 2025-11-2217:131 reply In an AI bot and troll infested world, expect quippy contrarian opinions posted with throwaways to be taken less seriously.
Every message on social media is a throwaway, unless if it has some tangible memorable impact on life.
By unethical_ban 2025-11-2221:581 reply I disagree. Accounts with a post history, sleep consistency and decency in their content and particularly older pre AI accounts can at least be trusted as human and well meaning.
I humbly disagree. Humans have inherent bias, and politics and ideologies skew their behavior, even if they themselves mistakenly think it is well intentioned when it really is not.
Social media and news media, in general, are controlled and dominated by Leftists. And that inherent bias and prejudiced ideology is very evident on social media posts, news articles and Wiki articles, especially about my country and culture. And it's because humans are being taught (and some of them are taught or indoctrinated to perpetuate) skewed and ideology driven versions of history and (mis)information for centuries.
By unethical_ban 2025-11-233:181 reply We are talking about different things.
I am discussing the legitimacy of content from accounts that are new, and/or post low-effort contrarian content which is a signature form of trolling. I'm also talking about the ease of script kiddies all the way up to nations using AI to more intelligently troll as bots with endless questions and logical fallacies when talking about current events.
In other words, literally the difference between bots/trolls and people looking for real dialogue.
You seem to be concerned with left-wing bias in forums.
By vee-kay 2025-11-238:26 I think we are talking of the same thing, but from different perspectives.
If I understand you, you are talking of non-AI-generated social media content posted by and interacted by humans vs the AI-generated junk created by AI bots & script kiddies. You probably feel the internet is getting diluted as the authentic (human-created) content is replaced or superceded by junk stuff (AI generated or trolling content) that are more irrelevant fluff & unavoidable diversions than the real raw human-driven content and exchange of ideas spurring meaningful dialogues.
I am talking of same human created social media (and news media, and info-repository media (including wikipedia, books, journals, etc.)) content created and maintained by humans, which unfortunately tend to have inherent bias & skewed ideologies leading to bad/unwarranted behavior. But when all that online and offline content is consumed as data repository and training material for AI LLMs, then the AI bots will inherit and demonstrate those same biases, skewed ideologies and resulting bad behavior.
e.g., the main subreddit (under Reddit.com) for my nation, is operated by admins belonging to enemy nation. They use bots for such propaganda. Reddit knows this problem, but hasn't bothered to do anything about it, because that bias and malice against my country and its culture is widespread among Leftists, who own and control most of social media, news media, info-repositories (like Wikipedia, which too openly spreads such propaganda). So that subreddit is filled with hate posts and malicious misinformation about my country and culture. Last year, Google made a deal to absorb all Reddit content, in order to train it's AI LLM models. Now guess what those AI LLMs will think and say about my country and culture?
You miss the real human content and realistic online interactions, but I feel you are missing the fact that such content will always have bias and driven by ideologies or opinions. But perhaps that difference in ideas and opinions is what you seek. You are probably afraid that AI will replace such content creators and content, thus leading to boring online communities and lack of meaningful interactions.
I am afraid that such human created content and bias will inevitably percolate into AI LLMs content and behavior, and it will forever skew the world's opinion about my nation and its ancient culture.
Unfortunately , it looks like AI will reshape our online realities and interactions to make it all a worser place from which there's no return or escape (AI will become all-pervasive in our lives, whether we like it or not).
By tbrownaw 2025-11-221:00 Since when does a can of soda cost less than 50¢?
This was circulating recently and is sort of funny:
https://old.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/1oolm68/lapd_he...
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.
> end up in holding patterns with nothing to do
Cynical-me assumes those are the ones running stingrays/imsi-catchers.
By colordrops 2025-11-226:20 I don't see why a realistic theory that happens to point at an unpleasant possibility should be called "cynical".
