As a resident of Los Angeles, I have often wondered why the cops fly their helicopters around so much. It turns out the reasons are obscure, but it’s possible that literature can help us understand them. Let me explain.

Introduction

In Los Angeles, police helicopters feature regularly in the sky. Although studies have repeatedly shown helicopters contribute nothing to crime prevention or reduction, LAPD spends about fifty million bucks a year flying them around up there anyway.

When LA’s own Controller’s Office reported in 2023 that only about 40% of the LAPD’s helicopter flights are for purposes of handling crimes, and called for a modicum of oversight, LAPD responded with the circular argument that helicopters are needed because cops on the ground (i.e., the LAPD) call for them. In defense of helicopters, the LAPD cited their Air Support Division’s motto: “The mission is the same, only the vehicle has changed.” Whatever the cops are doing on earth, they are also, apparently, doing in the sky, and if the earth stuff is justified, so is the sky stuff.

But really that argument is just fluff. The author representing the LAPD (henceforth “The Responder”) gives the deeper justification: Knowing why the helicopters must be in the sky requires experience of a certain sort. “[T]here are several instances where factual errors or false presumptions were made on the part of the Controller’s team,” The Responder writes (and not without a note of tragedy, it bears mentioning).

In some cases, this may have been due to an understandable lack of knowledge and experience regarding police practices, working conditions and requirements. However, when [Air Support Division] personnel attempted to explain the nature and complications of police work, and the duties and contributions of [Air Support Division] specifically, they noted a lack of interest and engagement by the auditors. For instance, at no time did any member of the Controller’s team participate in any observation of that work (such as taking a ride/fly-a-long or simply monitoring radio broadcasts of flight activity with [Air Support Division] personnel). Given the role of [Air Support Division] in day-to-day police operations, this kind of observation is imperative to understanding their contributions to public safety. (“Response,” pp. 1–2; my emphasis)

One of the basic ideas here is that there is something irreducibly first-personal, something irreducibly experiential about the nature of the justification for the existence of helicopters in the sky doing the work of policing. Indeed, it seems not to be the sort of thing that could be derived from simply (detachedly, say) accepting a number of ideas about social order or safety, For example, it would be a useless exercise to go up into a helicopter in order to discover the justification for the Air Support Division if we could simply demonstrate with empirical evidence that having and maintaining such a fleet was an essential and efficient component of ensuring public safety. Then you could simply say, Well, look, if you're an advocate of public safety, then you are compelled to support the existence of an Air Support Division. But we know, and the LAPD knows, because they’re not stupid, that no such justification exists.

What is it precisely about the experience of sitting in a metal bird in the sky that immediately announces the justification of such a program? We can imagine, if The Responder is right (and we have no reason to doubt them; they wouldn’t abuse their position in that way; that would be a moral outrage), that if Mejia (the Controller) himself had gone up in a helicopter and seen Los Angeles from a few hundred feet in the sky, he would have renounced his worries and criticisms. Having experienced, he would know.

What is it about the experience of being in the helicopter that is, in this way, self-justificatory (so that the reason for more being-in-the-helicopter becomes apparent from being-in-the-helicopter)? This question is not the other question—to which everyone knows the answer is no—whether helicopters are essential to ensuring public safety. The fundamental question that The Responder is alluding to could only be inappropriately addressed by empirical methods of study, such as the social sciences. For they address only objective reality, not the nature and quality of experience, intuition, perception, the on-the-ground reality—or, rather, in this case, the reality in the sky.

The LAPD must also know that, unfortunately, very unfortunately, it is impossible to afford all Angelenos the privilege of experiencing a helicopter ride firsthand, so that we, like the cops themselves, would be able to feel the reason coursing through our bodies, as it were, for ourselves. There are ten million of us in LA County. Some back-of-the-hand math suggests it would cost about five billion dollars for us all to experience, and thereby to know, the reason for this multitude of steel beasts of the sky.

Exploring the nature and diversity of first-personal experience is certainly one of literature’s purposes, if it has purposes, and it is especially of interest where that experience is hard to come by or limited. Books, say, about war, or grief, or madness, or isolation, help readers unfamiliar with these experiences fathom what they might be about. Perhaps, therefore, one way to interpret The Responder’s comment is to say that there is an ineluctably literary dimension to the justification of the helicopter program, something only literature, or literature especially, is equipped to capture. (Put differently, perhaps The Responder is fulfilling two civic duties at once: justifying the police practice of flying around for no particularly obvious reason; and providing us with an occasion for sharpening our capacities for literary appreciation.)

With this clue as our guide, we might therefore look to a handful of relevant literary reflections to coach our intuitions in the right sort of way, to prepare ourselves for acceptance.

Questions for reflection

The purpose of this series will be to look at flight in works of literature for clues to answering questions we might have about the justification for flying helicopters incessantly around Los Angeles. Here are some initial questions for us to ponder.

• The “Response” author complains that the Controller’s team were not appropriately “interested” and/or “engaged” to receive knowledge about the need for helicopters in the sky. What attitudes of “interest” and “engagement” are appropriate here? and how do we cultivate them?
• Presumably members of the Controller’s team, like many of us, have flown before, that is, in commercial or private aircraft. Is there something distinctive about flying in municipal vehicles that we’re missing? Is it the mission? the height? the view? the sense of power? the detachment from conditions of accountability (the terrible and awesome sense of one’s own freedom)?
• Understanding the helicopter-to-ground relation seems a critical part of being able to articulate the justification for the helicopters. What can we cull, if anything, from literature about the distinctive nature of the air-to-ground relation?

Shy of embarking on a “fly-along” ourselves, these are just some initial indications of the sort of open, questioning stance we ought to assume, it seems, to prepare ourselves for discovering the justification for flying helicopters in the admittedly second-best but perhaps only medium available to us—literature.

In the first post, I’ll be discussing Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s Night Flight.

Sources

• For Mejia’s report, see here.
• For the LAPD’s response, see here.