Inside the city’s pioneering air-support division. by GEOFF MANAUGH
With the title of a book published 500 years ago, Thomas More coined a term we still use today for describing the ideal society. More’s “Utopia” is equal parts political theory and moral treatise, its arguments built atop a foundation of aspirational city planning. His panoramic survey of governance, public safety and crime, with its vigilant, top-down views of a megacity divided into districts with clearly defined canals, streets and squares, reads at times like a literary helicopter shot, as if we are passing over the roofs of an idyllic metropolis. We see forests and rivers, busy markets and residential neighborhoods — a well-ordered geography that More imagined would be governed by a nearly omnipotent political will, all in the name of the greater good. Before writing “Utopia,” More held a unique judicial position with broad responsibilities for governmental administration and municipal law enforcement: He was undersheriff of the City of London. For the last half-millennium, when we refer to the ideal city, we have been invoking an urban blueprint as imagined by a cop.
Crime shapes cities — even Paris, the “City of Light,” takes its nickname, according to one story, from streetlights first instituted as part of a 17th-century police operation — but the reverse is also true. Cities get the types of crime their design calls for. This logic extends even down to their bedrock: Tunnel jobs are almost unimaginable in granite-based Manhattan, for example, but the soft sedimentary rocks of Los Angeles — a former seabed — make it more susceptible to subterranean crime. Infrastructure also plays a major role in permitting or preventing entire classes of criminal activity. The construction of the city’s freeway system in the 1960s helped to instigate a later spike in bank-crime activity by offering easy getaways from financial institutions constructed at the confluence of on-ramps and offramps. This is a convenient location for busy commuters — but also for prospective bandits, who can pull off the freeway, rob a bank and get back on the freeway practically before the police have been alerted. The maneuver became so common in the 1990s that the Los Angeles police have a name for it: a “stop-and-rob.”
The built environment may inadvertently catalyze new forms of illegal activity, but this also means that the Los Angeles Police Department is constantly responding to criminal innovation with new forms of police work, often before the rest of the world even knows they might be necessary. With its campaign of ubiquitous aerial surveillance, Los Angeles is a kind of real-time R.&D. site for the world’s sprawling megacities, as they, too, try to manage the extralegal consequences of their newfound expansion.
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