A Burglar's Guide to the City (4 page)
If so, congrats: you were looking at a building the way a burglar would. There’s a bit of George Leonidas Leslie in us all.
A Burglar’s Guide to the City
As the FBI defines it, burglary is “the unlawful entry of a structure to commit a felony or theft.” Burglary is thus an explicitly
spatial
crime: it requires a perpetrator to enter an architectural structure illegally, thus differentiating burglary from mere theft, pickpocketing, or robbery. Sensing there might still be some potential confusion here, the FBI quickly adds that their own “definition of ‘structure’ includes apartment, barn, house trailer or houseboat when used as a permanent dwelling, office, railroad car (but not automobile), stable, and vessel (i.e., ship).”
So much for the Bureau’s reputation for being neat and tidy—such a list clearly risks being subject to constant, ever more detailed architectural updates. Is a shed technically a “barn”? Is a dog kennel just a different kind of “stable”? It depends on which lawyer you ask. Oddly enough, contemporary burglary law reveals that some of the most intense—certainly the most consequential—architectural arguments today are not occurring inside the hallowed halls of academia, but inside law offices looking to redefine what a building is. Even the way the FBI tiptoes around its own attempt at definitions makes it clear that burglary involves a fluid yet confusingly specific definition of architectural space: a “house trailer or houseboat” can be subject to burglary, for example, but only if it is “used as a permanent dwelling.”
Nevertheless, to commit burglary you must cross some imaginary border, or invisible plane, and enter another clearly defined architectural space—a volume of air, an enclosure—with the intention of committing a crime there. Without walls and thresholds—without doorways, floors, and window frames, or even roofs, awnings, and screened-in porches—burglary would not be legally possible. It is a spatial crime, one whose parameters are baked into the very elements of the built environment.
To put this another way,
burglary requires architecture
. Not infrequently, only because of some aspect of a building’s design is burglary even possible. A blind spot, a vulnerability, a badly placed window, a shadowy alcove, an unlocked skylight, a useful proximity between one structure and the next—the burglar sees this opportunity and pounces. Solving certain burglaries thus often has the feel of an architectural analysis. How did the criminal enter? Can we deduce from the method of entry that a person was there to commit a crime? In many states you can be charged with burglary simply for unnecessarily using a side entrance or coming in through the garage rather than the front door: an indirect approach to the built environment is considered legally suspicious.
So I wanted to learn more about how burglars see the city—what a town, a street, a neighborhood, looks like through their eyes, as spaces of seemingly endless possibility. I wanted to learn from cops and robbers both what the built environment can really do, equally fascinated and horrified by the on-again, off-again brilliant stupidity of the burglar’s approach to architecture, with its X-ray vision of secret passages, spatial agents, and the porous world they inhabit together, where everything architects take for granted can literally be undercut, punched through, knocked down, or simply sidestepped.
Burglars, it seemed to me, are uniquely ambitious in what they want from the buildings around them—to walk through walls, to enter through third-story windows rather than through front doors, and to pop up from below, emerging from the city’s sewers like half-dreamed creatures of local folklore. They are as magical and otherworldly as they are so endearingly incompetent, so stupidly unprepared for a world of well-policed walls and ceilings.
Somewhere between absurdity and genius, I thought, there should be a new guide to the city: an idiot’s guide, a guide for people who can’t use floors and ceilings the right way, for people who don’t understand doors or windows, who can’t even let the ground itself rest untouched without trying to dig a tunnel through it.
There should be
a burglar’s guide to the city
.
CRIME IS JUST ANOTHER WAY TO USE THE CITY
Sky Control
“You want to see
The Brady Bunch
house?” The helicopter radio was crackling and I wasn’t sure I had heard the pilot correctly. Had there been a burglary there? I tried to adjust my headset.
“You mean the house from the TV show?” I asked, pulling the microphone closer to my mouth. I began imagining some bizarre fictional heist involving Mr. Brady’s personal collection of blueprints. He had been an architect in the show, after all; he could have had plans for the entire neighborhood. He could have been another George Leonidas Leslie. A more interesting version of
The Brady Bunch
started unfolding in my head.
The helicopter suddenly banked right and we shuddered northwest across Los Angeles. L.A. is the second-most-populous city in the United States, yet what we refer to as if it were one place with a single, clearly expressed identity is actually a diffuse network of much smaller cities and distinct neighborhoods so expansive that the outer limits of Los Angeles County frame an area nearly the size of Rhode Island. This not only reveals the fluidity of the concept of a city—where a suburban landscape on a large enough scale becomes urban—it also suggests that cities of this type require a different sort of policing, and that they produce different sorts of crime.
The physical design of a metropolis—its public transit and its street grid, its climate and its topography—can inadvertently result in weak spots that only become clear when criminals take advantage of them, whether that’s to commit bank heists, burglaries, drive-by shootings, or murders. This means that, to a surprising extent, the way a city was built can catalyze or help inspire certain criminal acts.
The reverse is also true. The various parameters that define a city—including the most basic details, like its size and shape—affect how that city can be policed. This can be as obvious as a water-based city such as Stockholm or New York City requiring a more active harbor division, or it can be far more subtle. For example, the impenetrable, fingerprint-like density of London has, in part, helped to encourage the near-infinite proliferation of street-level surveillance cameras, whereas the wide-open sprawl of Greater Los Angeles has led to NASA-sanctioned police-helicopter patrols. These distinctive forms of policing, in turn, affect the kinds of crimes that are committed in each city.
If there is a general law of urban criminality here, it’s that cities get the types of crime their design calls for.
I was riding along with the LAPD Air Support Division on a routine night flight. It would be two and a half hours in total airtime, the duration of all LAPD helicopter patrols, but we weren’t finding a whole lot to do. This evening, for good or for bad, had almost no criminal activity for us to track. The radio was silent. Our moments of highest tension weren’t new crimes being called in but high winds blowing in from the San Fernando Valley. Rather than a night of aerial adventure, we just hovered for a while near the towers downtown before almost exaggeratedly roaring off after whatever radio blips finally reached us—a reported holdup of a 7-Eleven near Glendale that was over long before we got there, a fight of some kind in a park near USC that we never witnessed. Nothing boiled over or lasted long enough for us to respond, leaving us with nothing to do but kill time above the city.
Nearly an hour went by like this before the pilot got an idea. Feeling the need to show me
something
—to give this night at least some redeeming value for the backseat passenger—and having already heard about my interest in architecture, the pilot and his tactical flight officer quickly cooked up a plan. L.A. is full of architecture, they must have thought; famous buildings are everywhere. So—why not?—let’s show this guy the city. At least until another crime was called in, they’d give me an architectural tour of Los Angeles at night, possibly the most surreal such tour in the city’s history, a flyby sequence of greatest hits led by none other than the LAPD.
First up?
The Brady Bunch
house.
*
The Air Support Division of the Los Angeles Police Department operates out of a labyrinthine building on Ramirez Street in the city’s downtown, near the concrete viaduct of the Los Angeles River. It appears to have no real façade, but is instead a looming mass of utilitarian architecture tucked immediately beside the 101 Freeway, across the street from a Denny’s. Approached from the back, via Cesar Chavez Avenue, it resembles nothing but a gargantuan parking garage ringed with chain-link fence and barbed wire.
After you’ve been cleared for entry by a security guard stationed in a small building at street level, you’re instructed to drive back into an alleyway between two warehouses, abruptly coming to a series of half-hidden concrete ramps that soar up to the right through the parking garage. Finally, leaving your car behind on this massive apron of concrete and walking toward a wall-size mural of a police helicopter, shining angelic under fluorescent lights, you climb a small flight of steps. There, you ring a buzzer on the door of the actual command center for the nation’s largest municipal helicopter fleet—and you’re in. It’s a bit like climbing up into an airport control tower, and in some ways, that’s exactly what you’ve done.
The building’s landing deck is the size of an aircraft carrier: a vast meadow of painted concrete baking in the Southern California sun. This makes the Air Support Division’s HQ a kind of beached warship in the heart of the city. The inner sanctum of this megastructure is a dense sequence of small corridors and stairways, and even this at times resembles the guts of a military ship. Helicopter timetables and safety-procedure posters are tacked up on the walls, and an erasable whiteboard keeps track of who is flying what and when. I have never seen the facility crowded, although there are an awful lot of chairs, as if waiting for some future gathering. A TV plays nonstop, showing the news, weather, or whatever else the officers might want to watch before going up on their next patrol. More often than not, it’s just relaying news to an empty room.
Anyone’s geographic understanding of a city can be profoundly improved when given access to an aerial view—when the city is laid out below you like a diagram—and this is all the more true when your job requires you to survey the city from above, imagining getaway routes and potential hideaways, possible next turns and preemptive roadblocks. The officers have uniquely unfettered access to a fundamentally different experience of the city, in which Los Angeles must constantly be reinterpreted from above with the intention of locating, tracking, or interrupting criminal activity. This perspective reveals not only overlooked connections between distant neighborhoods but distinct possibilities for committing—or preventing—crime on a city scale. Police helicopters also come with special optical technologies, often borrowed from the military, including dynamic-mapping software and forward-looking infrared (FLIR) cameras. Seeing the city through this literal new lens can be transformative.
From a civilian perspective, however, the police helicopter is not necessarily a welcome sight. That the police can track us from above, without a warrant or any probable cause, has justifiably inspired no end of Orwellian fears about a coming dystopia of unstoppable panoptic control. In
City of Quartz
, his apocalyptic portrait of mid-1990s Los Angeles, author Mike Davis portrays the LAPD as an invasive “space police,” a darkly futuristic force of winged overlords buzz-bombing whole neighborhoods across the city and scanning the metropolis from above with their helicopters, military radios, and geostationary satellites. As I was to learn on my helicopter flights with the LAPD, surveillance missions often occur at heights of ten thousand feet or more, making those helicopters invisible to the naked eye, even while they meticulously track a single car or pedestrian for hours at a time.
One of the most memorable moments in Davis’s book is when he describes how LAPD pilots navigate the city: “To facilitate ground-air synchronization, thousands of residential rooftops have been painted with identifying street numbers, transforming the aerial view of the city into a huge police grid.” With this incredible image, Davis implies that the police have stealthily redesigned urban space to suit their own needs, even painting our addresses onto the roofs of our buildings without us noticing, all so that we can be more easily corralled. To Mike Davis, we are not civilians; we are sheep.
Seen from above, however, the situation is far less intimidating. Those police-branded rooftop numbers from
City of Quartz
are all but nonexistent, for example, and all of the pilots and tactical flight officers with whom I spoke agreed that it is precisely the lack of such numbers that presents one of the main barriers to doing their job most effectively. The LAPD’s “Burglary Prevention” page specifically suggests that Angelenos should “mark your address with large, reflectorized numbers on the roof of your building for high visibility to police helicopter patrols,” clearly implying that most buildings currently lack this identifying feature.
On another flight at the height of summer, things seemed to be winding down toward the end of our late-afternoon patrol. I was flying with a different tactical flight officer, a prickly, no-nonsense woman in her midthirties who didn’t seem to appreciate having a civilian along for the ride. But then an urgent call came in for Air Support, and we raced off to the north, the farthest I would go on these flights, all the way nearly to the mountains that separate L.A. from the deserts beyond. We were at the northern fringe of the San Fernando Valley, flying over a part of the city known as Pacoima, where a woman had allegedly barricaded herself inside a house with a loaded 9 mm handgun. Why she had done this was not at all clear—and it would remain unexplained to us—but the police needed to set up a perimeter.