A Burglar's Guide to the City (6 page)

“The way the parcels work in the city of Los Angeles,” Burdette began, “is that Main Street and First Street are the hub of the city.” This is also where the LAPD built its headquarters, a huge new building I was able to visit later for a meeting with detectives from the Burglary Special Section. The LAPD is thus literally at the very center of the metropolis, its numerological heart: it is the zero point from which everything else emanates, with Los Angeles a kind of giant mandala built by the police, airborne lords of the spiderweb.

Street numbers get bigger heading south from police headquarters, and it works arithmetically. “If it’s the fourth house south of the corner on the west side of the street,” Burdette explained, speaking very carefully and watching to be sure I was following him, “then the address is going to be an odd number. The rules of four mean that I can do four times four—it’s the fourth house, times four—which is sixteen. But, because the numbers on that side of the street are odd, we know we’re going to be looking at either fifteen or seventeen. So, if the address is south of Thirty-Eighth Street and it’s the fourth house on the west side of the street, then it’s going to be 3815 or 3817. It is going to be that address. If it’s on the other side of the street, it’s going to be even—it’s going to be 3816 or 3818.”

There are holes, however, gaps in the urban fabric where a certain street will disappear for several blocks before reappearing farther on. I remembered the other tactical flight officer mentioning that we had been flying over a part of the city that was out of sync with the city’s grid, and now her comment actually made sense: the streets there were resistant to these street-counting techniques, as if falling outside the navigational wizardry of the police department. It’s not just the city’s grid or its transportation infrastructure that can affect burglars or the police who track them; something as immaterial as the mathematics of the city’s street-numbering system can affect the ability of the police to interrupt crimes that might be occurring.

In a short essay called “Every Move Will Be Recorded,” historian Grégoire Chamayou recounts a hypothetical system of urban surveillance devised by an eighteenth-century police officer named Jacques François Guillauté. In a book about police reform written for King Louis XV of France, Guillauté proposed thoroughly and rigorously updating the Parisian address system. This would require a behemoth piece of machinery that operated a bit like an oversize index-card file—or what Chamayou describes as a “huge archiving machine linked to a map in a central room”—and some arithmetical cartography.

“Paris was to be divided into distinct districts,” Chamayou writes, “each receiving a letter, and each being subdivided into smaller sub-districts. In each sub-district each street had accordingly to receive a specific name. On each street, each house had to receive a number, engraved on the front of the house—which was not the case at the time. Each floor of each building was also to have a number engraved on the wall. On each floor, each door should be identified with a letter … In short, the whole city was to be reorganized according to the principles of a rationalized addressing system.” An intimidating and nearly unpoliceable tangle of streets would, at a stroke, take on newfound three-dimensional clarity. Nearly every room in every building would be assigned its place in an abstract model that could then be studied by the king, looking down upon his territory as if he were a set of all-powerful eyes floating in space. A police helicopter, of sorts, before the dawn of aviation.

But police use many techniques other than counting streets to find burglars, Burdette continued. He explained that if a helicopter crew responding to a burglar alarm sees something like a big piece of plywood leaning up against the outside wall at the site, then “that tells me right away that there is a possibility of a tunnel job.” Someone has carved, knocked, or drilled a hole through the wall—a “tunnel,” in police speak, means any deliberately created hole, whether or not it’s belowground—and tried to mask the activity by putting up this little piece of camouflage. This might work at street level for your average pedestrian or even a police rookie, he said, “but we, as experienced aircrews, know to look for things like that. That’s the sort of thing that an experienced officer in an aircrew can see and then alert officers on the ground, to defeat a lot of really savvy suspects.

“When I came on the job,” Burdette added, “my impression of a burglary is that they walk up and kick the door in, or they smash the window and there you go. But most of our burglaries are not like that. Windows aren’t used nearly as frequently as you would think. Doors aren’t used nearly as frequently as you would think. There are a lot of tunnel jobs. There are a lot of roof jobs. There are a lot of very creative ways of gaining access to restaurants or residences—including driving a car through the wall.” Burglars, Burdette had learned while patrolling the city from above, were constantly innovating new ways of using the built environment.

“I’ve seen people take tools and cut out the back of the Dumpster,” he said. “What they then do is pull the Dumpster up to the side of a building and chip away at the wall for several days. They just pull the materials and debris back into the Dumpster with them so that we can’t detect it. You can look underneath it and you can look all around it, but you won’t see anything because the Dumpster is up against the wall. In that Dumpster they’ve got a place that’s quiet where they can tunnel in peace. But then, sometimes, their goal is not even to get into that building—it’s to get into the building that’s in the strip mall three doors down from there, but they know that the building they’re tunneling into is for lease now.” Then, inadvertently likening burglary to a computer game, Burdette said, “That’s just the first level. During the next couple of days, they’ll tunnel through the inside walls until they get to that last business.” All along, the steadily filling Dumpster outside has been acting as their makeshift base of operations.

All these holes and tunnels would be hidden from aerial view, but Burdette explained how being airborne is a real asset: “Burglars look for opportunities. I might see a business where they’ve got a whole bunch of stuff stacked up behind their building. Well, they’re just inviting a roof job. We have senior lead officers in all the divisions, and they work closely with the local business owners. So I’ll make a note and say, ‘Hey, could you tell that property owner it might not be a bad idea to clean up back there?’ Because a person can climb on top of all those pallets they’re storing back there, and they can do a roof job. A pallet is a ladder to a burglar. They’ll just set it vertically and then stack another one on top of it, and then they’re off and running—off and climbing. For anything like that, you look at it from above and you go, ‘Okay, if I were a burglar, that’s how I would get into that place.’”

On a separate visit to the Air Support Division, I sat down with another tactical flight officer, Mark Burdine, to learn about some of the burglary calls he had responded to over the years. Roof jobs, Burdine explained to me, aren’t uncommon, but they tend to happen around one or two in the morning, after the city’s gone to sleep and there is little risk of a neighbor’s spotting the activity. One case in particular had struck him for its ingenuity and the difficulty of spotting, let alone interrupting, the crime.

A small crew of burglars had gotten into an office building through the roof, accessing the building by its ventilation system; they crawled in and, crucially, closed the vents behind them, leaving no trace on the roof that someone might be inside. Now out of sight, moving deeper into the building like ninjas, they lowered themselves into the main office by removing a panel from the drop ceiling. Then they turned all the motion detectors away from the room itself, rotating them to face the walls. Next they burglarized the place: computers, laptops, cameras, valuables left in desk drawers, whatever else they could get ahold of.

Even after they accidentally tripped an alarm deeper in the building, the police didn’t hear anything about it because the security company hired to watch the building’s CCTV monitors was based in Texas. By the time they noticed what was happening and had made the right calls to the local business owners and then to the LAPD, nearly half an hour had gone by, giving the burglars ample time to escape.

Examples such as this showed that having an eye in the sky does not make the LAPD invincible, nor can an eagle-eyed tactical flight officer—whether it’s Cole Burdette or Mark Burdine—accurately deduce everything happening inside a structure. After all,
Mission: Impossible
–like burglary crews accessing office buildings through air ducts, then rappelling deeper inside by way of a drop ceiling, are hard to detect from nine hundred feet above the streets.

However, new technologies are on the way. An Orlando, Florida, company called L-3 CyTerra has developed a “stepped frequency continuous wave” handheld radar system called the RANGE-R. This device, about the size of a walkie-talkie, allows users to see through walls—or ceilings. It is primarily marketed as a tool of great value for search-and-rescue operations, where firefighters might use it to locate someone inside a burning building or even trapped beneath rubble after an earthquake. However, the RANGE-R is also enthusiastically pitched as a near-miraculous device no SWAT team should be without, offering police a tool for determining “the presence and location of assailants or hostages inside a building prior to entry,” the company boasts.

The RANGE-R made national news for all the wrong reasons, however, when, back in February 2013, U.S. marshals used one of the units to determine whether a suspect was inside his home in Wichita, Kansas. The man’s subsequent arrest was later disputed in court on the basis that using radar to, in effect, watch him inside his own home was a form of unconstitutional “entry.” Its use should thus require a warrant. This argument was based on an earlier Supreme Court case,
Kyllo v. United States
, where the court determined that using thermal-imaging cameras to scan a suspect’s home for signs of a marijuana-growing operation was only legal with the appropriate search warrant. The court did not agree, however, that radar should be subjected to the same limitations, and police use of a RANGE-R remains perfectly legal and does not require a warrant.

While RANGE-R radar technology is not—for the time being—used by the LAPD Air Support Division, attaching a high-powered unit to the undercarriage of a police helicopter and using it to peer inside high-rises, suburban homes, industrial warehouses, and even into the sewers beneath city streets would give police a powerful new level of resolution in their 3-D view of the city. Cops don’t (yet) have X-ray vision, but something approximating that technology is on its way.

*

At nearly 10:30 p.m. I was in the police helicopter circling over a house near the banks of the Los Angeles River. In the dark I couldn’t see any real detail below and couldn’t make out exactly where we were. The moving map on the monitor in the front seat had our position accurately marked, but the pilot and tactical flight officer were arguing over whether they had even flown to the right location. Finally, the pilot decided simply to turn on the spotlight, a blinding, 30-million-candlepower inferno justifiably known as the Nightsun.

There, shining in the LAPD’s own artificial daylight, was
The Brady Bunch
house.

“You remember
The Waltons
?” the pilot then said, and we were off again, tracking down not criminals but the bygone sites of prime-time TV. The police radio was still quiet, the city’s criminals apparently taking an evening off. Over the next hour or so, we would go on to visit the Bat Cave; we flew over the downtown set from
Back to the Future
, the crashed airplane from
War of the Worlds
, and Charlie Chaplin’s old mansion near USC; then we headed back over to that icon of the city, the
HOLLYWOOD
sign. There, the pilot switched on the Nightsun, and it blazed against the sign’s giant white letters; he even circled the helicopter a few times so that I could take a few photos from the backseat. Nearby, they remembered, was Madonna’s old mansion—so we flew there, too, even using the Nightsun again as if it were our last chance to do so. They lit up nearly every window of this imposing complex in the Hills as they told me a bit about the home’s history, including its connection to gangster Bugsy Siegel and the Luciano crime family. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to be inside the house that night, every curtain suddenly blazing as if it were noon as the sky filled with the rhythmic chop of an unexpected helicopter, like an all-out home invasion under way—but, just like that, we left the neighborhood.

I had to remind myself that I was there for an actual reason—doing research for a book, not just gawking at celebrity houses and famous locations—so I began to ask them about the equipment they used: the devices and gadgets on board that literally made the city look different from above, whether it was the forward-looking infrared camera (FLIR), the possible acquisition of RANGE-R technology, or their image-stabilized binoculars.

They showed me how the FLIR worked. This required me to lean considerably far forward, all but pulling myself into the front seat with the tactical flight officer, who inched a little out of the way to help me see. We headed for the darker parts of Los Angeles, flying broadly northwest over the deep canyons of the Hollywood Hills—Laurel Canyon, Coldwater Canyon, Dixie Canyon—deliberately looking for a good place to test the camera’s infrared sensitivity. If a human body was down there emitting heat, the camera would find it—but even here we were having bad luck. Nobody was out walking the dog, it seemed, or even sneaking a late-night cigarette, so we continued on over the dark bulk of the mountains until the Getty Museum came into view. The officers realized we’d be better off heading for the ocean, so we made a beeline for Santa Monica—and the effect was unbelievable.

Almost at once, the FLIR monitor mounted in front of the tactical flight officer began to light up with the strangely beautiful thermal flare of human life: white-glowing forms walking along the beach, lying on dark blankets next to one another, even sitting around in a circle somewhere just south of the Santa Monica Pier. We flew on, quite low to the water, as they explained some of the basics of infrared visualization, and I watched as apparently sleeping forms—white-hot—came into sharp focus, curled up beneath lifeguard structures. There was nowhere to hide, I saw; you could be concealed behind the trunk of a tree yet an eerie glow would still surround you, shining like a halo. It was almost moving: a night flight with the LAPD had inadvertently opened my eyes to this extraordinary human glow, as dense knots of blood vessels burned hot in the coastal night like road flares. This all but supernatural vision of animal life is not only being used more and more to track suspects from above—or, technically, to track their thermal side effects—but it also plays an increasingly vital role in capturing suspects before they can get away.