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Heydy Vasquez, 19, is accustomed to the constant police presence in Echo Park — she grew up near a border where two rival Los Angeles gangs often clash. Over the years, gentrification led to an influx of wealthier people who often mistake innocuous get-togethers for gang activity, prompting what she views as an unnecessary increase in policing.
“People call the cops on anyone and on anything, and it’s really sad,” Vasquez told me. “A lot of the youth in Echo Park have experienced — especially those who are Latino and Black — police helicopters shining the light on them when they’re just walking on the street.”
Los Angeles was the first city in the country to add helicopters to its police force. After the Watts riots in 1965, the practice became commonplace, ushering in the largest police air unit in the country with 17 helicopters and over 90 employees.
The unchecked growth of this now-behemoth of policing power rarely attracts headlines, but Angelenos have long complained about unhealthy noise pollution, inefficient spending and instances of bias by over-policing certain neighborhoods. Officers in the LAPD often disgracefully go so far as to call the helicopters “ghetto birds,” sociologist Sarah Brayne wrote in her book “ Predict and Surveil .”
In December, LA City Controller Kenneth Mejia’s office released a first-of-its-kind audit of the $50 million Air Support Division, scrutinizing an aspect of California law enforcement that has generally evaded oversight and accountability. Among the audit’s many eye-opening discoveries, Mejia’s office found that LAPD helicopters are disproportionately used in areas with less serious crime, and underutilized in others.
“Analog surveillance (is) the observation of specific communities and historically Black communities, and even currently Black communities, with the expectation of criminality,” said Matyos Kidane, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition and a native Angeleno. “Helicopter presence has been one of the many tools that can easily be described as emblematic of this type of surveillance.”
As the LA controller’s audit suggests, this often overlooked aspect of law enforcement in California points to what residents and researchers have said for years: Police helicopters are perpetuating biases against certain communities, while squandering taxpayer dollars in the process.
Effects of discriminatory over-policing
Kidane recalled a time during high school when he was walking home from the bus stop and a police helicopter shined its light on him. Despite knowing they were looking for someone else, Kidane feared “the proverbial ‘fitting the description.’”
“The consequences of that are just violence,” Kidane told me as a police helicopter flew over my home in South Central. “Beyond the regular kind of surveillance that we experienced, the criminalization that leads to, what those forced encounters with policing lead to, there’s also the psychological toll to that, the notion of being watched all the time.”
Ongoing research of these helicopters by the Carceral Ecologies Lab reveals that they consistently fly at the lowest altitudes over largely Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, worsening noise pollution with their proximity, said UCLA professor Nicholas Shapiro.
Federal guidelines require aircraft to fly at a minimum of 1,000 feet, but helicopters are exempt from those rules. Shapiro found that in the Watts area of South LA, a highly surveilled neighborhood, the median altitude of helicopters between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. — when most people are sleeping — was a mere 550 feet.
Regulations for helicopters are much more vague, only stating that they cannot pose a hazard to people or property on the ground, giving law enforcement ample leeway. According to Shapiro’s research, these helicopters do pose a hazard to people when they fly so low.
As a child, the constant droning from police aircraft interrupted Kidane’s sleep, he said. His home lacked air conditioning, forcing him to choose between leaving his window open in the summer and risking waking up to a helicopter, or endure the heat with a closed window.
Chronic noise exposure can have serious health effects, according to a growing body of research , including metabolic diseases like diabetes, cardiovascular diseases , and depression and anxiety — meaning that excessive or unnecessary flyovers are endangering the health of these communities.
Shapiro even admitted that a helicopter woke him from sleep the night before we spoke — just as a helicopter buzzed above my own home loud enough to mask his voice on our call.
Limited oversight and accountability
LAPD helicopters cost almost $3,000 an hour to keep in the air, yet they are used wantonly: 39% of flights helped respond to high priority incidents, and only 1% involved a firearm. The other largest category of flights were simply patrols, consisting of 34% of flights and costing taxpayers approximately $16 million a year.
The LAPD did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this story. Department officials attempted to cast doubt over the audit and its methodology in February.
The neighborhood disparities in helicopter usage led the LA controller to assert that those flights “could be driven by other factors, such as perceptions about crime.” Mejia’s office carefully suggested bias could play a role, something many residents and activists say has long been clear.
Sergio Perez, the chief of accountability and oversight for the city controller, says that LAPD helicopter pilots have most of the power to choose where and how they fly, identifying Boyle Heights and South LA as two areas disproportionately patrolled. Boyle Heights, which corresponds to the Hollenbeck area, accounts for 5.3% of Air Support Division activities but only 3.7% of serious crimes.
The 77th Street area, which has the highest level of disproportionality, experiences 8.9% of aircraft activity and sees 6.4% of serious offenses. This area is the center of Air Support Division surveillance, with South LA facing helicopter presence almost continuously for 20 hours a day.
It’s no wonder why residents are complaining.
“They get to decide, based on that discretion, where to spend their time, and it looks like deciding to fly over certain communities,” Perez said. “These are communities that anybody who lives in Los Angeles understands to be communities with high minority representation.”
Not only do these pilots have discretion, but they’re unnecessarily repetitive. In her book, Brayne wrote that an Air Support Division supervisor told her that their data demonstrated a need to fly over so-called hot spots “51 times per week for there to be a reduction in crime, so they often flew over hot spots 80–90 times.”
Officers knowingly use these helicopters to excessive levels, and some residents experience low-flying helicopters overhead up to 13 times per day, Brayne says. Yet the audit found little evidence that helicopters reduce crime, and claims by the LAPD that these are effective rely on two outdated studies from the 1970s that are contradicted by more recent research — essentially enabling a culture of impunity for 50 years.
The Federal Aviation Administration does not monitor police helicopters, instead relying on citizen complaints. The problem, of course, is that most people would not know how to submit one — if they even knew it was an option.
Without state policy, clearer guidelines for law enforcement or action from the LA City Council, the Air Support Division and others like it are tacitly being allowed to continue this behavior without any accountability. LA Mayor Karen Bass’ office did not respond to requests for comment about any potential next steps in the wake of the audit.
Beyond LA
Residents and researchers throughout California have come together to call for and point to the need for change, yet those calls remain largely unanswered.
While no other California law enforcement agency can match the scale of the LAPD, many have air divisions of their own, which means that communities across California are likely being exposed to similar health risks and biased practices. Residents deserve to know the expenses and extent to which helicopters are used to surveil them — and if that surveillance is even effective in reducing crime.
In the absence of stronger oversight and political action from state and city leaders, residents continue to suffer negative health outcomes, and helicopters continue to be a tool to over-police Black and Latino neighborhoods — exposing them disproportionately to those hazards in the process.
Above all, many Angelenos like Vasquez still feel unheard, frustrated that such a visible arm of law enforcement has escaped accountability.
“I’ve seen the policing of my neighborhood every day, but I’ve also seen it with helicopters, which is really unnecessary because it doesn’t make people feel safe,” she said. “It makes people who have lived in the area for so long, question if this is really home.”
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