Change in the air
When it comes to crime-fighting helicopters, officials must balance the need to be safe with our right to be left alone
By Kevin Uhrich 01/14/2010
There have been some pretty strong reactions — some just simple-minded sniping, but most of them actually constructive — to a story that we ran recently on neighborhood complaints about extremely noisy and intrusive Pasadena police helicopters.
Our Dec. 17 cover story by contributor Justin Chapman, “Trouble above,” focused on a young couple, Roli Gostelow, a 26-year-old software systems engineer, and Keith Dsouza, a 27-year-old grad student at Cal State LA, living on Fay Place in Northwest Pasadena, a place where police train a lot of their attention, primarily because a lot of crime occurs there.
Nonetheless, both Gostelow and Dsouza believe the cops could do a better job of keeping the noise down while using Vietnam-era helicopters in waging their never-ending war on killers, rapists, bangers, burglars and car thieves.
The divide on this issue, at least according to the mail we’ve gotten and some of the posts to Justin’s story on our Web site, seems to be pretty vast. Judging by some of those posts, you’re apparently either for the cops on this one, agreeing with everything they say and doing everything they ask, or — as a recent ex-president who just loved secret surveillance used to say — you’re agin ’em.
In the mind of otherwise obliging Pasadena police Capt. Robert Mulhall, head of the department’s Air Operations Division, it’s a simple matter of catching crooks. Period. “If a helicopter is circling a neighborhood, something bad is going on there,” Mulhall told Justin. “If anyone has a question, just call the heliport and ask. We’ll let them know why the helicopter is there.”
To Ricardo Costa, however, the hovering copters not only sometimes serendipitously find crime while responding to other calls; they also get a glimpse of things they have no business seeing while flying low and essentially invading the privacy of law-abiding citizens.
“It feels more like surveillance than crime prevention,” said Costa, who also lives in Northwest Pasadena. “I wouldn’t mind as much if they flew over Caltech just as much as they fly over my neighborhood.”
While Costa makes some good points, and to its credit the city is in the process of purchasing quieter copters, the US Supreme Court has seen to it that privacy concerns will not soon trump the government’s right to use helicopters for fighting crime.
In the 1989 case Florida v. Riley, the high court ruled 5-4 that airborne inspections do not violate the Fourth Amendment’s protections against warrantless searches and the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of due process and equal protection. The high court found that complainant Riley’s expectation of privacy was not reasonable because “private and commercial flight in the public airways is routine.” That extremely generous definition of a public area just a few hundred feet in the air set the gauge at zero for the level of privacy Riley could expect from local law enforcement.
Judging by how close the decision was, however it appears the high court was just as torn as some of our own residents when it came to questions of safety versus privacy.
Justice William Brennan, joined in his dissent by Justice Thurgood Marshall and John Paul Stevens, had a big problem with the justification used for police peering into Riley’s secluded backyard — where he actually was growing marijuana in a greenhouse. The ability of the cop who without a warrant looked over Riley’s fence “depended on his use of a very expensive and sophisticated piece of machinery to which few ordinary citizens have access,” Brennan observed. … “The question before us must be not whether the police were where they had a right to be, but whether public observation of Riley’s curtilage was so commonplace that Riley’s expectation of privacy in his backyard could not be considered reasonable.”
Considering the court ultimately found that just 400 feet off the ground was a public thoroughfare for aircraft, it’s a wonder police don’t more often use helicopters, which last year in Pasadena and some surrounding cities responded to 10,000 calls for service, accounting for 600 arrests. Like it or not, it appears helicopters are a fact of life as a crime-fighting tool. But that doesn’t mean the service they provide is above improvement.
Police, at least in this town, are not unreasonable. Heck, the street right next to the city police building was renamed Thurgood Marshall Street from Ramona Street soon after Marshall’s death in 1993 to honor the memory of that paragon of reasonableness and civil rights. Nor are the local cops inflexible when faced with a genuine community concern, which noisy and sometimes intrusive police helicopters currently are.
Especially these days, when government seems all too willing to dismiss basic rights guaranteed by the Constitution with each new terrorist threat, it is incumbent of our local leaders — both in the Police Department and on the City Council, which should consider forming a citizen’s task force to study the issue — to find the balance needed to keep people safe while upholding their fundamental right to be left alone.
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Comments
I would like to offer my assitance in reviewing the
military grade photos of young ladies's behinds to define what may be a mole or pimple.
gft
Costa and his crew are just a bunch of cry-babies. If they put as much energy into ridding their neighborhood of the thugs, gangsters, thieves, and other low-life that require so much police activity, then they would be doing something postitive for their community. But oh no, they've got to whine about the very police activity that is more than likely the thing that is keeping them safe every day. They should just stop their belly-aching or move! Waaaaa!!!
I'll bet a joint or two that those complainers are growing marijuana in their backyards.
http://www.pasadenastarnews.com/news/ci_...
Sure 'nuff, those helicopter crybabies are marijuana farmers! Busted by the ghetto birds!
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hello
Hey, I know, helicopters are noisy. Also, chances are, if there's a helicopter flying circles or otherwise hovering over your property, if it's not the fire department making a water-drop, well then, it's most likely your friendly local law enforcement either tracking an alleged law breaker or otherwise observing whether the young, fresh sunbathing daughters of a Northwest neighborhood are at least minimally dressed for the occasion.
Now, from that cowboy law-enforcement show called "Cops," we already know that the average police helicopter incorporates video recording devices. And since these same LE helicopters have to (or maybe I should say, are supposed to) fly a minimum altitude above any human habitation, it is logical to presume that those observation cameras also possess perhaps even military grade features of image recording. Consequently, they most likely can define the difference between a pimple and a mole on a young girl (or boy ...)'s ass.
As a consequence, while a five-foot, 10 inch tall cop cannot (or I should say, ain't supposed to) just casually walk up to somebody's six-foot fence and tippy-toe spy over it for unsuspicious the purpose of discovering something illegal, apparently now, all he has to do is simply get an airborne brother to fly over it in a helicopter which can take high-resolution pictures of an otherwise private family compound for later study and review.
In the meantime, the nine top senile adjudicators of America's court of Supremes will never have to worry about any police helicopters just casually ever snooping over their private property, because -- well -- those kind of government intrusions just aren't done. For that matter, neither are they done in such locations as Beverly hills, or so much even over La Vina.
It seems that the only positive aspect of this government-manufactured circumstance is that -- at least while the helicopters are still loud -- at least you can hear them coming.
DanD