For many years, one of the ongoing themes of my columns has been the exposure of lazy, incompetent, agenda-driven “journalism” that purports to reveal some defect in police practices. Most often the burdens of these perceived defects are said to be borne by those racial minority groups favored by the lazy, incompetent, agenda-driven “journalists.”
Gentle readers, today I present the latest, incandescently glaring example, brought to you by that seemingly endless font of such rubbish, the Los Angeles Times. The story, by staff writer Jeong Park, appears on page B-4 of the paper’s Sunday print edition, but was posted Friday evening under the provocative headline, “They say sheriff’s helicopters buzz lowest over Black homes, and they’re out to prove it.”
“Aha,” the reader is expected to say, “those dirty, racist cops are even harassing black people from the sky!”
Park begins the story thus: “Law enforcement helicopters routinely buzz around Greater Los Angeles. But in certain neighborhoods, they swoop in — low and loud. So say two community groups that are studying the effects of helicopters on the health of county residents.”
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As is often the case in these stories, Park seeks to support the accusation of police racism with a veneer of academic credentialism. He quotes Nicholas Shapiro, an assistant professor of biology and society at UCLA and director of the Carceral Ecologies Lab. “The higher the proportion of Black population,” says Shapiro, “the lower the altitude of the helicopter.”
Park writes: “Shapiro said the groups had found that in every census block of L.A. County that is more than 40 percent Black, the median elevation of helicopters was below 1,000 feet, the “minimum safe altitude” for congested areas as set by the Federal Aviation Administration.” The online version of the story links to the FAA’s Guide to Low-Flying Aircraft, which indeed says that aircraft operating over a “congested area” maintain “an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.”
Alas for Times writer Park and the Oxford and Bard College-educated Shapiro, they failed to thoroughly read the very document they present as proof that police helicopters are operating in a racist manner over Los Angeles. If they had, they would know the 1,000-foot minimum altitude rule applies to fixed-wing aircraft. Had they bothered to read a mere two paragraphs beyond the point where the 1,000-foot rule is mentioned, they would have learned that helicopters are explicitly exempted from this rule, and that helicopter pilots are directed to “comply with routes or altitudes specifically prescribed by the [FAA] Administrator.”
The journalistic face-plant doesn’t end there. Had Park bestirred himself to do any actual reporting beyond Googling up the FAA document he believed supported his premise, had he done more than speak with the people making the specious accusations he wants his readers to believe, had he bothered to pick up a telephone and speak with someone at the FAA, or even a pilot working for one of the local television stations, he would have learned the following:
A few miles to the west of South Los Angeles, where one finds the highest concentration of black residents said to be so disturbed by low-flying helicopters, there is a place called Los Angeles International Airport, one of the nation’s busiest. (Perhaps Mr. Park has noticed it when looking out the window of the L.A. Times’s offices in El Segundo.) Because of its proximity to LAX, the FAA designates the sky above South L.A. as Class B airspace, the most highly restricted. All aircraft entering the area must first receive clearance from the LAX control tower, and though clearance is routinely granted it is only under certain conditions, among which are that helicopters remain below 900 feet between the Santa Monica Freeway and Florence Avenue, and below 500 feet between Florence Avenue and the Century Freeway — the very neighborhoods where the concentration of black residents is highest. This is done so as to avoid interfering with aircraft approaching LAX (and under certain weather conditions, departing from it).
And there is another explanation for the presence of police helicopters over these neighborhoods, one surely known to Mr. Park but deliberately ignored. The city of Los Angeles is patrolled by officers assigned to 22 patrol divisions. Two of these, 77th Street and Southeast Divisions, cover those neighborhoods where black residents are most highly concentrated and lie east of LAX. The total population of these two divisions is about 325,000, or about 8% of the city’s total. In 2022, those same divisions saw 54 homicides, or 27% of the 382 murder cases handled by the LAPD. The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols demographically similar areas adjacent to these two divisions, reports similar crime figures.
The Los Angeles Times publishes an online database they call the Homicide Report, which chronicles every murder in the county. At one time, it included a map with a dot to represent each homicide victim, which revealed that murders occurred most frequently in those neighborhoods where the concentration of black residents is highest. For reasons we can only speculate on, as of this writing the map is still there but the dots are gone.
The Los Angeles Times can make the dots disappear on their map, but they can’t do anything about the murders. That’s why the police are in — and above — those neighborhoods.
There was a time when an article such as Park’s would have been looked over by some curmudgeonly editor, a man with a cigarette dangling from his mouth and an ashtray full of stubbed-out butts on his desk, who would have told Park to get off his keister and do some actual reporting. Alas, such editors are creatures of the past, with the result being journalistic disgraces like this one. Everyone involved in its publication should be ashamed, but surely are not.
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