“Mobility” by Lydia Kiesling

“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs edited by Koritha Mitchell

“Muscle Memory” by Jenny Liou

“The Persuaders” by Anand Giridharadas

The <a title="https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/book-club" contenteditable="false" href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/book-club">LARB Book Club</a> is one of the Los Angeles Review of Books’s signature membership perks where we discuss the seasonal selection directly with the author on our podcast and have an online discussion with members. Past book clubs have featured a range of authors and books, from Viet Thanh Nguyen's The Sympathizer, Helen Oyeyemi's Boy, Snow, Bird, and Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends to Natalie Diaz’s Postcolonial Love Poem, Kink ed by R.O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell, George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,  Kate Evans’s graphic novel Threads: From the Refugee Crisis, and K-Ming Chang’s Gods of Want. 

LARB Friend-level members get a copy of the book along with the conversation, and LARB Supporter-level members are welcome to join the conversation and take advantage of discounts at participating bookstores around the country. <a href="https://shop.lareviewofbooks.org/join">Join today!</a>

LARB Quarterly is our signature print magazine featuring original fiction, essays, and poetry. Air is the third installment in our “Elemental Year” collection. <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/membership">Subscribe</a> to get the Air issue plus the next four issues of LARB Quarterly. <a href="http://lareviewofbooks.org/membership">Join as an LARB member</a> for a subscription, access to events, a tote and more!
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In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air, we aimed to look at the world from new vantage points. Writers took note of what was in the sky—the invisible pollutants and the all-too-visible police helicopters that patrol Los Angeles—and on the ways air, or breath, sustains or stifles us, the way it can bridge or divide one person from another.
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/carnivalesque-on-the-ways-we-see-basketball/">Tosten Burks</a> surveys recently published books about basketball to understand the way a new generation of writers have come to talk about the sport. Nicholas Shapiro, Kate McInerny, Matyos Kidane, and Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco offer a researched history of the police helicopter in Southern California. Meghan Racklin considers the life and imperfectly rendered image of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-funny-thing-about-misogyny/">Katie Kadue</a> digs into the history of the misogynist joke. Corina Zappia considers the state of travel for single women. <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/362001/">Lauren Collee</a> reports on light pollution and the political implications of environmental discourse. Dan O’Brien finds symbols of life and faith in the theater. Matthew Mullins explores indie rock in what he calls “exvangelical America.” And finally, Editor-in-Chief <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/pillows-of-air-a-conversation-with-lawrence-weschler/">Michelle Chihara</a> conducts an expansive interview with the writer Lawrence Weschler. This issue features new short fiction from Susan Finlay, Evan Grillon, Rae Canaan, and Dashiel Carrera; poetry by Maya C. Popa, D. S. Waldman, Joy Priest, Emma Trelles, Danusha Laméris, and F. Douglas Brown; and art from François Tosquelles and others. Through vibrant prose, poetry, art, and fiction, Air examines life from a slightly different angle.

This article is an excerpt from the LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air. <a class="c-link" href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-stringify-link="https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/" data-sk="tooltip_parent">Subscribe now</a> or <a href="https://account.lareviewofbooks.org/np/clients/lareviewofbooks/product.jsp?product=127&amp;">preorder a copy</a> from the LARB shop.
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AFTER THE EIGHTH-SEEDED Miami Heat took a surprising series lead over the Boston Celtics in May’s splendid NBA Conference Finals, Heat veteran Udonis Haslem joked on a podcast about projection models favoring his opponents. “I don’t listen to assalytics,” he smirked. Assalytics! Tortured but inspired. Haslem, 43, was the league’s oldest player before retiring in June. Once a key rebounder on championship squads, his role of late was more like a chaperone. His beard is gray. He entered the NBA the same year Michael Lewis published Moneyball.

Basketball looked different when Haslem’s career began. Today’s teams play faster and score more, from a wider spread of locations on the court, stretching beyond the three-point line. Haslem’s Heat, his employer since 2003, averaged 19 more points and eight more possessions per game this past season than they did when he was a rookie and yours truly was a fifth grader. Players’ creative responses to rule changes and advancements in statistical analysis both changed the game’s shape and pace, according to a raft of recent books.

A new professional class of math-minded basketball experts, who started advising teams around the time Haslem turned pro, stopped focusing on basic counting stats like points or assists. Savvy application of large databases of detailed historical data allows these analysts to more precisely quantify (and, at the negotiation table, price) the past and potential future impact of a player, lineup, or tactic on outcomes, adjusting for numerous variables, which are growing as new tools measure ever more granularly what happens during games.

Still, part of the expert class finds new technical methods and their supposed dictates less useful. The great forward turned star commentator Charles Barkley once declared, “Analytics don’t work at all. It’s just some crap some people who are really smart made up.” Mild hating in the media is persistent and funny; after a made shot from an inefficient location during a trivial December game, my local L.A. Clippers broadcaster Brian Sieman exclaimed, “John Wall pulls down his shades and tells the stat geeks to deal with it!”

Ironically the so-called “modern game” backed by dry math is spectacular to watch. Miami’s tallest starter, Bam Adebayo, likes to dribble the ball up court after rebounds, expediting the start of the attack (analytics support speedy “transition” because offenses score more easily when defenses aren’t set) and reorienting our sight line away from the smaller guards who traditionally steer. Adebayo will pause as sprinting teammates curl up around or dart down past his body, or he’ll pretend to do one then do the other. He’ll quickly feed them for a drive or deep shot or fake a pass before driving to the hoop himself, opening paths for new passes, picks, and cuts.

Movement, misdirection, depth, and touch at this tempo can make for a thrilling display that teases and overwhelms the eye. The Heat’s underdog run last season was ultimately stopped by a Denver Nuggets team that did it all even better, led by a six-foot-eleven passing savant Nikola Jokić, around whom players slice to convenient delivery addresses in quick patterns of slants, screens, and feints. Like Sol LeWitt’s lines from corners to points on a grid, these offenses—my favorite kind—create a dense crisscross geometry that appears prescribed until a closer look reveals endless improvisation and surprise.

The new styles spawned discourse and therefore a book market. There is an audience that likes to read about structural changes in sports, and if your contribution to those changes was maligned, I could see the appeal of receiving money to explain yourself. I was curious to see how the numbers guys (they’re all guys) write and whether their words add up to much. Basketball explaining is pretty saturated. I skipped the book that interviews magicians, the self-published one from a math professor, and the one with hand-painted infographics. What’s left are semi-closeted aesthetes, passionate about a game they find beautiful but whose passion they feel inclined and professionally obligated to rationalize. For most of us, looking is enough.
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The first credentialed media member to market was ESPN’s Kirk Goldsberry, whose Sprawlball: A Visual Tour of the New Era of the NBA (2019) illustrates some of basketball’s formal evolution. Goldsberry, a former Harvard geographer, admits that he fits Barkley’s stereotype of nerds who “never got the girls.” Early he writes, “girls definitely didn’t talk to me,” but snipes back that certain analysts “treated these opportunities to study and learn about the game in exciting new ways the same way girls treated me in high school.”

The shot charts Goldsberry invented and for which he’s best known fill his square book’s pages in the manner of a pitch deck. These charts, based on X–Y coordinate data that the NBA started tracking and sharing last decade, map representative players’ aggregated shot locations in colorful hexagons to illustrate Sprawlball’s argument that the majority of the game’s scoring takes place in an increasingly limited, and in his view boring, number of spots, near the rim and far from it, chosen for the sake of efficiency and scale.

Goldsberry’s primary tone is irked. His writing addresses lingering skepticism of the discipline he helped popularize. (Later, he calls Barkley fat and elsewhere criticizes Barkley’s diet.) But he also seems frustrated with the “aesthetic upheaval” that analytics reinforced and attempts to defend more traditional styles of play. He dislikes how franchises value skills and players now. In one short passage, he mentions three-point specialist Ryan Anderson’s contract size eight times. “The Rockets were paying Anderson $20 million a year to loiter,” he writes.

Loaded language helps Goldsberry make his point. Sprawl of the non-basketball variety has a touchy connotation, whatever your politics: a favorite of his analogies for stationing shooters deep to spread defenses is “suburban loitering.” (“Dumb sprawl and senile suburbanism,” a different geographer once wrote.) Goldsberry tells a cursory history of the three-point line and describes its introduction to the NBA in 1979 as “the most influential gerrymander in sports history.” In another fraught formulation, he calls the line the “Most Valuable Partition.”

Goldsberry’s interest in market dynamics drives his work and exacerbates his dismay. Readers learn about shot selection in terms of “economic behavior,” “incentives,” and “subsidy.” How referees officiate the defending of ball handlers, made less physical by a rule change in 2004, is part of the game’s “regulatory landscape.” The framework leads him into a corner where he ends up protesting the “fundamental relationship between shot difficulty and shot value” as “deformed.” He imagines awarding points more fairly—a perfect market.
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Mike Prada’s Spaced Out: How the NBA’s Three-Point Revolution Changed Everything You Thought You Knew About Basketball (2022) tells a more complicated story. Basketball has always evolved in contested ways. The NBA’s adoption of the three-point shot followed its introduction first in an upstart competing league, and many stalwarts opposed the move, calling it a gimmick and “carnival basketball.” The vote for the addition by the organization of team owners was “the furthest thing from a (pardon the pun) slam dunk.” Prada often intends puns, I’m sorry to say.

Basketball’s flux dates back to its earliest days. Inventor James Naismith’s 1891 version featured nine players per side and little dribbling, shooting, or contact; late in life, he complained about the game’s increasing physicality. Rules banning (and later unbanning) certain defensive formations, limiting the number of seconds an offense has to score, permitting dunks, reshaping the key, and, most recently, modifying the amount of contact to which perimeter players are subject have all emerged from debate about the game’s style and “freedom,” and all have produced unintended new styles in turn.

In Spaced Out’s telling, this century’s developments are themselves misunderstood and unsettled. For one, the rapid rise in three-point volume, as pioneered by a mid-aughts Phoenix Suns team that I loved to watch on my great-uncle’s cold tile floor on hot Yuma nights, resulted from granting nontraditional shooters permission to take deep shots because the response this demanded from spaced out defenders created more room to attack the rim, not because of some shooting fetish. But defenses adapted with more coordinated approaches to court coverage, and yielding some perimeter shooting to better protect inside is once again in vogue.

Prada excels at describing the formal characteristics of schemes and tactics, which strengthens his argument for more nuance in how we discuss what we see. The expository approach requires a new vocabulary for what is in his words “an emerging field of study”—in other words, an avant-garde. This is a book about blitzes, shows, hedges, deep drops, levels; switches of the soft, contact, peel, scram, and veer-back sort; snake dribbles, patient dribbles, yo-yo dribbles, crab dribbles; step-up screens, drag screens, flat screens, and ghost screens, the last of which is “really just a fake screen, but it’s a lot more fun to say ‘ghost screen.’”

Beyond the savored jargon, Prada maintains a critic’s focus on language, even if his own sometimes flops. (Stephen Curry’s Warriors “flew around the court like a beautiful symphony.” Which symphony is that?) He traces the etymology of terms like “point forward” and “Eurostep,” coined by players themselves. He quotes rules to show how “creativity has outstripped” them. He’s interested in words failing. Most breaks are now “fast breaks.” Any step can be a “first step.” The most advanced and beautiful offenses evade taxonomy. One coach called this higher form “just playing.” Another called it “summertime.”
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Seth Partnow’s The Midrange Theory: Basketball’s Evolution in the Age of Analytics (2021) also explores how new basketball inspires new language. He specializes in the statistician dialect. Partnow was director of basketball research for the Milwaukee Bucks before joining The Athletic’s writing staff. (Goldsberry was the San Antonio Spurs’ vice president for strategic research. Prada, to be fair, is just an editor—Partnow’s, in fact.) This book, the cottage industry’s most revealing read, is about NBA technocrats.

Basketball analytics is a collection of distinct jobs. Teams employ data engineers to create and maintain databases, product designers to build interfaces, researchers to construct models, and analysts to communicate findings to coaches and executives. These individuals rely on quantitative observations recorded live during games by scorekeepers, and increasingly those produced by computer vision software that translates player and ball location and movement into “useful information.”

These latter duties raise epistemological questions about words and their roles. What is a shot? When does one type become another? Who decides? Computers and humans alike require vocabulary to function as “units of measure” that make sense because “numbers must take on the properties of conversational language” to be worth anything. The words we choose “help shape the story as much as the reverse.” Analytics is assalytics to the extent that practitioners fail to create meaning.

So Partnow tours the lexicon and its intellectual history. Readers meet a roster of presenters at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, the sector’s most important platform and hangout. A central chapter traces how player efficiency rating (PER) developed into adjusted plus/minus (APM), then into regularized adjusted plus/minus (RAPM), then into statistical plus/minus (SPM), then into box plus/minus (BPM), then into real plus/minus (RPM) as regression models grew more sophisticated. Such “impact” metrics obtain the properties of conversational language through their wonky conversion into “wins produced.”

These more abstract all-in-one measurements are key to the analytics project. The workers who calculate and analyze them serve owners who increasingly share backgrounds in finance as franchise valuations grow by the billions. The most important number of all is the NBA’s salary cap, to which Partnow attributes how “performance metrics serve to commodify players.” Assembling a team entails predicting a player’s production, how many wins they are likely to produce, assigning to these dollar values, and optimizing available dollars, roster spots, and minutes. The Midrange Theory breaks down the formula.

Throughout, Partnow welcomes skepticism. He details how diffuse definitions, data input errors, and “allocative incentives” can dirty conclusions. But he doesn’t explore how that last bit, perverse incentives like those that compel a player to stage a rebound to earn a triple-double, might also be noneconomic, like those that compel a player to attempt a more extravagant dunk and miss. He concedes early that aesthetics is “ultimately the thing,” but style as an end in itself does not occur to him or seem a consequential part of the game for him to deconstruct.

Nor does Partnow explore how perverse incentives might apply to observers. How do professional constraints and ambitions inflect an analyst’s (or critic’s) perspective? How do those perspectives spread among fans, and for what purpose? Boardroom influences can’t drain basketball’s beauty or the pleasure found therein, but they can distort our appreciation. Winning and efficiency aren’t the only things. To these authors’ credit, writing is one way to combat a managerial mind. A more expressive relationship to the game lies beyond the charts and spreadsheets.
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<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/tosten-burks">Tosten Burks is a writer and editor in Los Angeles. He’s currently editing his great-grandfather’s memoir.</a>

Carnivalesque: On the Ways We See Basketball

Tosten Burks surveys recently published books about basketball to understand the way a new generation of writers have come to talk about the sport.

This article is an excerpt from the LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air. <a class="c-link" href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" data-stringify-link="https://lareviewofbooks.org/membership/" data-sk="tooltip_parent">Subscribe now</a> or <a href="https://account.lareviewofbooks.org/np/clients/lareviewofbooks/product.jsp?product=127&amp;">preorder a copy</a> from the LARB shop.
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AS CLOUDS OF SMOKE began to accumulate over the city in August of 1965, the manager of fleet sales for the Aircraft Division of the Hughes Tool Company made yet another call to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. He had been trying for months to coax interest from law enforcement and saw the Watts Rebellion as the perfect opportunity for an eye-in-the-sky sales pitch. He was right. Over the next several days, a Hughes Helicopter served as an aerial observation and command post for the sheriff. As Richard C. Kirkland, a decorated Korean War helicopter pilot who later worked for Hughes as a salesman, <a href="https://smithsonianbooks.com/store/aviation-military-history/tales-of-a-helicopter-pilot/">described it</a> in his 2002 book Tales of a Helicopter Pilot, those initial law enforcement flights were “primitive by today’s standards, but it opened eyes, and doors, to the potential.”

It was here in Los Angeles where helicopters made their first showing as “flying patrol cars” alongside the high-intensity firepower of SWAT teams. Both emerged as tools for suppressing Black insurgency and spread to become standard forms of policing across the country. Both tactical practices have, through <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003097381/swat-mission-creep.html">mission creep,</a> moved from rarefied and specialized operations into daily policing usage. Yet the history of the police helicopter remains relatively unknown.

In the years leading up to Watts, helicopters had come into increasingly heavy use for command-and-control operations in the Korean and Vietnam wars. Back in the states, helicopter salesmen—many of whom were veterans themselves—successfully tapped into the soldierlike desires of police to bring rotary aircraft into use for domestic surveillance. Militarized police dreams, combined with a density of aerospace defense contractors in Southern California and the era’s technological optimism, made Los Angeles the primary test bed for taking policing into what was then referred to as “the Space Age.”

To justify the massive expenditure that establishing new fleets of aircraft required, law enforcement and the aircraft industry worked together to persuade the public that the helicopter was more than just an expensive new toy. Within a year of their first test flight, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department and the city of Lakewood—a suburban city in the southern part of the county—had secured what was then the <a href="https://capitalandmain.com/are-police-helicopters-worth-the-cost">largest ever</a> federal grant issued to law enforcement to test the efficacy of whirlybird patrols using rented Hughes aircraft. Even before the findings from this initial study were published in 1968, the potential of helicopters for policing, specifically for “demonstrating a police presence,” was echoing through <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/174NCJRS.pdf">federal reports</a> on the future of policing.

Community members and abolitionist organizers have equated this logic to that of an occupying army flexing its sovereignty. In April 2023, a SWAT team landed their Super Puma helicopter on a West Hollywood street as a show of force, snarling Friday traffic for 11 hours, in a standoff with barricaded subjects that revealed themselves to be simply clamorous pets inside an <a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-04-07/woman-shot-in-west-hollywood-suspect-is-barricaded-inside-apartment">empty apartment.</a>

The study that resulted from the sheriff’s first field test did what it was designed to do and found a decrease in crime in a white bedroom community during the helicopter test phase, yet the exact mechanism of hypothesized crime prevention remained elusive. Not to be outdone by the sheriff, the LAPD commissioned its own study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which had been transferred to NASA from the army only a decade earlier. Paul Whitehead, an emeritus sociology professor who conducted a more robust study in 2002—a study that found no relationship between helicopter surveillance and crime—<a href="https://capitalandmain.com/are-police-helicopters-worth-the-cost">has noted</a> that the JPL study was designed “with the purpose of finding the evidence that helicopters improved policing. And everything was aimed at reaching that conclusion even before the first piece of data was collected.” Today, the more than 50-year-old study remains a key justification on the <a href="https://www.lapdonline.org/office-of-the-chief-of-police/office-of-special-operations/air-support-division/history-of-the-air-support-division/">LAPD’s website</a> for their helicopter arsenal, which it also proudly claims to be the world’s largest police fleet.

To facilitate police sales, the aviation industry drew on both military salesmen and law enforcement consultants. For example, Hugh MacDonald, the division chief at LASD who first flew on a Hughes helicopter at the request of a persistent salesman, was later hired by the aircraft company to sculpt its national helicopter sales strategy aimed at law enforcement agencies. After the L.A. evaluation was published, a cadre of former-military-helicopter-pilots-turned-salesmen was quickly assembled across multiple helicopter manufacturers and armed with both the study and the insights of a once-skeptical cop-turned-advocate.

Dividends for these law enforcement courtship efforts came quickly. By 1970, upwards of <a href="https://archive.aviationweek.com/issue/19700309">one in five</a> new commercial helicopter purchases were made by police departments. By the following year, this technological, corporate, and policing vision had spread from Los Angeles to <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/68871NCJRS.pdf">24 municipalities</a> that had acquired helicopters for police patrol. Police sales buoyed slumping corporate and charter sales and pushed design changes, such as increased onboard electrical capacity to power loudspeakers, high intensity lights, video recording, and night vision devices.

The Hughes 300C model of helicopter was reportedly developed especially for law enforcement applications. <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/law-enforcement-assistance-act-1965-hearings-subcommittee-senate#:~:text=The%20main%20purposes%20of%20the,local%20agencies%20charged%20with%20law">Multiple tributaries</a> of <a href="https://one.nhtsa.gov/nhtsa/whatsup/tea21/grantman/html/07_sect402leg23usc_chap4.html">federal funding,</a> culminating in <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/omnibus-crime-control-and-safe-streets-act-1968">the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968,</a> helped make the initial purchase of these big-ticket items more fiscally palatable for municipal and county budgets across the nation. Historian Elizabeth Hinton <a href="https://lsa.umich.edu/content/dam/sid-assets/SID%20Docs/Hinton,%20_A%20War%20Within%20Our%20Own%20Boundaries_.pdf">has documented</a> that by the time the early 1970s segued into the middle of the decade, the federal government had bought helicopters for over 50 local police forces. Their reach extends well beyond the borders of the United States, with police helicopter use spanning six continents. Not long after the fall of the Berlin Wall, police helicopters even served as <a href="https://archive.aviationweek.com/issue/19921026#!&amp;pid=60">an olive branch</a> between a US defense contractor, Bell, and the “emerging markets” of the former USSR aviation industry.

In the early 1970s, the LAPD was logging over 62 full days of flight time per month. These aerial patrols focused on five police divisions, <a href="https://uncpress.org/book/9781469646831/policing-los-angeles/">all but one</a> working in predominantly Black or Chicano neighborhoods. As historian Max Felker-Kantor detailed in his 2018 book Policing Los Angeles: Race, Resistance, and the Rise of the LAPD, discontent with these helicopters—which would quickly, and widely, become known as “ghetto birds”—had already been coalescing for several years. A spokesman for the Greater Los Angeles Urban Coalition, Ralph M. Nutter, said in 1969, “We are of the opinion that exaggerated and unnecessary use of law enforcement helicopters is causing unnecessary tension in minority areas and stimulating resentment to such an extent that there will be provocation for acts or attitudes which could cause lasting harm to the community.”

The proliferation of police helicopters coincided with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the mounting public demands for clean air, water, and soil that pushed the agency into existence. Today, the LAPD uses environmental arguments to support requests to the city council for new helicopters. Some 600 pages deep into their latest budget proposal, submitted in November 2022, <a href="https://lapdonlinestrgeacc.blob.core.usgovcloudapi.net/lapdonlinemedia/2022/11/1_2023-24-LAPD-Proposed-Budget-FINAL-8.pdf">the department notes</a> that “a helicopter is equivalent to four Black &amp; White vehicles […] which may contribute to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” Yet the intensive energy needs of rotorcraft make the fuel consumption of a single LAPD helicopter roughly equivalent to 23 squad cars running at 36 mph. Beyond mystifying green math, the most persistent environmental concerns emerging from police helicopters are not related to <a href="https://heated.world/p/the-climate-cost-of-las-police-choppers">their carbon footprint</a> but rather the sonic consequences of what the engine and rotors do with all that energy.

Noise has been a key community concern since the start of the Sheriff’s Department’s experiments. Engineers at UCLA <a href="https://doi.org/10.1121/1.1982228">recorded</a> police helicopter noise between 70 and 80 decibels in residential neighborhoods and 65 and 75 decibels inside classrooms, loud enough to obscure teacher-student communication. They also found that nighttime flights produced an Effective Perceived Noise Level, a measurement that takes into account the tonality and duration of the noise exposure, of 100–115 decibels and were “in violation of municipal noise codes and exceed the federal landing noise limits for new jet aircraft.” Beyond this one-paragraph abstract of a 12-minute presentation in 1973, little to no research has been conducted on these helicopters that have become, at the very least, the irritating background noise of life in Los Angeles.
That is why we—researchers and community organizers—began collecting data on the more than 50 helicopters registered to law enforcement in Los Angeles. We started by submitting public records requests to the LAPD and LASD, owners of the two largest fleets in the county, to acquire accurate tail numbers. We then took to the FAA helicopter registration database to fill in the other, smaller municipalities, like El Monte and Pasadena. Then, to understand their movements, we purchased the six most recent years of flight trajectory data available for all of these aircraft, dating back to 2017. We’ve released some <a href="https://ktla.com/news/local-news/lawsuit-filed-for-information-on-los-angeles-county-sheriffs-department-helicopter-fleet/">preliminary results</a> that indicate that Black and Latino neighborhoods are surveilled more often and at lower altitudes—even when controlling for race, income, and other variables.

The LASD would not divulge simple public records that would enable our research, so we had to resort to <a href="https://stoplapdspying.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/LASD-Helicopters-Lawsuit.pdf">suing them</a> for these public documents. Our successful lawsuit yielded documents that revealed the LASD Aero Bureau budget increased by $11,265,140.89 from 2019 to 2020, an increase of more than 40 percent.

In a cruel cycling of history from the Watts Rebellion to the uprisings spurred by the murder of George Floyd, protests over police brutality and structural racism have been countered by the thundering presence of law enforcement helicopters in Los Angeles and their ever-expanding budget lines. In line with its roots, <a href="https://file.lacounty.gov/SDSInter/bos/commissionpublications/report/1138014_DeputyGangsSpecialCounselReporttoCOC3.2.2023.PDF.PDF">a recent report</a> from the L.A. County Sheriff Civilian Oversight Commission indicated that Aero Bureau had no Black staff and that leadership were members of multiple racially homogeneous deputy gangs including the Spartans and the Vikings, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1991-10-12-me-107-story.html">once described</a> by a federal judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang.” A 2021 lawsuit <a href="https://unicourt.com/case/ca-la23-michael-colbert-vs-city-of-long-beach-a-municipal-entity-et-al-755612">filed</a> by a man who states that he is the only Black helicopter pilot to ever serve in the Long Beach Police Department, which patrols approximately the southernmost 10 miles of Los Angeles County, claims 436 incidents of racial discrimination or harassment. Racist imagery was allegedly baked into pilot continuing education exams, posted in the pilots’ office, used as computer screensavers, and placed in helicopter flight logs.

Enumerating flight hours, altitudes, and budget lines can paint a crisp picture of the law enforcement use of helicopters in the sprawling, most populous county in the country while remaining abstract in their social and biological costs. The reality is that police helicopters have measurable effects on the physical world, even for those who never have an in-person interaction with a law enforcement officer. Thousands of times a second on every flight, the rotor blades slap the air, sending out small vortex trails that then interact with the next blade slicing through the air a tiny fraction of a second later. This phenomenon, known as blade vortex interaction, yields the pulsing, clapping sound of helicopters in addition to what is known as “thickness noise,” which is generated by the displacement of air with each passing rotor. Unlike the often constant din of a highway, the sounds of helicopters erupt into soundscapes intermittently. Chronic exposure to intermittent noise is associated with <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160412021005997?via%3Dihub">higher risk of death</a> from cardiovascular diseases. At night, these slapping blades can cut into dreams. In addition to a more metaphorical deferral of Black and Brown dreaming, arousing people from sleep can increase <a href="https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/35/6/727/2709360">diabetes and cancer risks,</a> and exacerbate <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3100528/">anxiety</a> and <a href="https://academic.oup.com/jpepsy/article/41/9/983/2222556">other mental health symptoms.</a> Disturbed sleep can also make it harder for students <a href="https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/ben/cnsnddt/pre-prints/content-35549867">to learn new concepts</a> or remember what they studied on tests.

Even from our preliminary analyses of the flight trajectories, it is clear that there are racialized impacts of the noise pollution generated by <a href="https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/operational-value-police-helicopters-cost-benefit-analysis">dubiously</a> <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.601667/full">effective</a> police helicopter patrolling. These sonic pulses and their many consequences are traces of airborne structural racism that can have lasting, generational impacts. For over 50 years, this large-scale experiment in policing has played out in the skies over Los Angeles in the name of public safety. We are working on determining the extent of these impacts, but even without all the numbers in hand just yet, we can confidently say that it’s time for a citywide conversation about how many public safety dollars are going into racialized harm.
¤
<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/nicholas-shapiro/">Nicholas Shapiro is an assistant professor at UCLA’s Institute for Society and Genetics. </a>

<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/kate-mcinerny/">Kate McInerny is a staff researcher with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA, where she recently earned her BA in public affairs.</a>

<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/matyos-kidane/">Matyos Kidane is a community organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a community-based abolitionist group working to dismantle the police surveillance state. </a>

<a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/contributor/jacobo-pereira-pacheco/">Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco is a statistician and data scientist working with the Carceral Ecologies Lab at UCLA.</a>

State Eyes in the Sky: On the History of Helicopters in Policing

Nicholas Shapiro, Kate McInerny, Matyos Kidane, and Jacobo Pereira-Pacheco offer a researched history of the police helicopter in Southern California.

The Funny Thing About Misogyny

Katie Kadue digs into the history of the misogynist joke.

Perma-noon: On Light Pollution and the Way We Talk About the Natural World

Lauren Collee reports on light pollution and the political implications of environmental discourse. 

New short fiction from Susan Finlay, Evan Grillon, Rae Canaan, and Dashiel Carrera.

Poetry by Maya C. Popa, D. S. Waldman, Joy Priest, Emma Trelles, Danusha Laméris, and F. Douglas Brown.

Art from experimental psychiatrist François Tosquelles and others.

LARB Quarterly, no. 39: Air

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Latest Issue

No. 39: Air

In this issue

“Mobility” by Lydia Kiesling

“Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs edited by Koritha Mitchell

“Muscle Memory” by Jenny Liou

“The Persuaders” by Anand Giridharadas