Read Online A Burglar's Guide to the City by Geoff Manaugh - Free Book Online
Authors: Geoff Manaugh
Tags: History, Non-Fiction
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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.
As I looked down out of the helicopter window, the beach was nothing but blackness, silky and absolute, with not a human being in sight; but when I peered back at the monitor, lights were everywhere. They were like fireflies, these humans huddled around one another and listening to the sea.
Where the Money Is
My time with the Air Support Division had revealed the extent to which pilots and tactical flight officers can identify and, more crucially, interrupt the city’s illicit routes and hiding places. Back at ground level, however, I’d become interested in how the city’s freeway infrastructure could be used by criminals not just as a possible route of escape from police capture, but as an urban-scale tool for helping them design better crimes.
In an interesting article published by The New Yorker , author Tad Friend implies that the high-speed chase is, in many ways, a more authentic use of L.A.’s sprawling road network; by comparison, the daily commute was embarrassingly impotent, an automotively timid use of this extraordinary landscape whose very premise is not safety and convenience but personal liberation. Friend suggests that fleeing from the police—often at lethal speeds—while being broadcast live on local television is, well, it’s sort of what the city is for . To focus on L.A.’s legendary traffic is to miss a larger and much stranger point: that crime is often a more effective way to use the fabric of the city.
After all, Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of “bank robbery capital of the world.” At its height, the city’s bank-crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every workday. As FBI special agent Brenda Cotton—formerly based in Los Angeles but now stationed in New York City—told me, the agency even developed its own typology of banks in the region. Most notable was the “stop-and-rob”: a bank located at the bottom of both an exit ramp and an on-ramp for one of Southern California’s many freeways. This meant it could be robbed as quickly and as casually as a commuter might pull off the road for a tank of gas. As Cotton described it, you could jump off the freeway, rob a bank in West L.A., hop right back onto the 405, and be over the mountains—as long as you hadn’t timed your crime for the height of rush hour—long before a police helicopter could make it to the scene. This was not possible in New York City, she pointed out, where the city’s transportation infrastructure and its pedestrian-friendly streets facilitate a different genre of bank crime in which the perpetrator will flee on foot or even use the subway.
Stop-and-robs are therefore one of those instances where an architectural form—the freestanding bank or credit union—and a piece of urban infrastructure—the ever-expanding Los Angeles freeway network—unexpectedly combined to catalyze something that law enforcement
As I looked down out of the helicopter window, the beach was nothing but blackness, silky and absolute, with not a human being in sight; but when I peered back at the monitor, lights were everywhere. They were like fireflies, these humans huddled around one another and listening to the sea.
Where the Money Is
My time with the Air Support Division had revealed the extent to which pilots and tactical flight officers can identify and, more crucially, interrupt the city’s illicit routes and hiding places. Back at ground level, however, I’d become interested in how the city’s freeway infrastructure could be used by criminals not just as a possible route of escape from police capture, but as an urban-scale tool for helping them design better crimes.
In an interesting article published by The New Yorker , author Tad Friend implies that the high-speed chase is, in many ways, a more authentic use of L.A.’s sprawling road network; by comparison, the daily commute was embarrassingly impotent, an automotively timid use of this extraordinary landscape whose very premise is not safety and convenience but personal liberation. Friend suggests that fleeing from the police—often at lethal speeds—while being broadcast live on local television is, well, it’s sort of what the city is for . To focus on L.A.’s legendary traffic is to miss a larger and much stranger point: that crime is often a more effective way to use the fabric of the city.
After all, Friend writes, if you build “nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets” in one city alone, then you’re going to find at least a few people who want to put those streets to use. This suggests that every city blooms with the kinds of crime most appropriate to its form.
In the 1990s, Los Angeles held the dubious title of “bank robbery capital of the world.” At its height, the city’s bank-crime rate hit the incredible frequency of one bank robbed every forty-five minutes of every workday. As FBI special agent Brenda Cotton—formerly based in Los Angeles but now stationed in New York City—told me, the agency even developed its own typology of banks in the region. Most notable was the “stop-and-rob”: a bank located at the bottom of both an exit ramp and an on-ramp for one of Southern California’s many freeways. This meant it could be robbed as quickly and as casually as a commuter might pull off the road for a tank of gas. As Cotton described it, you could jump off the freeway, rob a bank in West L.A., hop right back onto the 405, and be over the mountains—as long as you hadn’t timed your crime for the height of rush hour—long before a police helicopter could make it to the scene. This was not possible in New York City, she pointed out, where the city’s transportation infrastructure and its pedestrian-friendly streets facilitate a different genre of bank crime in which the perpetrator will flee on foot or even use the subway.
Stop-and-robs are therefore one of those instances where an architectural form—the freestanding bank or credit union—and a piece of urban infrastructure—the ever-expanding Los Angeles freeway network—unexpectedly combined to catalyze something that law enforcement
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