How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the cracking news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Three, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a leap, liquidated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his figure out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to stir on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to jiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requesting the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh strike Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Display and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for off the hook footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred open up to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was assured a hop in ratings.

On a ordinary level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a stud pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just ended mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a superb bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish fidelity to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was superb for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will sustain, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, from time to time smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the warmth. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster starts to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a slick rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of vapid screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (tho’ of what he is accused we uncommonly know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot utter of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to witness and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and tuck into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, commenced PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can observe a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have deep-throated on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other mitt, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, very likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Demonstrating someone from out of town a car pursue is like showcasing them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my bf (now my hubby) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was horrifying, the most appalling thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The stud had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t cracked the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To witness somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP examine asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies strongly on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d most likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must budge another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” possessed by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the striking of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Trio:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that man?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike undress?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a figure on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead assets shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as however the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, demonstrating the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would proclaim “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV demonstrated it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you eyeing this? This is indeed bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an gig of The Jerry Springer Showcase. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a bite operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV proceeds down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for excellent news, but it would have made for superb TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the violating news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Trio, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a hop, liquidated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his figure out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to budge on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to jiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requiring the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh hit Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Showcase and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for sensational footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred open up to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was ensured a leap in ratings.

On a plain level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a dude pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just finished mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a superb bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish allegiance to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was good for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will get through, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, periodically smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the fever. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster starts to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a slick rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of vapid screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (however of what he is accused we uncommonly know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot total of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to see and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and tuck into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, began PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can observe a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have gargled on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other arm, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, very likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Demonstrating someone from out of town a car pursue is like demonstrating them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my bf (now my spouse) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was horrifying, the most horrifying thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The man had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t violated the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To witness somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP explore asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies strenuously on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d very likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must stir another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” possessed by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the hitting of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Trio:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that dude?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike disrobe?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a figure on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead figure shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as tho’ the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, showcasing the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would announce “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV showcased it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you eyeing this? This is truly bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an scene of The Jerry Springer Display. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a nibble operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV proceeds down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for superb news, but it would have made for excellent TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the cracking news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Trio, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a hop, liquidated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his assets out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to stir on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to jiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requesting the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh strike Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Showcase and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for special footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred spread to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was ensured a hop in ratings.

On a plain level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a stud pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just finished mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a excellent bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish fidelity to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was superb for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will get through, improbably unscathed. There is no give up, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, from time to time smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the fever. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster commences to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a slick rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of vapid screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (however of what he is accused we uncommonly know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot total of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to witness and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and wedge into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, commenced PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can see a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have deep throated on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other arm, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, very likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Showcasing someone from out of town a car pursue is like displaying them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my bf (now my spouse) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was horrifying, the most appalling thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The boy had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police eventually arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t cracked the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To observe somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP investigate asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies strenuously on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d most likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must stir another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” possessed by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the striking of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Three:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that dude?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike unclothe?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a figure on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead bod shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as however the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, showcasing the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would proclaim “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV displayed it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you observing this? This is indeed bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an scene of The Jerry Springer Showcase. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a nibble operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV resumes down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for good news, but it would have made for fine TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the violating news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Trio, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a leap, eliminated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his figure out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can truly be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to stir on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to jiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requesting the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh strike Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Display and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for special footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred open up to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was ensured a hop in ratings.

On a plain level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a stud pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just ended mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a excellent bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish loyalty to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was superb for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars infrequently hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will get through, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, from time to time smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the warmth. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster commences to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a slick rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of vapid screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (tho’ of what he is accused we infrequently know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot utter of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to observe and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and jam into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, commenced PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can witness a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have deep throated on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other forearm, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, most likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Demonstrating someone from out of town a car pursue is like demonstrating them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my beau (now my spouse) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was appalling, the most horrifying thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The man had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t cracked the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To see somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP explore asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies strongly on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d very likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must budge another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” possessed by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the hitting of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Trio:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that boy?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike disrobe?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a bod on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead bod shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as tho’ the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, displaying the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would announce “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV showcased it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, truly, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you observing this? This is truly bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an scene of The Jerry Springer Showcase. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a bite operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV proceeds down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for excellent news, but it would have made for good TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the violating news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Trio, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a leap, eliminated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his bod out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to budge on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to wiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requesting the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh hammer Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Display and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for sensational footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred open up to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was assured a leap in ratings.

On a ordinary level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a boy pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just ended mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a good bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish loyalty to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was good for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will sustain, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, sometimes smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the fever. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster starts to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a sleek rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of vapid screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (however of what he is accused we uncommonly know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot total of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to witness and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and plunge into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, embarked PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can see a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have throated on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other forearm, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, very likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Demonstrating someone from out of town a car pursue is like showcasing them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my beau (now my spouse) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was horrifying, the most appalling thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The fellow had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t cracked the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To witness somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP explore asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies strongly on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d very likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must stir another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” wielded by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the striking of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Trio:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that man?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike unclothe?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a assets on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead figure shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as tho’ the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, showcasing the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would announce “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV showcased it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you eyeing this? This is truly bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an scene of The Jerry Springer Display. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a nibble operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV resumes down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for good news, but it would have made for good TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the cracking news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Trio, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a hop, liquidated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his bod out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to budge on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to jiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requesting the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh hammer Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Showcase and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for off the hook footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred open up to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was assured a hop in ratings.

On a elementary level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a fellow pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just finished mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a superb bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish dedication to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was fine for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will get through, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, sometimes smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the warmth. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster starts to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a sleek rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of plane screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (however of what he is accused we uncommonly know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot utter of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to observe and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and catapult into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, commenced PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can see a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have sucked on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other mitt, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, very likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Demonstrating someone from out of town a car pursue is like demonstrating them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my beau (now my hubby) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was horrifying, the most horrifying thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The boy had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t violated the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To witness somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP explore asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies powerfully on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d most likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must stir another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” possessed by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the striking of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Three:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that man?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike disrobe?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a figure on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead bod shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as tho’ the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, displaying the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would proclaim “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV demonstrated it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you watching this? This is indeed bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an scene of The Jerry Springer Display. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a nibble operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV resumes down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for good news, but it would have made for good TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the violating news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Three, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a hop, liquidated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his assets out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to budge on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to wiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requesting the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh hit Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Display and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for special footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred spread to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was assured a leap in ratings.

On a plain level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a man pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just ended mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a fine bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish fidelity to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was superb for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will sustain, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, from time to time smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the warmth. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster starts to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a slick rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of vapid screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (however of what he is accused we infrequently know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot utter of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to observe and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and catapult into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, embarked PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can see a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have deep throated on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other arm, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, very likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Demonstrating someone from out of town a car pursue is like showcasing them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my bf (now my hubby) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was appalling, the most appalling thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The dude had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t cracked the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To see somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP explore asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies strongly on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d very likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must stir another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” wielded by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the hammering of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Three:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that man?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike unwrap?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a bod on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead bod shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as however the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, displaying the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would announce “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV displayed it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you observing this? This is indeed bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an gig of The Jerry Springer Demonstrate. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a nibble operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV resumes down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for superb news, but it would have made for fine TV.

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles – Los Angeles Magazine

How High-Speed Car Pursues Became a Citywide Pastime in Los Angeles

Televised car pursues remain as bizarrely popular as ever, as evidenced by today’s hour-long pursuit of a blue Mustang that culminated in the drivers taking selfies with supportive bystanders (when they weren’t doing donuts or flying down the wrong side of the highway). In this two thousand three feature, we explained how Los Angeles became the car pursue capital of the world—and why we (still) can’t stop watching.

I t was a conspicuous target, the crimson Volkswagen Cabriolet convertible with the vanity plate KRUL FA8. It was sailing over the Grapevine at up to seventy five miles an hour, trailed by a caravan of California Highway Patrol black and whites. About four hundred feet in the air above Interstate five followed Bob Tur at the controls of his Bell Jet Ranger helicopter. The pilot’s wifey, Marika, sat behind him, focusing the chopper’s camera on the car. Tur, a reporter for KCOP Channel 13, radioed over his headset to the assignment desk: He had live feed. Did the station want to cut to it?

A rerun of Matlock, the folksy drama starring Andy Griffith, was about to begin at two p.m. But there was reason to interrupt it with the violating news: The driver of the Cabriolet was a murderer. Earlier that day—Friday; January Three, 1992—a 22-year-old unemployed electrician from Oregon named Darren Michael Stroh had stopped for gas in Los Banos, where he picked up a hitchhiker. Twelve miles south, Stroh’s one thousand nine hundred seventy nine Toyota Corona broke down. He pulled out a plastic emergency sign that read HELP. One person stopped, didn’t help, and drove on. One person stopped, helped, and died.

David Scott Baker was a 26-year-old boat builder from Washington State. Like Stroh, he was traveling to Southern California to visit a brother. Baker attempted unsuccessfully to give Stroh’s Toyota a leap, liquidated the cables, and returned to his Nissan. Without explanation, Stroh took a 12-gauge shotgun out of his trunk, walked up to Baker, and shot him twice in the chest. He dragged his bod out of the car and looked over to the hitchhiker. Would he like to come along for the rail? The hitchhiker declined. An hour later, near Coalinga, Stroh bumped into the Cabriolet. When the driver got out to check the harm, Stroh got in and drove away.

The Turs worked out of a hangar at Santa Monica Airport, where they monitored scanner frequencies, listening in on the police, the fire department, the coast guard. They were in the air covering a rainstorm when they heard the CHP report that a high-speed pursuit was headed toward L.A. Theirs was the very first news helicopter on the scene.

At KCOP in Hollywood, the assignment desk called in executive news director Jeff Wald to look at the feed. Wald had been the well-regarded news director at top-rated KTLA Channel five until 1990, when KCOP whisked him away to give its broadcasts some journalistic heft. The station manager, Rick Feldman, said at the time of his hiring, “No station in this market has a news product that they can indeed be proud of. … Everyone is spending all this money, and no one is telling me anything but garbage.” One of Wald’s very first moves was to hire the Turs.

Wald, an L.A. native, had never seen anything like the pursue footage. No one had. Police had pursued murder suspects before, but not with the eye of a TV news helicopter trained from above. It was a real-time game of cops and robbers, Wald thought, and he needed to stir on it. He called the station’s general manager, Bill Frank, and shortly after two p.m., KCOP broke into Matlock.

Stroh used off-ramps, shoulders, his shotgun, anything he could to jiggle the CHP. Bob Tur narrated the scene with an even calmness. Midday there was little traffic. The occasional car or truck veered out of the way, but there was an ease with which the fugitive navigated the roads, blasting his gun through the back window. From the five Stroh merged onto the one hundred seventy and then the 101. He turned off at Melrose, darting down the streets of Hollywood, past City Hall downtown, over sidewalks in East L.A. He got on the southbound 710, then the 405. By that time other stations had picked up the pursue. At Two:27 KNBC Channel four had gone live from their helicopter; at Two:35 KABC Channel seven from theirs. KCOP cut back to Matlock. Viewers phoned in, requiring the pursue. They got it.

At Two:45 Stroh ran out of gas and coasted to a stop on an off-ramp near Westminster. Eight CHP cars idled behind him; another blocked the exit. “We’re going to see a drama unfold here,” said Tur. Using bullhorns, officers ordered Stroh to drop his weapon. He refused. Until now Tur’s narration and the whirring of the helicopter were the chase’s foot soundtrack. An officer sprang up on the passenger side and shot several rounds into the car. Bang, bang, bang, bang—it was muffled, but there. Out the driver’s window, a quick puff of smoke. The suspect was dead.

T he next morning, the ratings came in. Stroh hammer Matlock. The Los Angeles Times ran the pursue on its front page, calling the event “a marriage of technology and tragedy.” The police pursuit had found its television audience. Over the next decade the car chase—high speed, low speed, or, when a tire has flattened and the fugitive is running on sparks and stupidity, virtually no speed—would become another peculiar symbol of the city, an “Only in L.A.” ha-ha, like surfing Santas and transvestite Tupperware salesmen. With the slow-speed pursue of O.J. Simpson in 1994, the pursuit would become an international phenomenon. With plotline references in TV programs as disparate as The Larry Sanders Display and Seventh Heaven, it would become part of L.A.’s vernacular. With Fox specials such as World’s Scariest Police Pursues and best-selling movie games like Grand Theft Auto and Need for Speed, it would become an industry.

Every news station in town invested in its own $1 million helicopter to monitor the skies. They outfitted them with costly gyro-stabilized cameras and digitally encrypted police radios and 50-million-watt Night Suns to illuminate the evenings. Pilots, who were on call twenty four hours a day, competed for off the hook footage by throwing each other off course with misinformation such as “I heard he’s going to Malibu,” when they knew the driver was headed for Orange County. Of the Five,000 to 6,000 police pursuits that take place in California each year, half last less than two minutes; fewer than one hundred spread to more than an hour. No matter the length, if a pilot was savvy enough to get there in time, the station was ensured a hop in ratings.

On a elementary level, L.A.’s obsession with car pursues results from a confluence of factors: the LAPD’s aggressive pursuit policy (which is under review by the police commission), the city’s horizontality, an abundance of freeways, advances in camera technology, and a competitive TV news market that encourages imitation rather than innovation. Take away just one of those factors, perhaps, and there might not be a car pursue packing the screen every time you flick on the remote.

In the past ten years, I have observed a tank trample a pickup and rip the belly out of an RV on a residential street. I have observed a stud pull over halfway through his pursue and receive a drink from bystanders as if he had just ended mile thirteen of a marathon. I have seen a woman who survived Auschwitz but not Encino when she crossed the path of a carjacker. I have observed a stolen bus back into someone’s kitchen on the Westside. I have seen one cocky fellow lead a string of police cars through the parking lot of Capitol Records, and another perform slow doughnuts in an intersection as three squad cars followed like Shriners in a parade. I have observed an unarmed man, visiting from South Korea and driving erratically while high on coke, shot to death by officers who had to duck for cover from their own cross fire. I have seen teenagers give the finger to pilots through their sunroofs or strut and giggle as they engaged in the now-familiar rites of surrender—hands where we can see them, on the pavement spread-eagle—their baggy pants drooping about their knees.

Bob and Marika Tur no longer cover pursues. After two hundred thirty televised pursuits, they stopped a year and a half ago. They kept the copyright to all of their film, and spend their days licensing footage from some of their Ten,000 hours of gauze and battling over copyright infringement.

“I knew the streets,” Bob Tur tells me over a cup of coffee. “I had a fine bond with this city.” He is serious and intense, in wire-rimmed glasses and a brief leather jacket. He’s not macho; news helicopter pilots strike me as more science teacher than Chuck Yeager. Tur is an outspoken critic of how police treat car chases—he thinks most are unnecessary—and he is distressed by the networks’ slavish allegiance to them, but he makes a living off those tapes. “It was excellent for ratings,” he says of pursuits, “but what I didn’t see was that it would be the death of local news.”

S teve McQueen tears up the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt. Gene Hackman weaves under the el in The French Connection. Robert De Niro pummels Paris in Ronin. An exhilarating car pursue can be the cornerstone of a movie, the most popular playback at a film retrospective. A televised police pursuit through this city is nothing like it is in the movies. Few since Stroh’s have been as dramatic. Real getaway cars uncommonly hold murder suspects popping off a shotgun.

In the movies, we usually practice a pursue from the nauseating viewpoint of the pursuer or his quarry. We, like they, bounce over speed bumps and dips in the road, swerve around stopped cars, absorb the hard asphalt. Our ears are assaulted with the screeching of tires, the crashing of trash cans, the exaggerated vrooms of a revving engine. An extended cinematic car pursue lasts at most eight or nine minutes, and we know that, at its end, the actors will sustain, improbably unscathed. There is no capitulate, only escape.

Televised police pursuits tap into different emotions. Watching through the lens of a camera high in the air, we can’t see the driver. We don’t know what led him to this point in his life. We don’t have a feel for his car. We can’t hear its hiccups, its burps. It maneuvers through the streets like a silent Hot Wheel on a plastic racetrack, at times smashing into someone or something. We see the fire but don’t feel the warmth. A pilot or reporter or combination thereof narrates the picture for us. We want Steve McQueen’s machismo; we get Paul Moyer’s histrionics. If the newscaster embarks to annoy us, we can turn down the sound and provide our own chatter. It can go on for much longer than eight or nine minutes, but thanks to those stabilized cameras, it is a slick rail, nothing that will interfere with dinner.

We look down on the car from a vantage that only God is customarily privy to. Whether we’re in our living room or in front of a bank of plane screens at Circuit City, we, too, can stand in judgment of the accused (tho’ of what he is accused we infrequently know). Like God, we have a broad view of the picture and can see what lies ahead—Oh no, a cul-de-sac!—before the driver can. Albeit we are all-seeing, unlike God we can suggest no help to those on whom the driver is about to inflict harm. The mother of three in the black van approaches a downtown intersection. We know, with a sickening sense of powerlessness, that the hijacked bus is speeding toward that same intersection. Stop! Please, pull over! we yell at the van. She doesn’t see the bus, just as we feared, and then there is the crash, the noiseless, ghastly crash, that hauls her van down the entire block into a UPS truck and across a parking lot utter of cars. It took only seconds, but we knew before she did. She is dead.

Ask pursuit enthusiasts what compels them to observe and invariably you hear the cliche “This is the real reality TV—you never know how it’s going to end.” That is only partly true. While there is a lot we don’t know—will that cop spin out and ram into the wall? will that pedestrian step off the sidewalk for the last time?—we do know that, with a helicopter overhead, the fugitive will be caught. But how will the drama unfold?

Four years ago Ken Kuwahara, a police officer in the San Gabriel Valley, commenced PursuitWatch.com, a message service that alerts subscribers via phone, pager, or Internet when a live pursuit is on TV. Two thousand subscribers pay $Five a month for the privilege. “Nobody knew when one was happening unless a friend or relative called,” says Kuwahara, sitting on his flowered couch in San Dimas, a nativity scene on either end table. “Unlike other cop shows, you didn’t know when these were going to be on.” An exceptionally quiet man, Kuwahara says he and his wifey love watching pursues together—PursuitWatch registers three or four a month.

To report a pursue, members call an eight hundred number. (The very first three callers get free-membership prizes.) Volunteer verifiers are notified; once they determine that a pursue is on TV, they trigger a server that sends a recorded message to all subscribers. That list includes Dean Spaul, a cardiac monitor technician who says he has had patients scheduled for open-heart surgery ask for a delay so that they can observe a pursue. “In the hospital, it’s `code blue’ for cardiac arrest,” says Spaul, “and `code pursuit’ when one comes on TV.” Wayne Coombs is another subscriber. Four years ago the self-employed Web master bought seven black-and-white TVs so that he would never again miss a pursuit. The picture tubes have deep-throated on all but two. “Now I have TiVo set on Channel 9,” says Coombs. “They’re more likely to broadcast the pursuits. It’s always recording. Believe me, it’s much better than VCRs.”

A televised police pursuit can connect us to the city. We recognize that corner, that overpass, that pedestrian bridge. We know someone who works in that area of town or who takes that route. On the other mitt, L.A. is so big that a pursue over numerous highways might be the only chance for us to see this unmanageable city as a entire. It can bring neighborhoods together. If we are desperate for anything, it is to feel close to each other, to have common practices. The pursues give us something to talk about the next day at work, or over the phone with Mom.

Listen to the story that Victoria Redstall, an actress, spokesmodel for GroBust (“a natural breast enhancer,” she says), and PursuitWatch subscriber told me: “I was in Studio City, having a nice sit-down dinner. There were people calmly sitting in the bar, most likely on their very first dates. Then I get a cell phone call. On KCAL9Los Angeles, there is a pursuit. I say I have to go to the bar. I tell everybody there’s a pursue on right now, could we possibly put on Channel 9? Everybody in the restaurant gets up from their seats, glued to the screen. Nobody complained. I’m from Surrey, just south of London. Showcasing someone from out of town a car pursue is like displaying them the footprints in the pavement at the Chinese Theater.”

I was chased once. Not by the police, and not on TV, but by some deranged man in a white sedan on a summer day. About eight years ago, my beau (now my hubby) and I were traveling north on the seven hundred ten when I noticed in my rearview mirror a car too close to my bumper. I switched lanes. So did he. I switched again. So did he. His visor masked the top half of his face; below, all I could see was his smile, a row of gold teeth—was this some bad James Bond film?—shimmering in the sun. I had done nothing to provoke him; this was obviously how he got off on his Sunday afternoons. I laid on the gas of my pickup, crossing onto interchanges at the last moment, doing anything I could to get rid of him. It was horrifying, the most horrifying thing I’d ever experienced, but at the same time it was a thrill rail. Los Angeles was unspoiled insanity to me that afternoon—the vastness, the recklessness. The freeways opened up for me as they never had before.

The pursue lasted about forty five minutes. I exited in Studio City and headed down Ventura Boulevard, a place with which I was familiar—a common m.o., I would much later learn, of fugitives leading pursuits. He stuck with us. We yelled to fellow drivers to call 911. I pulled up to a Hamburger Hamlet and ran inwards, past the Sunday brunchers, to the kitchen, where the unruffled staff hid us. The man had stopped, too, and was dangling from the metal bars of a construction site across the street as if it were a jungle gym. When the police ultimately arrived, they told us they could do nothing but detain our tormentor while we drove home. He hadn’t cracked the law, they said. They didn’t catch him speeding.

To observe somebody lead the police on a pursuit is both comical and painful. A CHP explore asked inmates who had been arrested for evading the police why they fled. They said they panicked. They said they had incriminating evidence in their cars. They also said that as soon as they heard a helicopter overhead, they knew it was over. We know that the driver will not become a celebrity from this, if that’s what he’s after, because TV news is dazzled by the spectacle, not the follow-up. Unless something truly bad happens during the pursue, no mention of it will be in tomorrow’s paper. There’s no interest in the drama once it’s over. We know that whatever set the pursue in motion—he failed to yield, he stole the car, his tags are expired—his life is only getting worse with each ticking minute of this pursue. Just by evading arrest he could be charged with a felony, possibly his third strike, earning a 25-to-life sentence. The stakes are higher now. We also know that, on some level, he’s getting high off this practice.

In 2001, police recorded seven hundred eighty one pursuits in Los Angeles—more than any other city in the United States. Of those, thirty six percent ended in collision and one hundred thirty nine people were injured. Each law enforcement agency has its own pursuit policy. If I were to lead police from North Hollywood to West Hollywood coming over the 101, I would encounter the LAPD very first, the CHP on the freeway, and the sheriff’s department in West Hollywood, and each of them would pursue me differently.

A two-and-a-half-week-old baby lost his left arm in November when his parents’ car was hit by an attempted-murder suspect. The pursue that preceded it lasted two minutes, not enough time for it to be televised. After the public outcry, police chief William J. Bratton defended his officers and blamed the culture. “In this town, you’re fascinated with these pursues,” he said. “It’s entertainment.” However, the department is refining its pursuit policy to be more like that of the sheriff’s, which relies intensely on air support. The chief has also spoken with TV news executives, encouraging them to curtail their coverage. He’d very likely have better luck asking Starbucks to stop selling coffee.

I am fiddling around with the gyro-cam on the Channel two news helicopter at Van Nuys Airport. The chopper hasn’t launched yet this afternoon, so the airborne reporter, Aaron Fitzgerald, is letting me play. The camera reminds me of an Etch-a-Sketch. As I shift its direction with one knob, I must stir another to keep it stable and yet another to get it focused. Otherwise the camera, which is mounted underneath the front of the helicopter, would just proceed to search for something to concentrate on. It is a mighty lens: Through it I can read the logo on the baseball cap of a Cessna pilot at the other end of the runway.

The maiden voyage of the word’s very first news helicopter, a “telecopter” wielded by KTLA, was on July Four, 1958. From the air the station covered (on taped delay) the one thousand nine hundred sixty one Bel-Air fires, the one thousand nine hundred sixty three Baldwin Hills dam disaster, and the one thousand nine hundred sixty five Watts riots. Twenty-seven years after that upheaval and three months after providing the very first live coverage of a police pursuit, Bob Tur would hover over Florence and Normandie during the one thousand nine hundred ninety two riots, the only pilot to document the hammering of Reginald Denny, and ask, “Where are the police?”

At any given time there could be a dozen news helicopters in the sky above Los Angeles. They are an integral part of the city. Look out the window of any high-rise, any time of the day, and you’ll likely spot one. All of L.A.’s major news stations own or lease a helicopter. Fox has two. The LAPD’s air support division has eighteen helicopters, three of which fly all day: one over the San Fernando Valley, one that covers an area from the Marina to the Hollywood Hills, and one over South-Central. The sheriff’s department has twelve helicopters in its fleet; the CHP has one.

Fitzgerald has just begun his Trio:30 to 11:30 p.m. shift for Channel Two. He is tall and youthful, well dressed in a sky blue T-shirt and black slacks. He served as a paratrooper in the army and began working at the Santa Monica Airport, pumping gas for Bob Tur, in 1994. He starts his shift by monitoring the scanners; as soon as he hears a peak, he launches, and is airborne for the remainder of the day, browsing the skies for structure fires and, when the sun sets, the flashing lights that denote police activity. Fitzgerald tracks an average of three pursuits a day, but since most last only a few minutes, he usually arrives too late. In fact, it has been about two weeks since he’s covered a live pursue.

In his off-hours Fitzgerald freelances as a pilot for KFWB News Radio, or goes on ride-alongs with police to learn about procedure, or brushes up on his Thomas Guide. “Chases are less of a mystery now to the public,” he says. “Viewers are sophisticated. They have gone from `Why don’t they just shoot that fellow?’ to `Why don’t they use a spike disrobe?’” He gets a call from the KCBS assignment desk. There is a assets on the six hundred five freeway. They’d like footage for tonight’s broadcast.

Later that evening, during my dinner, Fitzgerald calls me on his cell phone. The drought is over. “We had launched on that dead assets shot, which ended up going live, and then we got a pursue,” he says. “We picked it up in Placentia, and it ended in Brea. Channel seven was also there. It was armed robbery suspects, with a baby on board, going up to ninety five miles an hour. They got cornered, and the police pointed their guns at them. They gave up like little lambs.”

F or a moment in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight it looked as tho’ the televised pursuit might vanish. One spring day a man parked his truck on the interchange of the one hundred ten and one hundred five freeways and began to wave a gun and lob Molotov cocktails at passing cars. He unrolled a banner that read HMOS ARE IN IT FOR THE MONEY. LIVE FREE, LOVE SAFE OR DIE. Then he set his truck on fire, with his retriever mix inwards. After tearing off his searing pants, he took a rifle out of the pickup bed and shot himself in the head. Seven news helicopters hovered above, displaying the entire thing live. Several of them had taut shots.

After that there was hand-wringing. It was a “wake-up call,” news directors said. “We won’t go in so taut anymore,” they reassured people. “We’ll institute a seven-second delay.” This wasn’t a pursuit, it was a standoff. But it became a sign of a station’s seriousness when a general manager would announce “No more car pursues,” as Paula Madison did at KNBC in 2001. Everyone agreed to stick to medium shots. No one, however, stopped airing pursues, KNBC included, and no one instituted a delay. A year and a half later, in November 1999, a pursuit ended when police shot the suspect to death. KNBC, KTLA, and KTTV demonstrated it live.

“Very often a pursuit is a legitimate news event,” says Hal Fishman, the long-time anchor at KTLA. “Thousands of people are affected by it, imperiled by it, sometimes ems of thousands are delayed by it. I was not about to apologize for the fellow in the pickup truck who killed himself live on TV. That is the world in which we live. Our job is to bring you what happened.”

For Jeff Wald, who is back as news director at KTLA, car pursues peaked the day that man committed suicide. “We were hardened by it,” he says. We are sitting in his office, where he is once again monitoring feed from a news helicopter. The latest suggesting is the aftermath of a crash near Lawndale, where three sheriff’s cruisers collided with two vans as they joined the pursuit of a suspected carjacker. Rescue workers are extracting a badly injured deputy from his car—no longer a car, indeed, but a wad of mangled metal. “I’ve never seen an officer’s car look so bad,” says Wald. “Even now, after so many pursues, there’s always something different.” A news editor pops in to comment—”Are you witnessing this? This is truly bad”—then the station’s general manager says hello and is momentarily transfixed. On air at KTLA is an gig of The Jerry Springer Demonstrate. There was a time when the station would have cut in with the accident, says Wald, “when it was a novelty, yes. But now we ask ourselves, `How many people is this story affecting?’ The pursue is over, this isn’t holding up traffic on a freeway.”

These are human stories devoid of their humanity. In the papers over the next week, we would learn more about the man who killed himself. The story involved AIDS—he was HIV positive. It involved the breakdown of the country’s health care system—it had failed him. But we didn’t know that while we observed. Daniel Jones was newsworthy, in those last moments of his life, simply because he was holding up traffic.

There are limitations—painful limitations—to the form. Because of the immediacy with which the drama is unfolding, we learn little of the reasons behind a pursuit. Instead, what are possibly the last few minutes of a person’s life, or at least of his or her freedom, are documented with filler.

O n one of those just-after-a-storm days, when the city is particularly bright and crisp, I fly out of Van Nuys in KTLA’s Morning News helicopter with reporter Jennifer York and cameraman Steve Howell. We are scanning the Valley for traffic tie-ups. The pilot, Desiree Horton, swoops down the four hundred five and then over to the one hundred thirty four and the Five. Canyons rip through mountains, freeways through neighborhoods, but homes and cars are mere rectangles and squares on a grid. Above the ridgeline but underneath the clouds, the helicopter sits astride the real and the unreal, which is sort of like living in L.A.

On the headset, somewhere over Forest Lawn in the Hollywood Hills, York gets a peak: The police are in the midst of a nibble operation. A six-foot-four cop is dressed as Santa Claus. He is strolling back and forward along a crosswalk in front of Sherman Oaks’s Style Square to see if drivers stop; motorcycle cops wait around a corner.

It is our job to find Santa. Flying at one hundred six miles an hour, we get there in about four seconds. Even in a crimson velvet suit, white beard, and floppy hat, the cop isn’t effortless to spot: He looks dinky from five hundred feet. KTLA asks us to hover until someone is pulled over. It doesn’t take long. Santa steps off the curb and a dark SUV barrels right through the crosswalk. In an instant a motorcycle cop is behind the car, lights flashing. The SUV resumes down the block. This is it! I think. At the corner, the car turns right, slows down, and pulls into a parking lot to get a ticket. In a way, I’m disappointed. Even after all I’ve seen, part of me wishes he had kept going. It wouldn’t have made for fine news, but it would have made for fine TV.

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