Noisy Helicopter Still Makes One Heck of a Cop : Crime: Answering calls in seconds, choppers prove popular with San Gabriel police and store owners. Residents find racket a necessary evil.

Each pilot of a police helicopter has a favorite tale.

For Investigator Bob Mulhall, Pasadena’s chief pilot, it’s the time he caught two car thieves and recovered the stolen car without even trying.

One night, he said, he was simply sweeping his spotlight along the ground as he flew patrol when two guys slammed on the brakes and jumped out of their car.

“For bad guys, that light is like a death ray--they have to get out of it,” Mulhall said. “They always think Big Brother is up there watching them.”

Pasadena police pilot George Ramos’ favorite chuckle involves the guy who was about to vault a fence to elude his pursuers. Suddenly, the suspect heard a voice in the sky from a seemingly omniscient presence.

“Are you sure you want to jump that fence?” Ramos’ voice boomed through the chopper’s speaker system. “There’s a big dog waiting for you over there.”

Rapid response times and the advantage of having an all-seeing eye to back up ground officers are two of the reasons more San Gabriel Valley police departments are following the example of larger cities and swapping beat cops for beating rotor blades.

About one-fifth of the departments in the area have helicopter programs in place, and several other departments are taking a look at adding choppers. Pasadena and Pomona police and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, which patrols several valley cities, have been flying helicopter patrols for more than 25 years. El Monte started its own helicopter program in September, 1993, and Baldwin Park started a part-time helicopter program June 1.

“I don’t know how a police department can get by today without a helicopter,” said Lt. Terry Blumenthal, who heads the Pasadena police helicopter program.

A major consideration fueling such programs is manpower: Statistics from the state attorney general’s office reveal that the San Gabriel Valley is technically under-policed. The area’s 19 police departments average 1.3 officers per 1,000 residents; the national average is 2.2. More departments are finding that helicopters enable their finite police force to keep up with a load of calls that sometimes seems as if it’s approaching the infinite.

Blumenthal points out that his team of half a dozen officers, three pilots and three observers assisted with 1,000 arrests in 1993 and handled about 10,000 calls. Considering the entire 222-officer department made 10,201 arrests in 1993, his six officers were involved in almost 10% of the collars made last year.

“Helicopters so reduce response times. . . . You can catch people you never would’ve caught,” Blumenthal said. “Our worst response time is 58 seconds, and when you consider cars take about six minutes to get to crimes even on Priority One calls, that’s a big difference.”

One recent night, the infrared screen flickered in the fishbowl cockpit of the two-seat Pasadena police helicopter as the rotors beat the air and sped it to a crime scene at more than 100 m.p.h.

The infrared system turns the world into a black-and-white negative of real life, with hot images showing up bright white. The darkened city streets flow across the screen an inky black, their borders defined only by the heat from the street lights.

A man who had been spotted brandishing a handgun in a Pasadena neighborhood and officers responding to the call showed up on the screen like tiny characters in a real-life video game, with the ghost-like police relentlessly chasing the Pac-Man of the fleeing suspect through the maze of streets.

“The more afraid you are or the more you run, the hotter you are and the better you show up,” Mulhall said.

The helicopter crew spotted the man crouching in the bushes by the side of a home--the heat sensors are so advanced that footprints show up in grass on cool nights--and even picked out the dark shape of the man’s steel handgun, which stood out against the warmer background of the living grass. Via radio, the pilot led officers directly to the surprised gunman, who figured he was safe as long as he stayed quiet under the cover of the bushes.

“We found this guy within one minute,” said Mulhall, noting that with no red lights or traffic to contend with in the sky, the helicopter responded within 30 seconds of the call.

Departments also find the helicopters useful in the search for ways to keep police use of force to a minimum.

Pinning down a suspect in a spotlight and waiting for help to arrive is being seen as a preferable alternative to pinning down a suspect with a physical takedown, said Bryan Vila, an assistant professor in the criminology department at UC Irvine.

“If it’s nighttime and you’re chasing some person in the dark through back alleys, you have no way of knowing if it’s some scared teen-ager or some three- or four-time heavy loser who’s been pumping iron in prison and is heavily armed,” said Vila, who served with the Sheriff’s Department for nine years before going back to school for his doctorate.

“But if you have the helicopter, they can tell you, ‘He’s huddled behind some bushes. You’re almost on top of him.’ It’s a much safer situation for you and for the suspect. The more control police have, the more they’re able to attenuate their use of force.”

Pasadena owns five helicopters, one Bell Jet Ranger 206IIIB and four turbocharged EnstromF-28Fs, which fly about 10 hours a day, Mulhall said.

Although police maintain that the high visibility of the choppers is a major key to developing the mentality among crooks that the long arm of the law can reach them anywhere, officers field occasional calls from residents complaining about the aircraft buzzing like giant mechanical gnats above their houses all night.

“We try to address any kind of inquiry immediately,” said Lt. Tom Oldfield as he sat in front of the phones at Pasadena police’s Benedict Heliport. “We check with the guys flying and we’ll tell (the callers), ‘We’re checking out a liquor store that’s been robbed.’ That usually suffices; most people will say, ‘Oh, thanks, we were just wondering.’ ”

Many residents of Northwest Pasadena, an area well trafficked by the helicopters, regard the hovering choppers as a necessary evil.

“I would rather hear them circling overhead than hear shooting in my neighborhood and have them not be there,” said Alma Nelson, a community service representative who works the phones at the Jackie Robinson Community Center and lives nearby. Nelson said she does not hear any serious complaints from neighborhood residents about the aircraft.

Complaints are the last thing on the minds of area shopkeepers. “I can only give those guys praises and pluses on my behalf,” said Walter Butler, 53, the owner of Walt Butler Sports Shoes on North Lake Avenue. “It’s the one service I feel is totally worth paying for.”

Pomona and El Monte report similar situations. “We understand that some people have complained about the helicopter,” said training Sgt. Mark Sullivan, who heads up the El Monte program. “But we’ve also gotten petitions with 20 signatures of people in support of the helicopter. And at 2 a.m., when you see a prowler, it’s nice within 30 seconds to have a 15-million-candlepower light circling your house.”

Pilots admit that the hardest part of patrolling from the air is knowing where you are, and occasionally choppers drop low to read freeway signs or look for landmarks.

Most government-owned structures and automobiles, including low-income housing and city buses, are topped with numbers that help the crews find their way around. But most of the time, the pilots memorize landmarks and count streets.

Ramos, 37, worked as a patrol cop for eight years before becoming a helicopter trainee. After passing a battery of tests, he worked as an observer for about three years before being trained as a pilot. Although no pilots have ever been killed flying for Pasadena, he is one of the few who have been injured on duty, shot during the riots that followed the verdicts in the first Rodney G. King beating trial in 1992.

“A fragment of a 9-millimeter bullet came up through the canopy and ricocheted and hit me under the chin,” he said. “Felt like someone had hit me in the jaw as hard as they could.” He landed the helicopter safely and his wound turned out to be minor, he said.

Crashes are rare among helicopters, in part because the aircraft can pivot their rotors to let air pressure keep them spinning even if their engines cut out. “I had an electrical failure back in the summer of 1988,” Mulhall recalled. “My engine cut out and I had to put it down in the middle of the Fuddrucker’s parking lot over by Michillinda (Avenue). . . . We put up some tape around it, and everybody just thought the police helicopter was on display.”

Cost is the major stumbling block for operating a helicopter program. Pasadena’s program cost $1.45 million, though Blumenthal noted that about $362,000 went to actual helicopter-related costs, with the rest going toward salaries for the pilots, observers and ground crews.

Pomona once had three helicopters, but budget problems in the mid-1980s forced the city to ground two of the aircraft, said Sgt. Ken Gillespie, the officer in charge of the air support program. The Pomona budget is about a third of Pasadena’s--$465,000--but the department’s Enstrom 280FX still assisted with 300 arrests in 1993 and flies about five hours a day, five days a week, he said.

Baldwin Park and El Monte have been able to keep their helicopter costs lower--around $78,000 per year--by renting low-cost aircraft for a set number of hours each month, about 10 hours per week.

Baldwin Park Police Chief Carmine Lanza said money from the department’s asset forfeiture fund and funds from public safety Proposition 172 is financing his city’s helicopter program for the first year of operation. El Monte, whose program has been operating since September, 1993, on a 10-hour-per-week basis, went the same route, paying for all costs through its seized assets.

Costs are cut further because the Robinson R-22, the helicopter used by both El Monte and Baldwin Park, is a low-maintenance, two-person aircraft that costs about $115 per hour to fly, compared with about $450 per hour for a larger chopper.

Lanza hopes to interest other departments in sharing the price of the air support. “We’re planning on approaching chiefs in other areas to try and put a regional shared-cost program together,” he said. Departments in Alhambra, Covina and Monterey Park have expressed interest, but most are waiting to see how El Monte and Baldwin Park fare before actually committing any money.

“We think it’s a great idea, a great program, but what holds us back is the money,” said Covina Police Chief John Lentz, whose city is still wrestling with a potential $1-million deficit.

Although U.S. Helicopters, a firm based in Long Beach, is just squeaking out a profit on the aircraft rentals now, director of operations Bob Muse hopes he will land more contracts with more departments as they see what the helicopters can do.

“I started out with this idea about three years ago,” said Muse, who is also the primary pilot of the El Monte police chopper.

“We approached all the agencies in the San Gabriel Valley . . . and before, we couldn’t get anyone to listen,” he said. “But once we got El Monte, (the departments) are actually calling me now.”