Catching Up to the 20th Century : Donated night-vision goggles will help LAPD, but they should be shared among divisions

Just about everybody has access to the “starlight technology” involved in night-vision goggles or scopes. Well, everybody except much of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Bob Mathis of the International Assn. of Chiefs of Police says the technology was first used in the Vietnam War and was employed by his colleagues on the police force in Kansas City beginning in 1973.

These devices convert available light into electrical energy and then boost it into visible, greenish-white images. But the earliest models that Mathis describes were cumbersome and bulky. Now, the options range from a palm-sized Russian “moonwalker” that you can obtain through the American Wild Bird Co. in Rockville, Md. (for $399), to more expensive models costing $2,900.

There are two points to be made here. First, the fact that the LAPD obtained its few scopes through donations from a civic group and from ITT Gilfillan of Van Nuys is another striking example of how starved the department is for modern technology. Simply put, this technology has been accessible to state, local and private authorities for years.

In Percy, Ill., for example, security guards have used night scopes to protect encampments of temporary workers from striking coal miners. In New York City, transit police use them to sneak up on subway car graffiti taggers. In California, wardens of the Department of Fish and Game use the goggles to hunt for poachers. Even deer hunters have used them to get a leg up on their elusive prey, although you’d be hard-pressed to get one to admit it.

Now, the five Night Enforcer 250 scopes from ITT Gilfillan will give the LAPD’s Van Nuys division a nocturnal surveillance advantage. The scope given to police by the citizens group Supporters of Law Enforcement in Devonshire has already been used to capture two suspected rapists in Chatsworth Park.

Now that the Van Nuys division has five scopes, one or two ought to be shared with the other San Fernando Valley police divisions. That will help bring the force into the 20th Century before the century ends.