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Putting Police on Top of It All

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Officers Matt Jaroscak and Robert Vann were cruising at 400 feet above South Los Angeles Thursday when the radio spat out a call that a suspect on foot had eluded police. Technical Flight Officer Jaroscak called out the details: male, black hat, black shirt. Exposition Boulevard and Western Avenue.

Vann, the pilot, pulled the Astar chopter into a sharp 180-degree turn and sped forward at 136 mph. In less than a minute, they were circling the intersection. Jaroscak deployed half a dozen officers on foot, bicycles and in cars as they searched a maze of city streets for the suspect.

No luck this time.

“This guy has eluded police capture,” Jaroscak said after a 15-minute search. “He probably made it into one of the houses.” The chase was the first of only two such incidents for the team’s morning shift. It was an unusually slow morning, they said.

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As if they were patrol cars in flight, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Air Support Division usually has one police chopper hovering the San Fernando Valley and two others over the rest of the city during the day.

Boasting that it is the largest municipal airborne law enforcement unit in the world, the division has 82 sworn officers, 17 helicopters and a military surplus C-12 airplane for transporting detectives, VIPs and prisoners.

However, most of the division’s time--about 80%--is spent providing air support for daily police work. This includes radioing the whereabouts of sighted suspects to officers on the ground, photo and video reconnaissance and taxiing command officers, SWAT units or other teams to crime scenes.

The airborne unit began with one 12-C Hiller chopter in 1956, as part of the Traffic Enforcement Division. Pilots in the first year spent 775 hours airborne. Today, with three copters in operation during the day and one at night, the division can log about 20,000 flight hours annually.

Police emergencies were added to the unit’s duties in 1968 when a faster turbine-powered Bell 206A Jet Ranger was added to its fleet.

In less than a decade, the force grew to 77 officers, 15 helicopters, a Cessna 210 and was renamed the Air Support Division.

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A Special Flights Section was formed in 1976 to provide surveillance and support for detective and undercover operations. The special unit of about a dozen officers is essential to narcotics investigations, and is credited with helping police seize billions of dollars in contraband. Air Support has answered 48,325 calls from police dispatchers this year--more than 16,000 of them involved hunting for fleeing suspects.

“Most of the calls that we respond to are in-progress calls like ADW’s [assault with a deadly weapon], burglaries and shootings,” said Jaroscak, who has been a technical flight officer for the last 12 of his 21 years with the department. “Pursuits are a highlight for us. They get the adrenaline pumping.”

The airborne policemen say that during a chase, their mission is to radio ground patrols about the whereabouts of fleeing vehicles and alert officers about potential problems with approaching traffic or pedestrians.

Having a chopper overhead reduces the need for patrol cars to get involved in speed chases, and suspects will drive less desperately if police are not right on their tail, Jaroscak said. The result is greater safety.

“The challenge for us is that we do everything we can to minimize the risk,” Jaroscak said. “The last thing we want to see is an innocent civilian get hurt.”

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