Police Eye in the Sky Is Flying High-Tech

Lt. Bob Mulhall is Pasadena’s ultimate crime fighter. He flies at 100 mph, sees in the dark and never forgets anything he sees.

Thanks to his latest high-tech gadget, he can pinpoint the location of a fugitive on the ground and then tell colleagues patrolling there exactly where to look.

Mulhall is the pilot who commands the Pasadena Police Department’s Air Support Section, a unit of five helicopters with more than 30 years of experience in the skies over Los Angeles County.

The police choppers also patrol six other San Gabriel Valley cities as part of a joint-powers agreement known as the Foothill Air Support Team.

With a whirl of the blades and flick of the switches, Mulhall and his observer on the OH-58A Kiowa helicopter can operate an infrared imaging device capable of locating a suspect under a pile of leaves hundreds of feet below.

The image can be relayed via a gyro-stabilized camera mounted beneath the copter to a screen in the cockpit. Those images can be downlinked for a live television feed to ground units.

On this day, Mulhall is showing off his newest gadget in the Kiowa, the military version of the popular Bell Jet Ranger.

It’s a mapping device that employs a global positioning satellite system to get Mulhall to crime scenes faster, he said.

“You just punch any address in L.A. County and the computer shows you the helicopter’s position, the destination and most direct route,” Mulhall said.

On the screen, the copter appeared as a green arrow. The destination was a yellow star with a bearing, air speed and estimated flight time. The system uses data drawn from the Los Angeles County Assessor’s office to match street addresses to aerial observation.

In one incident during a two-month trial, a pilot was able to relay the street address of the home a suspect was hiding behind, thanks to the assessor’s data.

Pasadena is the first agency in the county to use the system. Other local agencies with air operations rely on older systems. The Pasadena system was purchased with a $34,000 grant from Los Angeles County.

Supervisor Mike Antonovich, who helped secure the funding, said he also wants to place the system in helicopters used by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.

Military surplus and a little ingenuity are the name of the game at the Air Support Section air base on the rim of the Arroyo Seco. The air base resembles a graveyard for helicopters. A couple of cannibalized hulls of old Kiowas rest on the edge of the parking lot. Storage containers for parts are nearby.

Mulhall said the two OH-58s in service are military surplus, designed to attack tanks on battlefields. The hulls are nonworking OH-58s provided by the military for parts. All were provided as part of federal anti-drug and homeland security efforts.

Each of the operational OH-58s was retrofitted at a cost of about $50,000 to $60,000 -- much less than the price of a new helicopter. The modifications included attaching a searchlight to a gun mount.

“We removed much of the armor,” Mulhall said. But one copter still has Kevlar, a bullet-resistant material, protecting the pilot’s seat. “We’ve only had one aircraft hit by bullets,” he said.

During the 1992 riots that followed the Rodney G. King beating trial, pilot George Ramos was hit in the chin by a fragment of a 9-millimeter bullet that penetrated the canopy. He landed the helicopter safely and his wound was minor.

None of Pasadena’s helicopters has crashed. But Mulhall does recall one incident 15 years ago in which his copter suffered an engine failure and he was forced to land in the middle of an East Pasadena strip mall parking lot. Shoppers thought it was a training exercise.

To avoid such incidents, helicopters require a high level of maintenance -- and air support is not cheap. Mulhall said Pasadena spends about $1.7 million on its program annually to pay five pilots, six observers and three mechanics. The other cities pick up between $25,000 and $75,000 in expenses and provide one observer each.

At least one of Pasadena’s helicopters is available to be airborne 18 hours a day. On Friday and Saturday evenings, one chopper patrols Pasadena while another flies above Arcadia, Alhambra, Azusa, Covina, Monrovia and West Covina.

Alhambra Police Chief Larry Lewis said that, with its rapid response and the advantage of observers above to protect officers on the ground, the regional helicopter patrol has proved a success for cities that could not afford such a program alone.

“There is nothing more valuable to officers than to see a helicopter in the air which can see the whole area,” he said. The need for aerial support is compounded by the San Gabriel Valley’s vast geography and lack of officers for a burgeoning population.

West Covina Police Chief Frank Wills said a helicopter can do some things a squad car cannot, such as identify fugitives’ escape routes, spot traps and pursue vehicles without endangering the public.

The helicopter’s Lojack receivers often detect stolen cars. Pilots then alert ground patrols.

Sometimes it’s as simple as turning on a spotlight. Once, Mulhall said, he was on patrol and turned his spotlight on a car below. Out jumped two men and they ran.

The vehicle had been stolen.