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HughPickens.com [hughpickens.com] writes:

Crime shapes cities but the reverse is also true. Cities get the types of crime their design calls for. The construction of Los Angeles' freeway system in the 1960s helped to instigate a later spike in bank-crime activity by offering easy getaways [washingtonpost.com] from financial institutions constructed at the confluence of on-ramps and offramps. This is a convenient location for busy commuters — but also for prospective bandits, who can pull off the freeway, rob a bank and get back on the freeway practically before the police have been alerted. The maneuver became so common in the 1990s that the Los Angeles police have a name for it: a “stop-and-rob.”

Now Geoff Manaugh writes in the NYT that flight paths around Los Angles have also come to influence how criminals use the city [nytimes.com] as the heavily restricted airspace around Los Angeles International Airport has transformed the surrounding area into a well-known hiding spot for criminals trying to flee by car. Los Angeles is a fundamentally different kind of place from New York or Chicago with their skyscrapers and deep, canyonlike streets. Those dense clusters of high-rises and towers make thorough aerial patrols nearly impossible, not to mention potentially dangerous. In L.A., by contrast, you simply cannot see the whole city if you rely solely on ground patrols. According to Manaugh Los Angeles police helicopters cannot always approach the airport because of air-traffic-control safety concerns. "Indeed, all those planes, with their otherwise-invisible approach patterns across the Southern California sky, have come to exert a kind of sculptural effect on local crimes across the city," concludes Manaugh. "Their lines of flight limit the effectiveness of police helicopter patrols and thus alter the preferred getaway routes."

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