JACK DUNPHY: Another Journalistic Disgrace at the Los Angeles Times: a Continuing Series.
As is often the case in these stories, Park seeks to support the accusation of police racism with a veneer of academic credentialism. He quotes Nicholas Shapiro, an assistant professor of biology and society at UCLA and director of the Carceral Ecologies Lab. “The higher the proportion of Black population,” says Shapiro, “the lower the altitude of the helicopter.”
Park writes: “Shapiro said the groups had found that in every census block of L.A. County that is more than 40 percent Black, the median elevation of helicopters was below 1,000 feet, the “minimum safe altitude” for congested areas as set by the Federal Aviation Administration.” The online version of the story links to the FAA’s Guide to Low-Flying Aircraft, which indeed says that aircraft operating over a “congested area” maintain “an altitude of 1,000 feet above the highest obstacle within a horizontal radius of 2,000 feet of the aircraft.”
Alas for Times writer Park and the Oxford and Bard College-educated Shapiro, they failed to thoroughly read the very document they present as proof that police helicopters are operating in a racist manner over Los Angeles. If they had, they would know the 1,000-foot minimum altitude rule applies to fixed-wing aircraft. Had they bothered to read a mere two paragraphs beyond the point where the 1,000-foot rule is mentioned, they would have learned that helicopters are explicitly exempted from this rule, and that helicopter pilots are directed to “comply with routes or altitudes specifically prescribed by the [FAA] Administrator.”