The LAPD Has a High Tech New Way to Catch You Getting High

Images courtesy of the LAPD

A few days ago, tech news sites, motorcycle news sites, and police news sites all excitedly posted stories about the LAPD’s brand new electric motorcycle. The Zero MMX is the latest military-grade, battery-powered super-bike, capable of seemingly everything Batman’s motorcycle does, plus you can take it off-road. Late last year there was talk of Los Angeles buying its police an inferior bike from the same company, but it seems they’ve decided to go whole hog, so to speak.

Adding to the enthusiasm of the tech writers blogging about it is that the Zero MMX is supposedly capable of going on indoor missions. According to Wired, “they can go indoors to chase a suspect through a hallway.” It’s a terrifying thought if you’re a suspect, or if you spend much  time in hallways. On the other hand, the gas-powered bikes working crowd control on a busy night downtown tend to be hard on the ears, so having this thing near pedestrians instead sounded like a win to me. And of course it’s much more use of resources than fueling up the LAPD’s Lamborghini.

Then I talked to the LAPD officers that are going to be using it, and my dream of a fleet of pollution-free motorcycles, noiselessly helping old ladies carry groceries across the street, was soon dashed. What’s more, contrary to what Wired says, the thing is never going to be chasing perps down any hallways unless someone writes it into a movie. 

Instead, it’s basically a hyper-efficient, $15,000 sneaking machine, capable of a lot, but used mostly to come up behind people when they’re getting drunk or high, or tagging in a storm drain, because those are the things 9-1-1 callers complain about.

I spoke to Sergeant Ron Alberca of the LAPD’s off-road unit—something I didn’t know existed. Alberca was soft-spoken and his candid, complete answers gave me a surprisingly vivid picture of what his workday is like. He seemed eager to tout what this new machine can do. What follows is a slightly edited version of my conversation with him.

VICE: What is the new motorcycle for?
Sergeant Ron Alberca: It’s for off-road purposes. We have an off-road unit, and what we do is, we patrol the mountains within the city of Los Angeles. It’s hard to believe, but there are hundreds of miles of mountain terrain in the city. 

What kind of patrols does that include? What’s happening out there?
We have a lot of homeless encampments, and not just them, there are other people that go up there to do drugs, because they figure they can do their drugs. It’s safe. The cops aren’t up there.

So what happens is sometimes after they start getting high or drunk or whatever they do, they start harassing for example the women. Within the homeless encampments, oftentimes they’ll cook, either their food, or drugs and that can cause a fire. People that have homes up in the hills will call and complain about the homeless encampments, because their homes are so close to those mountains and if a fire starts, their homes are in danger of burning up. If the fire doesn’t get the home, the burned vegetation might cause mudslides later in the year when it rains, so they call often, to tell us about homeless encampments. 

Every so often we get complaints of marijuana grows. And also stolen vehicle dumps. They just kinda drive them up there as far as they can go until they can’t go anymore and then just leave them there. We’ve gone looking for missing hikers.

Which hills are we talking about? 
Griffith Park is one of them. Remember there’s a lot of single track trails up there. You can’t get a vehicle up there. There have been times when we’ve made arrests, and we handcuff the person and have to walk—well, we’ll follow them on a motorcycle—but the person walks and we push our bikes, or ride our bikes behind them, until we get to a place where we can get like a 4×4 truck or a [cruiser]. Then we can put them in the car and take them out. [We go] all along the Hollywood Hills, up through Mulholland. We have the Palisades, all the way up [to] where you would never see the police unless we’re up there. 

When they bought the electric motorcycle, they were talking a lot about crowd control, or applications where a suspect could be pursued on a motorcycle through something like an indoor mall or a convention center floor. Is this true?
You know, I heard some of that stuff, and I don’t know where that came from. These motorcycles are specifically to ride the trails, up in the dirt where we can’t get vehicles. We would never—well, I shouldn’t say never—but I can’t imagine riding a motorcycle inside a mall. First of all, you would probably slip, slide and fall, because the surface of a mall is not like the surface of a roadway. So I can’t imagine ever riding a motorcycle inside a mall. I don’t know where that came from but I heard something about it. 

So it completely belongs to the off road division?
Correct, the off road unit uses it. The nice thing about it is because it is electric they’re very very quiet, as opposed to what we have now. […] Gas-powered motorcycles are very loud. So when we’re going through Griffith Park, Runyon Canyon, Hollywood Hills, Hansen Dam, those areas have a lot of horseback riders. Runyon Canyon has a meditation area at the bottom of the hill down there if you’re coming down from Mulholland, and the last thing [meditating people] want to hear is a motorcycle[…].

What is the tactical advantage of a silent motorcycle? What does it allow you to do specifically?
Well obviously we’ve had incidents where we’re riding out there, like for example north of the 118, and we’ll see kids down there graffiti-ing the wash or something like that but they’ll hear us coming because motorcycles echo down the canyon. And we can see them now, but now they can see and hear us, so by the time we’ve gone all the way down to the bottom, they’re running and they’re gone, so all we have left is a bunch of spray cans, a backpack, and a bunch of fresh writing on the rocks and on the wash. So they got away. This motorcycle here will be able to go down. They won’t hear us coming unless they see us, and there’s so much vegetation down there they won’t see or hear us, so it’s going to be very easy for us to, you know, come up on people that might not be doing the right thing, that are up there for their own personal, illegal thing that they’re doing. 

Is there any advantage other than spooking horses less, and being able to get the jump on somebody?
It also costs less to maintain. For example, a motorcycle that’s gas powered, runs about $8,000-9,000. This electric motorcycle is about $15,000. But a gas powered motorcycle has to be serviced every 3,000 miles, which means we have to take it to our city mechanic, and the way they add those costs up, every hour that that mechanic is on that motorcycle, it costs the city money.

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