THE PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS.(vehicle pursuits, Los Angeles)

There was a brief historical period when the rest of America understood life in Los Angeles. It began at 5:56 P.M. Pacific time on June 17, 1994, and ended two hours and fifty-one minutes later. Maybe you missed it. That was the night that O. J. Simpson toured greater Los Angeles in a white Ford Bronco while holding a gun to his head. North on the 5 Freeway he went, then west on the 91, south on the 110, and north on the 405, as dozens of patrol cars blocked off traffic and twenty police cruisers trailed the Bronco and seven news helicopters darted overhead and thousands of people gathered on overpasses to cheer him on. Ninety-five million Americans watched the pursuit on television, and Domino's Pizza set a delivery record. "This has been the most incredible series of events that we have ever witnessed," Michael Tuck, a KCBS-TV anchor, said.

Strictly speaking, however, not much actually happened onscreen. From the cameras on the ground, you saw empty, twilit freeways that seemed to embody Los Angeles's promise: the endless opportunity to leave mistakes in the rearview mirror, to lose yourself amid nine hundred miles of sinuous highway and twenty-one thousand miles of tangled surface streets. But from the cameras above, the customary vantage for tracking the city's televised pursuits, you could see that this most sprawling and motorized of our great metropolitan areas is a huge web that is easily apprehended from the air--some forty police and TV helicopters keep busy doing just that--and that it is not the roadways but their surveillance that never ends.

"The O.J. pursuit fixed once and for all in people's minds how Looney Tunes Los Angeles is about vehicle pursuits," William Bratton, the chief of the Los Angeles Police Department, said. After running police departments in Boston and New York with a swaggering style that put him on the cover of Time, Bratton came to the L.A.P.D., in 2002, prepared to repeat his crime-busting formula. He issued appeals and directives to curtail the city's pursuits--only to find himself buffaloed by the local vehicular folkways.

Most pursuits here are much faster and more violent than the Simpson outing: a quarter of them end in a crash, and about fifteen each year end in death. Yet Bratton has learned that trying to stop them is tantamount to tampering with life, liberty, and--obviously--the pursuit of happiness. Ken Kuwahara, a local policeman, has gone so far as to found PursuitAlert.net, a service that notifies its subscribers when a chase is on--in Los Angeles, pursuits air as often as weather reports. "I tried it in every American market with a news helicopter, and it only works in L.A," Kuwahara told me. "Here, everyone from old ladies to Catholic priests is waiting for the blood and guts, waiting to be appalled and mesmerized."

In 2004, California led the nation (as it always does) with 7,321 pursuits, and the majority of them--5,596--took place in Los Angeles County. Sheriff Leroy Baca, who heads the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, explains the prevalence of what he calls "these mechanized bullfights." "First, we don't have enough cops, which creates an atmosphere like an open shooting gallery," he said. (New York City has nearly twice as many police officers as Los Angeles County, though it has two million fewer people and is one-thirteenth as large.) "Second, we have more idiots here than anywhere else. Third, our idiots are highly mobile. A criminal without a car in Southern California is going to be a lonely man."

The freeways of Los Angeles are its public stage, its Colosseum. They are concrete expressions of its historical imperative to expand in search of further land and water. In Reyner Banham's influential 1971 book "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies," the British architectural historian hailed the freeways as one of those vital ecologies, and called the city an "Autopia." Fourteen years later, in the first sentence of Bret Easton Ellis's novel "Less Than Zero," the author observed, "People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles." In retrospect, it has become clear that Banham had an unrepresentative experience here, failing to have his car stolen (as happens every seven minutes) or carjacked (as happens twice a day in the city), or to get shot at on a freeway (as happens about three times a month in the city). Nor did he seem to participate much in that most democratic of local activities: seething in traffic. (The average county resident spends ninety-three hours a year in tie-ups.)

Because the county has so many centers--eighty-seven cities in addition to Los Angeles--its ten million occupants are all ceaselessly trying to go very different places by very elaborate routes that gum up everyone else's very elaborate routes. So the two people who stole a big rig filled with mixed melons last July and then led police on a four-hour meander around the 5, the 605, the 215, and the 15 freeways were, by local standards, behaving logically. And as for the trucker a few years back who fled deputies after a traffic collision, drove his eighteen-wheeler through the fence surrounding Long Beach Airport, overturned it on the main runway, set the cab on fire, and then ran away without any clothes on--well, fair enough, really.