London looks cool from street-level. London looks really, really cool from a helicopter — specifically from the Metropolitan Police Department’s Air Support Unit, a fleet of three that flies around providing support to the ground-bound team below. In between felony-fighting duties, the officers manage to take some truly incredible urban shots.
The aerial observers have a pretty extensive set of duties: tracking suspects and missing persons with thermal image cameras, vehicle pursuits, patrolling areas to keep misdeeds to a minimum. You can follow along with the city’s nitty-gritty goings-ons over at their Twitter feed, but at the beginning of this year they launched an Instagram feed, and it is just awesome shot after awesome shot; all of the beauty, none of the pesky crimes and misdemeanours.
Here are a few of our favourite shots. [qz; @MPSinthesky; mpsau]