On YouTube there's a lot of aerial footage of US police pursuits to be found, usually filmed from news helicopters, flying around and doing a lot of maneuvering in the same small area, sometimes in the immediate vicinity of big airports.
Almost always there are more helicopters involved: Police and tv stations, you can sometimes see them crossing the camera view. And all of this time, essentially no one knows where things are going. The whole thing seems to me quite hazardous from an aviation point of view, maybe even more so than the proceedings on the ground.
How are these operations kept safe? Under what rules or procedures does ATC handle this kind of situations?