last week, reason Reports say Colorado police departments are increasingly using drones as first responders for some 911 calls.
A new investigation released this week reveals how such a system works in practice, with alarming implications for privacy and civil liberties.
exist wired, Dhruv Mehrotra, and Jesse Marx write about Chula Vista, a small town in southern California between San Diego and Tijuana , the distance is approximately equal. In 2018, the Chula Vista Police Department (CVPD) launched the Drone as First Responder (DFR) program, which allows 911 operators to deploy drones in place of or alongside uniformed police officers. It is the first city in the United States to do so.
Police Chief Roxana Kennedy told KPBS at the time that DFR “is not a replacement for police, but an enhancement.” In the first week of the program, drones responded to 30 calls and led to three arrests, including a domestic violence case in which a man suspected of stabbing a woman fled back to a homeless encampment. The pursuit drone led police to his location. The program was initially limited to a one-mile radius of the police department, but expanded over time until it received federal authorization to operate citywide in March 2021.
As Mehrotra and Marx detail, in the nearly six years since, CVPD drones have flown nearly 20,000 flights, “often dispatched to respond to serious incidents, such as reports of armed persons. [but] They are also often deployed for minor issues such as shoplifting, vandalism and loud music. The city even used drones to broadcast public service announcements to homeless encampments early in the Covid-19 pandemic.
wired “Nearly 10,000 drone flight records from July 2021 to September 2023” containing “more than 22.3 million flight path coordinates” were examined to evaluate CVPD’s claim that drones were only used in response to specific They are dispatched only for 911 calls or lawful searches, not just to perform a mission.
The authors found that “drones were used in approximately 7% of the city’s service calls,” including “nearly half of incidents involving reports of armed persons and about a quarter of incidents related to violent crime,” as well as mental health and domestic violence calls .
The “vast majority” of the 10,000 flight records analyzed “can be linked to a corresponding 911 call. But not all.” In fact, about 10 percent of the flights “lacked a clear purpose and precluded any associated 911 calls.” ; For 498 flights, the department listed the cause as an “unknown problem.” In addition, “nearly 400 flights.” [flights] Did not appear within half a mile of where any calls had been made in the previous half hour.
Even specially approved flights may raise concerns: “Operators are trained to immediately begin recording using the drone’s camera, capturing video throughout the flight from takeoff to landing,” Mehra said. Terra and Marx noted. The cameras, which are “powerful enough to capture faces clearly and record continuously as they fly, have collected hundreds of hours of video footage of the city’s residents,” the vast majority of whom have declined to be released.
“On average, each drone flight flies over more than 13 census blocks and potentially exposes approximately 4,700 residents below to drone cameras,” wired Analysis found. Potential exposure also varies: “Residents of a typical working-class, immigrant-dominated neighborhood on Chula Vista’s West Side spend more than ten times as long in the air with drones as a typical East Side resident,” Mehrot said. Ra wrote. wiredof political lab Yesterday’s newsletter. West Side residents “claim police drones stalk them personally, linger unnecessarily in backyards, or spy on them during their most intimate moments,” while others complain about the noise from the drone’s rotors. (CVPD claims the discrepancy is due to the varying number of 911 calls received in each area; wired Analyze “Confirm[ed] That’s basically the case.
Interestingly, low-income Chula Vista residents who are most likely to be affected by the drone program also have the strongest support for the drone program. A Latino man told reporters that the apartment complex where he lives has been flown by CVPD drones more than 300 times since July 2021 wired Drones made him feel safer, especially after a stranger tried to steal his children and police deployed drones to find the suspect. That’s not unheard of: Polls show that black Americans are more afraid of police than their white neighbors, but they still want a strong, effective police presence in their communities.
Regardless, Chula Vista’s drone program could be a worrying sign of where American policing is headed. Even beyond DFR, city residents have been subject to a surprising amount of surveillance in recent years: automatic license plate readers, facial recognition software, and a partnership with Amazon to access its Ring doorbell cameras. In December 2017, CVPD partnered with a company to share its data with other law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP).
As the Colorado example illustrates, police departments are increasingly viewing DFR programs as a legitimate alternative to traditional policing, in which an officer is dispatched to the scene of an emergency. While this is certainly true, it will also expose ordinary citizens to a shocking new world of state surveillance.
