Several Colorado police departments may soon be sending drones to respond to certain 911 calls, rather than dispatching an officer each time. While the proposal holds promise, it also raises troubling questions about privacy.
As Shelly Bradbury explains this week in denver post”, “As police departments across Colorado continue to make widespread use of remotely piloted aircraft, some local law enforcement agencies are considering using drones as first responders, sending them out to respond to 911 calls.
“Whether we like it or not, this is really the future of law enforcement,” Bradbury quoted Arapahoe County Sheriff Jeremy Gates as saying. She noted that while there are no formal plans in place yet, ” Gates envisions a world where a drone would be dispatched instead of a deputy to answer calls about damaged traffic lights or suspicious vehicles, allowing actual officers to prioritize more urgent calls for help.
The Denver Police Department — whose then-chief called police use of drones “controversial” in 2013 and said “constitutionally there are a lot of unanswered questions about how drones are used” — has also launched a program , purchased several drones over the next year that could eventually serve as first responders.
In addition to Denver and Arapahoe counties, Bradbury listed a number of Colorado law enforcement agencies that also have drone programs, including the Colorado State Patrol, which has 24 drones, and the Colorado State Patrol, which has eight drones. Commerce City Police Department with man-machine and 12 pilots.
In addition to helping reduce the number of calls officers have to answer in person, some law enforcement agencies see it as a means to save money. A Commerce City police officer told denver post “What we’re seeing with this is that, basically, it’s a lot cheaper than officers.” The city of Denver plans to use the program to make up for $8.4 million in police budget cuts this year.
On the one hand, such a proposal certainly has its merits: Unless they are of the “predator” variety, drones are much less likely than police to kill or harm innocent civilians or their dogs. As Gates points out, drones can take some of the drudgery out of policing by offloading some of the more mundane tasks of police officers.
But outsourcing too much police work to surveillance drones also raises privacy concerns.
“Sending drones whenever a 911 call comes in can be dangerous and lead to overpolicing of communities of color,” said Laura Moraff, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado. denver post. “There’s also a risk that if we just look up and see drones everywhere and know that police are watching, then the more we normalize drones in the sky, the more it can really impact behavior on a large scale. us.
Indeed, while this dystopian panopticon would certainly make the daily lives of police officers easier, it would mark a further erosion of ordinary Fourth Amendment rights in Colorado.
In Michigan, for example, police hired a drone pilot to film someone’s property instead of going to the trouble of obtaining a search warrant. The state Supreme Court upheld the search earlier this month, ruling that because the purpose of the search was to enforce civil laws rather than criminal violations, it did not matter whether the search violated the Fourth Amendment.
Thankfully, there are some positive developments on this front: In March, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that state police fly over a suspect’s house and take photos with a high-power zoom lens to see if the suspect Growing cannabis.
“The fact that a random person might catch a glimpse of your yard while flying from one place to another does not mean that law enforcement can unknowingly take to the skies and land on the private space outside your home. Training high-powered optics. “Unregulated aerial surveillance of homes with high-powered optics is a police practice that is ‘incompatible with the goals of a free and open society’. “
