CZM Rewind: Police Drones and You

the only one. Drone fever is just sweeping the nation right now with the new Jersey drone panic, somehow making headlines based on unconfirmed and very disputable reports. The new Jersey drone thing isn't real. This is mass hysteria. Almost all of these incidents of UFOs, UAPs or mysterious drones are actually just like regular airplanes going to the airport, airplanes that you can track online via flight radar. These

aren't nuclear scanning drones. These aren't secret government military projects. These are either like legal, registered hobbyist drones in some cases, but really just mostly airplanes. A few weeks ago, there was a really cloudy day over the New Jersey coast, and that day all of the drone sightings stopped because you couldn't see up in the sky. You couldn't see the airplanes. But yeah, the New Jersey drone panic isn't real.

The reason why there's blinking lights flying over LaGuardia is that those are airplanes taking off and landing at an airport. This whole panic was boosted by unconfirmed social media reports and local news sites trying to gain clicks, and somehow this just broke through into the national mainstream discourse. But

fears over invasive drones isn't necessarily unfounded though. The ones that you should be worried about aren't UFOs or nuclear scanning drones, but are actually police drones, which are becoming all the more commonplace. More and more cities this year have adopted police drone programs. So for this episode, I'm going to rerun my episode from early in twenty twenty

four about police drones. Now, in the past year, there's also been a great increase in the reporting on police drones, including a fantastic Wired investigation titled the Age of the Drone Police is Here. They analyzed nearly ten thousand individual flight records from July twenty twenty one September of twenty twenty three, containing more than twenty two point three million coordinates.

The investigation showed that poorer communities, especially working class and immigrant communities, were disproportionately surveilled, with police drones in Chula Vista flying over neighborhood blocks on the west side more than ten times longer than blocks on the suburban east side. And considering Trump's second term, fears over widespread police surveillance are only more relevant, especially in immigrant communities and even in instances where drones like this fly over places like

abortion clinics, and these fears are not unfounded. In twenty twenty, the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Cheulavista Police Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE. Now it's still unclear how many drones Cheulavista PD currently has, but as of twenty twenty two, they had thirty two of these high definition camera mounted drones drones which have

now done over twenty thousand flights since twenty eighteen. All of this will get discussed more in depth in the episode, but for an update later, I discuss a court case to secure the public's right to access drone footage, and this case is still ongoing. Last spring, the city tried to appeal to the Califor Furnia Supreme Court, who ultimately declined to take up the case, basically reaffirming the lower

court's ruling against the police to withhold drone footage. This case is once again back to trial court to finalize details of how certain footage should be released. So, without further ado, here's my episode from the twenty twenty four Consumer Electronics Showcase Police Drones and you welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. Now, last week I spent a few days in Las Vegas for the Consumer

Electronics Showcase. Most of the time of the convention, I was just walking around the show floor looking at various new types of surveillance equipment, AI products, and various other bullshit that was being peddled to the many, many industry attendees of CEES. But I was also able to go to a few panels. Now, panels are really interesting because you get to hear people who are working inside industries talk about stuff that they don't usually really publicly talk

about very much. And on the first day of the convention, I went to a panel about drone technology. Half of the panel was about how Walmart is launching new delivery drones in Dallas, Texas. The other half was about police drones. And that's what we're going to be talking about here today, how the police are using drones, why they're using drones, and how you can probably expect to be seeing a lot more drones up in the sky piloted by either an AI or a police officer. So let's get started.

Cheula Vista is the southernmost kind of medium sized city in California, with the population of two hundred and seventy eight thousand people. Chula Vista has a police force of two hundred and eighty nine sworn officers as well as one hundred and twenty civilian employees. On top of their nearly three hundred officers, they operate a drone fleet ten hours a day, seven days a week, launching high depf camera mounted drones from four locations throughout their small city.

I'm going to quote from an article from the MIT Technology Review, which did a deep dive onto Cheulavista's police drones back in February of twenty twenty three quote. Cheulavista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only one officer is available, when two calls come in, one foreign armed suspect and another for shoplifting, an officer will respond

to the first one. But now cvpd's Public Information Officer, Sergeant Anthony Molina, says that dispatchers can send drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter unquote. And this really gets at the heart of how these drones are going to get used. They exist to funnel more people into the

criminal justice system. Instead of having to choose between two calls, one of which actually could relate to saving someone's life, the other just a petty crime, now the police can easily follow someone doing a petty crime while responding to other calls and eventually catch up. It's a way to just expand the amount of people that can be arrested and thrown into jail. Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools

for police. Over one thy five hundred departments currently use drones, usually for special occasions though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation, protest surveillance and sometimes tracking suspects, But at the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch drones in response to nine to one one calls, the first of which was Chew La Vista PD, who launched their quote drone as first responder program back in twenty eighteen.

Would the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene. Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Cheu La Vista Police Department talking on the drone at Technology panel at CES.

four diferent locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop, and then we have a operation center where we have sworn officers that are part one of seven pilots that fly the drones. So we are responding now to calls for service on average, an officer on scene, a drone penant on scene that's sharing information with our officers lights, streaming that information on our cell phones or in our computers that we're siving information about the call.

for much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vistaped was the first department to get a BEV lost waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly two hundred and twenty five more departments now have one as well.

why police drones are so important. In one video on their website, this guy from Skyfire Consulting was talking about how police may not have had to kill Tame or Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun, which is a ridiculous thing to say, because in the nine one one call that jump started this entire police interaction, it was expressed that the caller thought the gun was

probably a toy. And this notion that is simply if police have more ability to surveil, they'll be able to respond safer and apply less deadly force, I think is a pretty suspect premise. Yes, now, the effectiveness of drone technology and law enforcement is challenging to verify and quantify.

The MIT Tech Review cannot find any third party studies showing that drones reduce crime, even after interviewing CVPD officers as well as drone vendors and researchers quote, nor could anyone provide statistics on how many additional arrests or convictions came from using drone technology. I was able to find some data on cvpd's website talking about how many drone initiated interactions resulted in arrests, but quantifying additional arrests seems

to be a little challenging. Now, if you look at Chula Vista PD's own drone responses stats, the vast majority of deployments I estimate around seventy percent are for what the director of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation refers to as quote crimes of poverty unquote, which he believes will be the target of most drone

policing as opposed to violent crime. Nearly thirty percent of Tuela Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances. Almost fifteen percent are for psychological evaluations, ten percent are for quote, check the area and information, over seven percent are for welfare checks, six point five percent is for quote unknown problem, and over six percent is for suspicious

person and another six percent for traffic accidents. Now, some drone of deployments do result in patrol units not having to be dispatched, but CVPD also says that drones have assisted in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best

thing for a fifty one to fifty psych evaluation. The presence of a police officer doesn't always make the situations better either, but I don't see having a drone be a really calming presence if you think someone needs mental help. Funding a whole fleet of heavy duty surveillance drones and

paying dedicated operators costs money. Now it's unclear to me how many drones to Levista PD currently has, and on their website they list ten different drone models currently being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DGI drones like the DGI Matrix, the DGI Inspire, the DGA Phantom, the dj Maverick, as well as drones from a few other random companies. But nevertheless, Chief Kennedy is very grateful for their local Police Foundation for heading up the funding

for their DFR drone first Responder program. Let's hear from her I don't.

beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are allotted for drune programs, and so we've had to be very, very creative in our police department, and we were very blessed to have a police Foundation that has taken on the responsibility to help us really start our drone program and continue going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge and dependent upon the.

private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of discussion about drones and what drones we should.

dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, a Prenza newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high tech police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone braking software, license plate readers, drones, riagear, among other miscellaneous technology as a part of a DHS grant program due to their close

proximity to the US Mexico border. Chula Vista was one such department, and as of twenty twenty, so four years ago, they had already received over one million dollars in grant funds from this DHS program, titled the quote Urban Area

Security Initiative. Considering Chief Kennedy's budgetary concerns, drones actually have a lot of upsides financially, as they are often a lot cheaper than alternative surveillance methods, as well as being relatively easy to deploy remotely, either with a joystick or just by clicking a point on a map from a

comfy office building. Issues around this ease of use was pointed out by Dave Moss, the director of investigations for the privacy rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, who was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, up until the last like five to ten years, there was this unspoken check and balance on law enforcement power money. You cannot have a police officer standing on every corner of every street. You can't have a helicopter flying twenty four seven because

of fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system unquote.

In the v for Veneta graphic novel, anarchist writer Alan Moore imagined a fascist Britain characterized by surveillance cameras around every corner, and now cities around the country are setting up their own street mounted cameras linked to private security cameras and ring doorbell cameras to create a network of life coverage around a whole city which is instantly accessible

to police. The more widespread consumer adoption of new technologies like small camera mounted drones and doorbell cameras, the more acceptable it seems for police to add such technology to their arsenal of surveillance tools. It almost becomes expected. Two of US TPD has routinely declined to answer why their drones are always recording, both to and from the scene, and the department has put in a lot of effort into managing the backlash against their expanding drone program.

just going in my backyard? What if we're spoking marijuana backyard? And I said, you're in California, doesn't really matter. But way right that, we said, okay, we gave you your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we were with and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to.

the camera never actually stops recording. She just claims that it tilts slightly upwards in between nine one one calls, but it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Cheulavista have flown over eighteen thousand missions with their drowns. That's

a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Cheulavista, Chief Kennedy really emphasized how much her and the department really care about listening to community feedback and how data transparency is so important to CVPD.

Despite the chief's emphasis on the police's commitment to transparency and the importance of listening to community feedback, even going as far as to consult the ACLU when developing their drone program, for years now, the Cheulvista Police Department has denied all FOYA and public records requests for any drone footage. In response aar turnro Castnares, a Cheulvista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper Loprenza, filed a lawsuit against

the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation.

Just last December, only a few weeks before CEES, the California Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that this blanket exemption is invalid and that not all drone first responder footage could be classified as part of appending or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as nine one one calls about a roaming mountain lion or a stranded motorist.

And police were not happy about this ruling. I'll talk about their reaction at the end of the episode, but controlling the narrative about the drone first Responder program has been of the utmost importance to Truellavista Police, as the chief herself expressed at the panel, and we're real.

people's homes, backyards, or public protests. And that's why this recent ruling and the legal precedent it sets is a huge win for actual transparency and marks the first step towards the public finally getting a look at how these drones are being used in Scheula Vista, with drone first Responder programs is spreading to police departments across the country

modeled after the one in Cheula Vista. Combined with the increasing presence of stationary street level cameras, the ability for police to be watching everywhere without the need for on the ground officers creates what the EFF refers to as quote a fundamental change in strategy with police respecting to a much much larger number of situations with drones, resulting

in pervasive, if not persistent, surveillance of communities unquote. Speaking of persistent surveillance, near the end of the panel, the chief announced that two of us tapd is planning to expand their ten hour a day drone first responder program to a constant, twenty four hour a day drone surveillance program.

More than doubling the department's capacity to have eyes in the sky would mean a lot more work hours for drone operators, as well as a large increase in the amount of video files being stored indefinitely, but Chief Kennedy claimed that they're looking into offsetting costs by replacing some of the drone piloting team with AI assisted piloting and autonomous devices.

goes a little bit beyond that. And then one of the challenges, and I know you're only getting like a little piece of the information about exactly how we're doing this, but from the four different locations that we fly on each of the rooftops we have what's called the piloting command, and that piloting command is contracted through a company and we and they just have visual awareness of the sky and they work in coordination with our drone pilot that's

inside our operations center. But that's a huge expense for us to pay lead for each site.

My hope is that and we keep hearing about if you've seen some of the testing and we've been testing it as well in our area, or what's called drawn in the box, or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that our autonomous and so we're getting there, but we're not quite there because it's very different when you're dealing with flying over people and you're flying into areas where the drone was to drop out of the sky and harm

people in our community. That could create tremendous challenges. So we're very as I mentioned.

back when done. This would require a whole bunch of drones to just be launching and being piloted by themselves. You wouldn't have to train random police officers to become FAA licensed pilots, and you could just have the whole thing in the box, like it's called drone in the box. And these are only going to become more common and cheaper.

Imagine having ten of these throughout a city, launching from like ten different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked to the nine one one calls, creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police, live streamed from the air.

Matt Sloane, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a company here in Atlanta that trains law enforcement agencies on the use of drones and DFR programs, thinks that we'll start seeing autonomous deployment of police drones within the next year or two, as police budgets increase and become allocated for unmanned aerial systems. He referred to the state of drone use by police as quote rapidly escalating. Chula Vista likes to market itself as a pioneer of the smart city movement, which consequently

makes them able to receive a whole bunch of grant funding. Now, the idea of the smart city is built around having a massive amount of data to automate certain city services. So for this idea to work, there needs to be a way to collect that data, and these drones are

a major part of that. The website for the City of Chula Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive traffic signals in app for non emergency city services, as well as quote crime mapping and police dispatch modernization unquote as also being smart city initiatives.

like that could have many, many consequences. But anyway, back to drones. According to a twenty twenty article in the newspaper Loprenza, cities in San Diego County like Chula Vista, have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, poll cameras, license plate readers, and cell phone cracking technology used to circumvent passwords from the Urban Area Security Initiative

DHS grant program. A lot of these technologies have use in the Smart City Idyllic plan for data collection to automate city services. After the drone panel was over and I was walking around the show floor at CEES, I couldn't help but notice all of the smart cameras and AI image recognition systems being advertised for law enforcement applications. Software that can almost instantaneously scan through a wealth of footage and track people's movements, run facial recognition, and identify

every article of clothing. Versions of this type of software are already in use by many police departments, and they will only get better, cheaper, and more common. In effect, what this does is remove a lot of the detective legwork. Instead of having to manually map someone's movements and track down what niche etsy shirt someone's wearing, these aisystems can now do this all automatically. To quote the MIT Tech

Review article on cvpd's DFR drone program quote. As the technology continues to spread, privacy and civil liberty groups are raising the question of what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras, and new real time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence. This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically

suffered from over policing. Unquote. Pedro Rios, a human rights advocate with the American Friends Service Committee and a member of Chula Vista's Community Tech Council, was quoted in the MIT article saying, quote people in the community have no awareness of what images are captured, how the footage is retained, and who has access. It's a big red flag for a city that says it's at the forefront of the smart city movement.

being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked for like thirty minutes about how much they care about community engagement and how transparent they are with their flight data, I was able to ask the Chief how their commitment to transparency relates to the recent lawsuit she just lost over hiding drone footage. And I also threw in a question about owns at protests. Let's take a listen. Yeah, a question for the chief.

And I know you recently lost a court case regarding the availability of drone footage, So I'm curious about the kind of what the rationale for that footage is and how that plays into this idea of trying to be transparent with the community for how these drones are being used.

They did lose the case. The Fourth District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful and sent in the case back to trial court to hammer out the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage.

The police are now currently claiming that making DFR footage adhere to the Public Records Act would violate the privacy of Chula Vista residents captured in the videos, which perhaps demonstrates that the aerial videos should have never been captured in the first place. I'm going to read a press release from the city's communication manager. Quote the city declined to provide the copies because doing so might have violated

individual privacy rights. The city would have to manually review and redact every video record to protect information considered personal, such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more. Unquote, So the city is both trying to argue that having to manually review each requested file to determine if the video in question is related to appending investigation, as well as redacting personal information captured on camera, would be way

too costly and time consuming. City officials claim that reviewing and redacting videos from one month to obscure faces, license plates, and backyards would take a full time employee around two hundred and thirty days. I'm going to read a little bit more from the city's recent statement. Quote. While the city takes very seriously it's obligation to provide the public access to public records, the city is concerned that the Court of Appeal's opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of

members of the public in this case or in future requests. Unquote. Somehow the city has missed the point that this is the very reason the drone footage is being requested to learn the actual nature of this highly influential drone first

responder program that's being adopted across the country. If the existence of this footage is such a massive privacy violation, that implies that the recording of said footage itself implicitly violates people's privacy, and the harder police fight to hide their sweeping collection of aerial footage, all the more suspicious this entire program seems.

whether or not they're going to hear this case. If they decline, then the president will be set statewide against this exemption of the Public Records Act by hiding drone footage, So that will be really cool, And then hopefully within the next year, we'll finally be able to see what some of this footage actually looks like, how good their cameras are, how much they can zoom in, all of the details of how much of the city they're capturing, all this kind of stuff, how often the drones are

in the air, all of those types of things that it will be easier to highlight once we can actually take a look at the footage. And I assume that going through and releasing requested files for one month will probably end up not taking two one hundred and thirty days. But I do know how the police love to love to stretch out these public records requests for as long

as they can. As the request that this lawsuit stems from, it's all the way back to April of twenty twenty one, so hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally get a look. Special thanks to Loprenza for starting this lawsuit and doing all of the hard work to actually

force the police to be transparent. And if you want to read more, I'd recommend checking out the website to Loprenza dot org as well as the MIT tech review piece, which provided some really releaseful information to fill in the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you for listening. Could happen here. It certainly could happen here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in the air, It could happen here as a production of

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