More police departments and other first-responders are using drones
More police departments and other first-responders are
using drones
That presents cities with a choice between safety and
privacy
Oct 12th 2017 | LOS ANGELES
IN JUNE a search-and-rescue team in Colorado used a drone
to spot lost hikers in a pine forest, shaving hours off the time it would have
taken to find the hikers using dogs, and thousands of dollars off the cost of
doing so with a helicopter. In August police officers in Maine used a drone to
snap 81 photos of the aftermath of a collision between a pickup truck and a
blueberry lorry. The process took 14 minutes, instead of the hours officers
said would usually have been required. Last month, police officers in Illinois
used a drone to fly a mobile phone into the hands of a disgruntled man who shot
at them when they tried to evict him from a foreclosed home. After hours of
negotiations via the drone-delivered phone, they coaxed him into surrendering.
Despite such stories, many people are sceptical about the
merits of law-enforcement drones. On September 28th Los Angeles’s Sherriff
Civilian Oversight Commission, a body created a year ago by Los Angeles County
officials to increase the accountability of its Sheriff’s Department, asked the
department permanently to ground its drone, because of worries about privacy
and safety. Such concerns have a basis in recent history. In 2012 the Los
Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) secretly tested an aerial
surveillance programme over Compton, a deprived neighbourhood in Los
Angeles—though with a small aeroplane, not a drone.
Anxiety about drones is not confined to southern
California: Seattle cancelled its drone programme in 2013 after residents and
privacy activists protested, fearful of mass surveillance. A survey conducted
in January by Rasmussen Reports, a polling group, found that 39% of American
adults opposed the use of police drones compared with 36% who favour them.
Such tensions are set to intensify as an increasing
number of law-enforcement agencies, fire departments and emergency-response
teams start to use drones. A recent report by the Centre for the Study of the
Drone at Bard College shows that at least 347 such departments acquired drones
between 2009 and 2017. More drones were bought in 2016 than in all previous
years combined, says Dan Gettinger, the study’s author. The buying spree shows
no sign of slowing.
Growing recognition of how useful such machines can be is
one reason for the rapid increase; another cause is the proliferation of
affordable, easily operated consumer drones. The first police departments to
adopt drones, in the mid-2000s, leaned towards buying expensive commercial
drones that were produced specifically with law-enforcement and military
applications in mind. But today many police, fire and emergency-response
departments are opting for drones that are intended for use by photographers
and hobbyists. Of the 315 departments for which the Bard College centre has
drone-type data, 252 have at least one drone manufactured by DJI, a Chinese
firm which is the world’s largest dronemaker. Its popular Phantom drones start
at $499. Older models can be purchased even more cheaply on third-party websites.
The loosening of regulations by the Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA) has resulted in more drone use by first responders. Before
August 2016, all non-hobbyist drone operators had to hold licences to fly
manned aeroplanes, too. Now there is a separate licensing process for operators
of remote-controlled vehicles. Like private drone operators, police, fire and
emergency-response departments are still bound by other FAA rules. They must
register all their drones and are banned from conducting night-time operations
(unless they have a special waiver) or missions where the operator loses sight
of the drone that he or she is controlling.
On top of these federal rules, states are also putting
limits on how drones can be used by law-enforcement agencies. According to the
National Conference of State Legislatures, a bipartisan research group, 18
states require such agencies to seek search warrants before using drones for
surveillance purposes.
Workers and drones
Some concern about government agencies’ use of drones is
justified. But overly broad restrictions on their use could stop them from
doing useful things such as monitoring crowds at concerts or marathons, which
are public anyway. In a paper published in the George Washington Law Review in
2016, Gregory McNeal of Pepperdine University argued that, “legislation that
requires warrants for drones treats the information from a drone differently
from information gathered from a manned aircraft, by a police officer in a
patrol car, or even an officer on foot patrol.”
Under the Fourth Amendment, he continued, police are not
required to ignore wrongdoing until they have a warrant. “Why impose such a
requirement on the collection of information by drones?” Instead, legislators
might consider extending property owners’ rights to a certain altitude above
their homes (Mr McNeal suggests 200 feet, or about 60 metres) and requiring
that data collected by drones must be deleted after a certain period.
This article appeared in the United States section of the
print edition under the headline "Buzzed by the fuzz"
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