Jay Stanley of the ACLU admits he’s paid to “think about how things could go wrong,” but he said he came up with 10 things communities should consider before allowing their local police to use drones to respond to emergency calls.
Drone advocates said they understand the concerns, but that police use of drones could help police departments conserve resources and improve response times while also providing safeguards to protect citizens’ privacy.
This was the subject of a debate on drones at a meeting of the Maryland Association of Counties on Wednesday morning at the association’s summer conference in Ocean City.
Supportive views came from Montgomery County Councilmember Dawn Luedtke (D) and Montgomery County Police Lt. Tony Galladora, who spoke about the county’s Drones as First Responders program launched last year.
The use of the device, also known as an “unmanned aerial vehicle,” is limited to downtown Silver Spring and Wheaton in the county. Galladora said those two areas were chosen because of the “high rate of use” for burglaries, robberies and other crimes.
Using the drone, officers can see live images of a scene and track people’s movements from the air.
From November 2023, when the program began, through June 30 of this year, the drone program was most commonly used to respond to calls about theft/embezzlement (35% of the time), suspicious circumstances, people or vehicles (14%) and assault (12%), according to county data released Wednesday. During that period, drones responded to nearly 1,100 calls.
Since the number of officers in the department has decreased, the use of drones can now address more serious situations or take on other tasks, Luedtke said.
The department ensured that the cameras would not be turned on until the drone reached its destination. Luedtke said this was in response to public meetings and concerns from the public “that the cameras should not start recording until the drone has arrived on site.”
“So as the drone flies to its destination, the cameras are facing up and turned off,” she said. “This was a direct result of feedback from the community.”
Luedtke said the county plans to expand to Gaithersburg, Germantown and Montgomery Village, although it is not yet known when exactly that will happen. She also said Montgomery County is the largest county in the country to operate a drone program. The program costs about $200,000, including $35,000 for a drone and software.
Cost is just one factor that officials must consider, said Stanley, senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. Communities must decide whether the money could be better spent elsewhere, he said.
Thanks to the Federal Aviation Administration, other law enforcement agencies could adopt similar drone programs. Amazon told the federal agency in May that the company could operate drones “beyond visual line of sight” to extend its reach to customers.
As for the number of law enforcement agencies launching drone programs, Stanley noted that there are an estimated 14,000 to 16,000 police departments nationwide. “I get paid to be paranoid and think about how things could go wrong,” he said.
The ten problems he outlined related to drones included the need for communities to consider the importance of democratic processes, restrictions on use and mass surveillance.
He pointed to a lawsuit the ACLU filed with the nonprofit Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle against the Baltimore Police Department’s unauthorized use of a surveillance program that recorded footage across the city. In 2021, a federal appeals court ruled that the police program was unconstitutional and ordered that all data collected be deleted.
“The courts are grappling with these questions, and they are being applied to drones as well,” he said. “As drones explode overhead, there are many unanswered legal questions.”
Del. Luke Clippinger (D-Baltimore City), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, moderated Wednesday’s discussion. He said there may be a briefing from his committee on drones when the 90-day legislative session begins in January.
“What happens if a private security company decides to fly a drone over people … (and) follow them (the people) out of the building, into the building and then out of the building and then probably somewhere else,” Clippinger said after the more than hour-long discussion.
“You could track them for quite a while. At least initially, you could do that independently of the need to contact a police officer,” he said. “So that raises a whole range of different questions.”
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