Instead of sending one officer at a time, several Colorado police departments will soon send a drone to respond to certain 911 calls. While the proposal is promising, it also raises uncomfortable questions about privacy.
As Shelly Bradbury reported this week in The Denver Post, “A handful of local law enforcement agencies are considering using drones as first responders — that is, sending them in response to 911 calls — as police departments across Colorado continue to widely adopt the use of remotely controlled flying machines.”
Bradbury quotes Arapahoe County Sheriff Jeremiah Gates as saying, “This is really the future of law enforcement at some point, whether we like it or not.” He notes that while there are currently no official plans, “Gates envisions a world where a drone is dispatched to a call about a broken traffic light or suspicious vehicle instead of a sheriff’s deputy, allowing real deputies to prioritize more urgent calls.” to help.”
The Denver Police Department, whose then-chief in 2013 called police use of drones “controversial” and said “constitutionally there are a lot of unanswered questions about how they can be used,” is also starting a program, purchasing several drones. over the next year that they can eventually function as lifeguards.
In addition to Denver and Arapahoe County, Bradbury lists numerous Colorado law enforcement agencies that also have drone programs, including the Colorado State Patrol, which has 24 drones, and the Commerce City Police Department, which has eight drones and 12 pilots for a city of about 62,000 people and plans to start using them for 911 response within a year.
In addition to helping reduce the number of calls an officer must respond to in person, some police agencies see this as a way to save money. A Commerce City police officer told the Denver Post that “what we see is that he’s basically a lot cheaper than an officer.” And Denver intends for its program to offset an $8.4 million cut to the police budget this year.
On the one hand, this proposal certainly has its merits: unless they are of the Predator type, drones are much less likely to kill or maim innocent civilians (or their dogs) than officers are. And as Gates noted, drones could alleviate some of police work by removing some of the most mundane tasks from an officer’s plate.
But it also raises privacy concerns by delegating too much police work to unmanned surveillance planes.
“Sending a drone every time there is a 911 call could be dangerous and lead to increased policing of communities of color,” Laura Moraff, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado, told The Denver Post. . “There is also a risk that the more we normalize having drones in the skies, the more it can affect behavior on a large scale, if we just look up and see drones everywhere, knowing that the police are watching.” us.”
Indeed, while this kind of dystopian panopticon would certainly make life easier for officers on a day-to-day basis, it would signal a further erosion of the Fourth Amendment rights of the average Colorado citizen.
In Michigan, for example, police hired a drone pilot to take photographs of a person’s property instead of going to the trouble of obtaining a warrant. Earlier this month, the state supreme court upheld the search and ruled that since the purpose was civil code enforcement and not a criminal violation, it did not matter whether the search violated the Fourth Amendment.
Fortunately, there are some positive developments on that front: In March, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled against state troopers who flew a plane over a suspect’s home and took photos with a high-powered zoom lens to see if he was growing crops. dope.
“Just because a random person can catch a glimpse of your yard while flying from place to place doesn’t make it reasonable for law enforcement officials to take to the skies and place high-powered optics in the private space right outside your yard.” his house without a court order,” the court concluded. “Unregulated aerial home surveillance with high-powered optics is the type of police practice that is ‘inconsistent with the goals of a free and open society.'”
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