In this beach town, sometimes the first cop on the scene is a drone
When someone calls 911 in Santa Monica, Calif., a drone can respond in as little as 30 seconds and start collecting information before officers arrive.
When someone calls 911 for police in the upscale beach town of Santa Monica, California, a drone is dispatched from the roof of the station with a push of a button.
Officers respond, as well. But most of the time, the drone gets there first — rushing to a set of GPS coordinates punched in by the controller. Sometimes it is there in as fast as 30 seconds.
“It’s a fundamental change in the way that we can bring policing services to our city,” said Peter Lashley, a veteran of the force who often pilots the drone from a screen-filled command center inside the police station.
The drone’s powerful camera can provide a view of several square blocks, or it can zoom in close enough to read a license plate. In Santa Monica, the drone camera was the only witness to a brutal robbery, and one of two suspects was apprehended and convicted. On at least three occasions, it provided responding officers with critical, otherwise unobtainable information — that what looked like guns in the hands of subjects were not real firearms. That insight allowed officers to respond much less aggressively.
At a time when law enforcement agencies face a crisis of legitimacy amid a series of high-profile murder cases against officers, police say drones could make a huge impact by defusing potentially violent situations. Their proliferation is also likely to prompt fears about risks to privacy and a renewed debate about the balance of power between ordinary people and their government.
“What we found in tactical situations is if we can communicate with a person, we can de-escalate it much quicker and bring the situation to resolution,” said Don Lemond, a retired Chula Vista police officer who now works for BRINC. “But we also deployed it during the Surfside condo collapse in Florida to look for people that were trapped inside the building.”
Jay Stanley, who has examined government drone use as a senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union in Washington, says his organization does not oppose deploying drones to respond to emergencies or in hostage situations.
“Our position is it’s legitimate for police departments to use drones to find a lost kid in the woods, for raids, accidents, crime scenes,” he said.
But police use of drones raises “all the same questions body cameras raise,” he said. “What happens to the footage? Who gets access to it? Are the police going to release the footage when it makes them look heroic and bury it when it doesn’t?”
Police have sought to address those concerns. Departments prohibit operators from recording video over private homes or other places where people would have a reasonable expectation of privacy, except in emergencies or pursuant to warrants. Chula Vista publishes the flight paths for every drone mission on its website. Santa Monica officials say they destroy all video after 60 days unless it is being used as evidence or is needed for an investigation.
Police say they have informally shown drone camera video to anyone expressing concern, although California departments have taken the position that the video is not releasable under public records laws. That premise is being challenged in a lawsuit against Chula Vista by La Prensa San Diego, a bilingual Latino newspaper.
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