December 31, 2024 • 44 mins
Drone policing is on the rise. Garrison investigates a aerial surveillance program in southern California and upsets the police chief of Chula Vista.
Original Air Date: 2.2.24
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I
hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. I know I have,
or at least I've been trying to. It's difficult because
I keep getting distracted by this funny feeling like there's
something watching over me, up in the sky, something buzzing around,
And at first I thought this might just be Santa's sleigh,
(00:25):
but then I realized, no, no, no, no no, this
is actually a drone. And oh boy, am I not
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
(00:47):
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.
(01:09):
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.
(01:32):
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
(01:57):
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
(02:20):
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.
(02:42):
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
(03:06):
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.
(03:26):
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,
(03:47):
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
(04:10):
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
(04:34):
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
(04:57):
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
(05:18):
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.
(05:41):
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
(06:02):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:09):
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
(07:30):
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.
(07:55):
Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Cheu
La Vista Police Department talking on the drone at Technology
panel at CES.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
We are seven miles from.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
The Mexico border and we are the second largest city
in San Diego Counties.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
We have about two hundred.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And ninety officers and we serve a community of about
three hundred thousand. Because of the close proximity to the door,
we have a lot of people that have traveled back
and forth. We have a drone program that I'm awfully
proud of. We are responding proactively to calls for service
in our community and so we have drone station from
(08:34):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Within ninety seconds on a average.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
And so what it's doing for us in sual Vista
and for our community is we are providing information rapidly,
real time information to officers so that they can make
better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say
that community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects
that we encounter are safer.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
So we're only proud of what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
The way police are able to deploy drones used to
be a lot more limited. The use of drones is
regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases,
the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only
fly drones within the operator's own line of sight, but
starting back in twenty nineteen, agencies and vendors can start
(09:49):
applying for a beyond visual line of sight or BEV
loss waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing
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.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Another thing that.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
I always talk about because I think it's critical is
the concept of why they're using drones, what the benefit
is to the community with the use of our drones.
And I truly believe that when my officers can pick
up their cell phone before they even respond to the
call and they can look and see the scene.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
What's happening where the individual is.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
If the person's pacing in the middle of the park,
there are no children around, and there are.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
No body, there's nobody that's within.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
The reach of this individual harming, you might not have
to rush into that scene so quickly officers can de escalate,
make better decisions. And I mean, this is just a
game changer for law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
And right now, you.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Know, we were the first into agency to be involved
in the Integrated Pilot program with the FAA.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
We're very proud of that that they.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Trusted us enough for us to be the organization that
brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized
in law enforcements. Now.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about
why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about
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
(11:37):
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
(11:58):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:49):
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.
(14:13):
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,
(14:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
Know if anyone here is in law enforcement that many
agencies use drones and they're all different types of drones
that are available. I call them reactive drums or ones
that are like the tactical drunes that you can use
to go in on a hostage situation or a missing
person to check in the canyon areas, or you know,
(15:15):
interior drones.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
We have drones of grow underneath beds, go inside addicts,
all types.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Of different drones, and many organizations have drones like that,
but a da of our drone is very unique and different.
Because these drones are flying as you can imagine, eighteen
thousand missions. It puts a lot of wear and tear
on them. But that is one of the biggest challenges
beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge
(15:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Drone that you use. There are some drones that.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
You can't get any as you can't use for assets
seizure funding, nor can you get grants for because sometimes
when it comes to foreign drones there are many challenges
as well. So you have to think of that and
then we deal with legislation. Right now, that's the new
challenge that we all have. We kind of bite some valves.
Like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's
(16:27):
the best drone out there and protect the information and
we do that with encrypted software programs that are on
private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of
discussion about drones and what drones we should.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Be using right now.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal
battles in a bit here, but Tulavista's budgetary situation may
not be as dire as the chief makes it out
to be on top of their current fifty five million
dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, a Prenza newspaper
revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been
(17:04):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:08):
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.
(18:32):
That's just going to result in more people being pulled
through the criminal justice system unquote.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
My officers constantly are on the air now is UAS
one available?
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Is UAS one available?
Speaker 4 (18:42):
Because it's getting them more information. Think about the fact
that you can look at your cell phone. I could
be anywhere in the world and I can.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Look at kit lets me know whenever there's.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
A drune fly and I can walk, I can have
visual awareness, aial overlay of what's happening in my community,
no matter where I am.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance.
Ten years ago, would people react to news of a
twenty four hour police drone program the same way they
would now? What was once the threat of big Brother
has since become a very sought after, unfetishized nanny state.
(19:25):
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
(19:47):
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
(20:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And I'll tell you one thing.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
Even some of the activists, they were very concerned about
drones in the sense of privacy.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
What are you doing with these drones?
Speaker 4 (20:27):
As you're responding, you're trying to gather data and information
to spy on us, right, And we have had to
go to a lot of detail and explaining that as
our drone LIFs off, it is immediately it is recording,
because that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds,
the camera is already going almost three miles down the
(20:47):
road to where the scene is and giving us vital
information as the officers are responding. But one of the
criticism was going on the way back, is your drone
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.
(21:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
The horizon, so we're not recording anything.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
If another call came out, we can immediately we'll go
back in it or like map it for us and
share that information later on. But the goal is to
listen to your community as well.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because
CVPD have refused to show the public any of the
drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take the
chief at her word here anyway, she admits that the
drone goes back to recording at street level as soon
as there's another nine one one call, as they record
everything on the way to a scene and the way
(21:58):
she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading because
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
(22:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement, because there
are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's
out there, and whenever you're a part of what's deemed
as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior
motive when you're involved with.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Any type of technology, and so we have worked.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
Really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect
of our community. So it was about in twenty fifteen
when we started talking about the concept and the possibility
of drones, and I laughed the chance and said, George Jensen,
because that's my story that I used to and I
love it because I made fun of my guys. When
they said that we want to fly drunes, I said, oh,
(23:19):
come on, now, what are we going to be? George
jetson flying around the cars?
Speaker 3 (23:22):
And then I saw today they talked about a blind car.
So it happens. It happens, all right.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
And so with the community, we started having these conversations.
We created a working group, we started doing community forums.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
We started asking the.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
Community about what would you think if we were able
to do something like this. We even went to some
of the organizations that may not always.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Be so supportive of these types of groups.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
We worked with the ASL you and asked for their
input on our policy. So before we ever flew the drone,
we call it the Krawl Walk Run Base.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
We're still own at the.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Very end of brawl.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
We're not into lock yet and we've been doing it
again also for five years. So you have to make
certain that you're transparent, and we provided all types of
information that are available. If you go to children, all
you put in is jos face drones and it'll come
up with us and you can look at all the
(24:21):
things that we do, all the information that we share,
the flight maps that we share. I mean, it's just
super important to have those community forums.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Every year.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
We do a community forum twice a year where we
ask for input from our community.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD
is quote unquote extremely transparent about their flight data and
quote unquote have nothing to hide relating to their use
of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the
fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden
(24:58):
from the public and has fought in court to do so.
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
(25:19):
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
(25:41):
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
(26:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Good about telling our story.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement,
other people will tell it for it and it might
not be the right story. So we've gotten really good
at sharing on our social media and through YouTube channels
and everything success stories of what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
That is quite the claim there. To paraphrase, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, without public access to their drone footage. It
makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you
have Vista and whether police are even following their own
rules about when and whether they record sensitive places like
(27:07):
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
(27:38):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:22):
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
(28:42):
of the drone piloting team with AI assisted piloting and
autonomous devices.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
You've clearly been a leader with thrones's first responder and technology.
Looking forward, what is the future hole for the department?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
I asume you're spending a lot of time telling others
about the program edition using runs, but beyond that, what's.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It a Well, my hope is that we'll be moving
towards twenty four hour operations.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset.
Speaker 4 (29:12):
We go till close to ten o'clock at night, which
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
(29:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Right now, with the operations that we have.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
We're paying about one hundred thousand dollars per year, So
that's four hundred thousand dollars for four locations beyond all
the other proces associate and so I can get expensive.
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
(30:11):
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
(30:31):
we're very as I mentioned.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
The crawl phase, so to explain how these AI autonomous
drones would work. It's essentially this box about the size
of a truck bed that can either be mounted in
like a police pickup truck or be stored on various
rooftops around the city, and someone just needs to point
at a place on a map and the drone will
fly and pilot itself around obstacles and basically circle around
(30:56):
an area to do surveillance, and you can call it
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.
(31:18):
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
(31:41):
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
(32:04):
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
(32:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
We have what's called five ninety one one one, and
that allows my officers to hear incoming nine more one
calls before dispatch even.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
Puts it into the system.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
They can hear what's going on there, and that is
tremendousent and valuable to them. We have so many different
layers of technology that have really showcase.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
The value Live nine one one is a new piece
of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live
stream to nine one one calls directly and pinpoints the
location of the caller via GPS. Now, I don't even
have time to get into the many reasons that this
could be a bad idea, but simply put, police do
not need to respond to every call that goes into
(33:31):
nine one one, let alone be giving random cops this
ability to self dispatch on their own. It just seems
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,
(33:54):
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
(34:15):
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
(34:36):
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
(34:58):
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.
(35:21):
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
(35:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
These dramas they're revolutionizing the world.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
I mean people who are not taking drone seriously right now,
who will be left behind. We have flown eighteen one
hundred and fifty missions. You can go on our web page.
You can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We
share all that with our community. We have no need
to hide. We are in the business of saving wise
and I believe drones are one of the best estories.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
She told us them if they truly have nothing to
hide and are extremely transparent about the use of their
camera mounted drones, I wonder why they've spent years in
court fighting to keep every second of drone footage from
being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked
for like thirty minutes about how much they care about
(36:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
So, I know you talked about the importance of like
listening to the community and community engagement, and I'm not
sure this is the case for your department, but other
departments who've kind of followed suit for for your example,
have been using drones to like surveil First Amendment activity stuff.
And I know you recently lost a court case regarding
the availability of drone footage, So I'm curious about the
(37:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
That's kind of going to be a little bit difficult
for me to answer because the court case is still
moving forward.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't
lose the case.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
It was recommended to go to a lower court to
go back for some clarification under three categories.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Now this is either a straight upply or a huge
cope and a most mischaracterization. But more on that in
a sec I think.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
It's really important.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
As I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical
responsibility that you have as a law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Agency is super important.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
So how you utilize your drones and how you do
outreach with your community is fundamentally important, and so we
don't use our drones for if there was a protest,
We would not use our drones if there was if
it turned into a riot. So if people were out
(38:38):
there and they have the ability to to speak freely,
to share their concerns, and if it's in opposition, our
goal is to make sure that we keep it safe
for all parties involved on either side.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
So my hope is that other people look at it.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
The same way that we do, and hopefully I've been
able to answer it as much as I leave.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
I'm dying to give you more than I can't. Okay,
thank you for those questions. Folks were out of time.
Maybe there could be questions after the session.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I
kind of shut down that possibility anyway. Okay. So first
of all, the line between a protest and a riot
is meaningless. Police can declare a riot for any reason
they see fit, including people being in a road marching.
I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of
(39:30):
times actually, So moving on from that immediately, let's go
back to the court case. The City of true Livista
did lose the argument that they were trying to make.
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
(39:53):
is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process
for standardizing the release of the footage.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
The same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas,
January ninth, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal
to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of
their aerial video footage. There is a sixty day waiting
period where the High Court will decide whether or not
to take the case, and if they decline finally, it
(40:20):
will go back to trial court to decide on the
process of how selected drone footage shall be made publicly available.
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
(40:44):
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,
(41:07):
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,
(41:29):
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
(41:52):
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
(42:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
So.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
That is what I have to say about Chula Vista's
drone first responder program. In about a month and a half,
the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on
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
(42:56):
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
(43:19):
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
(43:43):
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
(44:03):
of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in
the air, It could happen here as a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here,
updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Thanks for listening.
Cool Zone Media.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
Welcome to it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis. I
hope you've been enjoying the holiday season. I know I have,
or at least I've been trying to. It's difficult because
I keep getting distracted by this funny feeling like there's
something watching over me, up in the sky, something buzzing around,
And at first I thought this might just be Santa's sleigh,
(00:25):
but then I realized, no, no, no, no no, this
is actually a drone. And oh boy, am I not
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
(00:47):
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.
(01:09):
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.
(01:32):
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
(01:57):
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
(02:20):
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.
(02:42):
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
(03:06):
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.
(03:26):
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,
(03:47):
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
(04:10):
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
(04:34):
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
(04:57):
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
(05:18):
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.
(05:41):
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
(06:02):
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
(06:24):
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
(06:48):
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
(07:09):
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
(07:30):
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.
(07:55):
Now we'll hear from Chief Roxanna Kennedy of the Cheu
La Vista Police Department talking on the drone at Technology
panel at CES.
Speaker 3 (08:05):
We are seven miles from.
Speaker 4 (08:06):
The Mexico border and we are the second largest city
in San Diego Counties.
Speaker 3 (08:11):
We have about two hundred.
Speaker 4 (08:13):
And ninety officers and we serve a community of about
three hundred thousand. Because of the close proximity to the door,
we have a lot of people that have traveled back
and forth. We have a drone program that I'm awfully
proud of. We are responding proactively to calls for service
in our community and so we have drone station from
(08:34):
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
(08:55):
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.
Speaker 3 (09:04):
Within ninety seconds on a average.
Speaker 4 (09:06):
And so what it's doing for us in sual Vista
and for our community is we are providing information rapidly,
real time information to officers so that they can make
better decisions so that everyone goes home safely. We say
that community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects
that we encounter are safer.
Speaker 3 (09:25):
So we're only proud of what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (09:28):
The way police are able to deploy drones used to
be a lot more limited. The use of drones is
regulated by the FFA, the Federal Aviation Administration. In most cases,
the FFA requires that both hobbyists and police departments only
fly drones within the operator's own line of sight, but
starting back in twenty nineteen, agencies and vendors can start
(09:49):
applying for a beyond visual line of sight or BEV
loss waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing
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.
Speaker 3 (10:13):
Another thing that.
Speaker 4 (10:13):
I always talk about because I think it's critical is
the concept of why they're using drones, what the benefit
is to the community with the use of our drones.
And I truly believe that when my officers can pick
up their cell phone before they even respond to the
call and they can look and see the scene.
Speaker 3 (10:35):
What's happening where the individual is.
Speaker 4 (10:37):
If the person's pacing in the middle of the park,
there are no children around, and there are.
Speaker 3 (10:42):
No body, there's nobody that's within.
Speaker 4 (10:43):
The reach of this individual harming, you might not have
to rush into that scene so quickly officers can de escalate,
make better decisions. And I mean, this is just a
game changer for law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (10:56):
And right now, you.
Speaker 4 (10:58):
Know, we were the first into agency to be involved
in the Integrated Pilot program with the FAA.
Speaker 3 (11:04):
We're very proud of that that they.
Speaker 4 (11:06):
Trusted us enough for us to be the organization that
brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized
in law enforcements. Now.
Speaker 2 (11:15):
I've watched a lot of videos of police talking about
why they're using drones, of drone training companies talking about
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
(11:37):
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
(11:58):
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
(12:20):
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
(12:41):
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
(13:04):
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
(13:26):
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
(13:49):
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.
(14:13):
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,
(14:36):
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.
Speaker 4 (14:54):
Know if anyone here is in law enforcement that many
agencies use drones and they're all different types of drones
that are available. I call them reactive drums or ones
that are like the tactical drunes that you can use
to go in on a hostage situation or a missing
person to check in the canyon areas, or you know,
(15:15):
interior drones.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
We have drones of grow underneath beds, go inside addicts,
all types.
Speaker 4 (15:19):
Of different drones, and many organizations have drones like that,
but a da of our drone is very unique and different.
Because these drones are flying as you can imagine, eighteen
thousand missions. It puts a lot of wear and tear
on them. But that is one of the biggest challenges
beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge
(15:40):
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.
Speaker 3 (16:02):
Drone that you use. There are some drones that.
Speaker 4 (16:05):
You can't get any as you can't use for assets
seizure funding, nor can you get grants for because sometimes
when it comes to foreign drones there are many challenges
as well. So you have to think of that and
then we deal with legislation. Right now, that's the new
challenge that we all have. We kind of bite some valves.
Like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's
(16:27):
the best drone out there and protect the information and
we do that with encrypted software programs that are on
private servers. But you'll see that there's a lot of
discussion about drones and what drones we should.
Speaker 3 (16:41):
Be using right now.
Speaker 2 (16:42):
We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal
battles in a bit here, but Tulavista's budgetary situation may
not be as dire as the chief makes it out
to be on top of their current fifty five million
dollar operating budget. Back in twenty twenty, a Prenza newspaper
revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been
(17:04):
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
(17:26):
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
(17:47):
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
(18:08):
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.
(18:32):
That's just going to result in more people being pulled
through the criminal justice system unquote.
Speaker 4 (18:37):
My officers constantly are on the air now is UAS
one available?
Speaker 3 (18:41):
Is UAS one available?
Speaker 4 (18:42):
Because it's getting them more information. Think about the fact
that you can look at your cell phone. I could
be anywhere in the world and I can.
Speaker 3 (18:49):
Look at kit lets me know whenever there's.
Speaker 4 (18:51):
A drune fly and I can walk, I can have
visual awareness, aial overlay of what's happening in my community,
no matter where I am.
Speaker 2 (19:02):
Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance.
Ten years ago, would people react to news of a
twenty four hour police drone program the same way they
would now? What was once the threat of big Brother
has since become a very sought after, unfetishized nanny state.
(19:25):
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
(19:47):
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
(20:08):
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.
Speaker 3 (20:19):
And I'll tell you one thing.
Speaker 4 (20:20):
Even some of the activists, they were very concerned about
drones in the sense of privacy.
Speaker 3 (20:25):
What are you doing with these drones?
Speaker 4 (20:27):
As you're responding, you're trying to gather data and information
to spy on us, right, And we have had to
go to a lot of detail and explaining that as
our drone LIFs off, it is immediately it is recording,
because that's the information gatherer for us. As that drone responds,
the camera is already going almost three miles down the
(20:47):
road to where the scene is and giving us vital
information as the officers are responding. But one of the
criticism was going on the way back, is your drone
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.
(21:09):
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.
Speaker 3 (21:22):
The horizon, so we're not recording anything.
Speaker 4 (21:24):
If another call came out, we can immediately we'll go
back in it or like map it for us and
share that information later on. But the goal is to
listen to your community as well.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
Chief Kennedy's claim here is difficult to back up because
CVPD have refused to show the public any of the
drone footage they routinely collect. But if we take the
chief at her word here anyway, she admits that the
drone goes back to recording at street level as soon
as there's another nine one one call, as they record
everything on the way to a scene and the way
(21:58):
she phrases this whole tilt feature is quite misleading because
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
(22:18):
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.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
Community engagement is essential, especially in law enforcement, because there
are so many challenges when it comes to misinformation that's
out there, and whenever you're a part of what's deemed
as a government, everyone thinks that you have some ulterior
motive when you're involved with.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Any type of technology, and so we have worked.
Speaker 4 (22:59):
Really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect
of our community. So it was about in twenty fifteen
when we started talking about the concept and the possibility
of drones, and I laughed the chance and said, George Jensen,
because that's my story that I used to and I
love it because I made fun of my guys. When
they said that we want to fly drunes, I said, oh,
(23:19):
come on, now, what are we going to be? George
jetson flying around the cars?
Speaker 3 (23:22):
And then I saw today they talked about a blind car.
So it happens. It happens, all right.
Speaker 4 (23:28):
And so with the community, we started having these conversations.
We created a working group, we started doing community forums.
Speaker 3 (23:36):
We started asking the.
Speaker 4 (23:37):
Community about what would you think if we were able
to do something like this. We even went to some
of the organizations that may not always.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
Be so supportive of these types of groups.
Speaker 4 (23:48):
We worked with the ASL you and asked for their
input on our policy. So before we ever flew the drone,
we call it the Krawl Walk Run Base.
Speaker 3 (23:59):
We're still own at the.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Very end of brawl.
Speaker 4 (24:01):
We're not into lock yet and we've been doing it
again also for five years. So you have to make
certain that you're transparent, and we provided all types of
information that are available. If you go to children, all
you put in is jos face drones and it'll come
up with us and you can look at all the
(24:21):
things that we do, all the information that we share,
the flight maps that we share. I mean, it's just
super important to have those community forums.
Speaker 3 (24:31):
Every year.
Speaker 4 (24:31):
We do a community forum twice a year where we
ask for input from our community.
Speaker 2 (24:36):
Later on in the panel, Chief Kennedy said that CVPD
is quote unquote extremely transparent about their flight data and
quote unquote have nothing to hide relating to their use
of surveillance drones, which is a curious claim considering the
fact that CVPD has historically kept all drone footage hidden
(24:58):
from the public and has fought in court to do so.
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
(25:19):
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
(25:41):
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
(26:04):
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.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
Good about telling our story.
Speaker 4 (26:30):
If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement,
other people will tell it for it and it might
not be the right story. So we've gotten really good
at sharing on our social media and through YouTube channels
and everything success stories of what we're doing.
Speaker 2 (26:47):
That is quite the claim there. To paraphrase, the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, without public access to their drone footage. It
makes it very difficult to assess how much privacy you
have Vista and whether police are even following their own
rules about when and whether they record sensitive places like
(27:07):
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
(27:38):
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
(28:00):
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
(28:22):
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
(28:42):
of the drone piloting team with AI assisted piloting and
autonomous devices.
Speaker 3 (28:48):
You've clearly been a leader with thrones's first responder and technology.
Looking forward, what is the future hole for the department?
Speaker 1 (28:56):
I asume you're spending a lot of time telling others
about the program edition using runs, but beyond that, what's.
Speaker 4 (29:03):
It a Well, my hope is that we'll be moving
towards twenty four hour operations.
Speaker 3 (29:09):
Right now, we're from sunrise to sunset.
Speaker 4 (29:12):
We go till close to ten o'clock at night, which
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
(29:33):
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.
Speaker 3 (29:47):
Right now, with the operations that we have.
Speaker 4 (29:49):
We're paying about one hundred thousand dollars per year, So
that's four hundred thousand dollars for four locations beyond all
the other proces associate and so I can get expensive.
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
(30:11):
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
(30:31):
we're very as I mentioned.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
The crawl phase, so to explain how these AI autonomous
drones would work. It's essentially this box about the size
of a truck bed that can either be mounted in
like a police pickup truck or be stored on various
rooftops around the city, and someone just needs to point
at a place on a map and the drone will
fly and pilot itself around obstacles and basically circle around
(30:56):
an area to do surveillance, and you can call it
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.
(31:18):
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
(31:41):
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
(32:04):
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
(32:27):
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.
Speaker 4 (32:48):
We have what's called five ninety one one one, and
that allows my officers to hear incoming nine more one
calls before dispatch even.
Speaker 3 (32:57):
Puts it into the system.
Speaker 4 (32:58):
They can hear what's going on there, and that is
tremendousent and valuable to them. We have so many different
layers of technology that have really showcase.
Speaker 2 (33:10):
The value Live nine one one is a new piece
of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live
stream to nine one one calls directly and pinpoints the
location of the caller via GPS. Now, I don't even
have time to get into the many reasons that this
could be a bad idea, but simply put, police do
not need to respond to every call that goes into
(33:31):
nine one one, let alone be giving random cops this
ability to self dispatch on their own. It just seems
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,
(33:54):
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
(34:15):
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
(34:36):
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
(34:58):
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.
(35:21):
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
(35:45):
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.
Speaker 3 (35:56):
These dramas they're revolutionizing the world.
Speaker 4 (36:01):
I mean people who are not taking drone seriously right now,
who will be left behind. We have flown eighteen one
hundred and fifty missions. You can go on our web page.
You can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We
share all that with our community. We have no need
to hide. We are in the business of saving wise
and I believe drones are one of the best estories.
Speaker 2 (36:24):
She told us them if they truly have nothing to
hide and are extremely transparent about the use of their
camera mounted drones, I wonder why they've spent years in
court fighting to keep every second of drone footage from
being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked
for like thirty minutes about how much they care about
(36:45):
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.
Speaker 1 (37:04):
So, I know you talked about the importance of like
listening to the community and community engagement, and I'm not
sure this is the case for your department, but other
departments who've kind of followed suit for for your example,
have been using drones to like surveil First Amendment activity stuff.
And I know you recently lost a court case regarding
the availability of drone footage, So I'm curious about the
(37:25):
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.
Speaker 4 (37:36):
That's kind of going to be a little bit difficult
for me to answer because the court case is still
moving forward.
Speaker 3 (37:42):
It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't
lose the case.
Speaker 4 (37:48):
It was recommended to go to a lower court to
go back for some clarification under three categories.
Speaker 2 (37:55):
Now this is either a straight upply or a huge
cope and a most mischaracterization. But more on that in
a sec I think.
Speaker 3 (38:03):
It's really important.
Speaker 4 (38:05):
As I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical
responsibility that you have as a law enforcement.
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Agency is super important.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
So how you utilize your drones and how you do
outreach with your community is fundamentally important, and so we
don't use our drones for if there was a protest,
We would not use our drones if there was if
it turned into a riot. So if people were out
(38:38):
there and they have the ability to to speak freely,
to share their concerns, and if it's in opposition, our
goal is to make sure that we keep it safe
for all parties involved on either side.
Speaker 3 (38:51):
So my hope is that other people look at it.
Speaker 4 (38:54):
The same way that we do, and hopefully I've been
able to answer it as much as I leave.
Speaker 3 (39:00):
I'm dying to give you more than I can't. Okay,
thank you for those questions. Folks were out of time.
Maybe there could be questions after the session.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
So yeah, there were no more questions after mine. I
kind of shut down that possibility anyway. Okay. So first
of all, the line between a protest and a riot
is meaningless. Police can declare a riot for any reason
they see fit, including people being in a road marching.
I've seen this happen dozens of times, nearly hundreds of
(39:30):
times actually, So moving on from that immediately, let's go
back to the court case. The City of true Livista
did lose the argument that they were trying to make.
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
(39:53):
is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process
for standardizing the release of the footage.
Speaker 1 (40:00):
Now.
Speaker 2 (40:00):
The same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas,
January ninth, the city of Chula Vista requested an appeal
to the California Supreme Court to prevent the release of
their aerial video footage. There is a sixty day waiting
period where the High Court will decide whether or not
to take the case, and if they decline finally, it
(40:20):
will go back to trial court to decide on the
process of how selected drone footage shall be made publicly available.
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
(40:44):
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,
(41:07):
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,
(41:29):
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
(41:52):
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
(42:13):
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.
Speaker 3 (42:32):
So.
Speaker 2 (42:32):
That is what I have to say about Chula Vista's
drone first responder program. In about a month and a half,
the Supreme Court of California will make their decision on
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
(42:56):
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
(43:19):
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
(43:43):
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
(44:03):
of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in
the air, It could happen here as a production of
cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
visit our website coolzonemedia dot com or check us out
on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here,
updated monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources.
Speaker 1 (44:26):
Thanks for listening.
It Could Happen Here News
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James Stout
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