I mean, we’ll see. Certainly the Pearland Police Department will see lots of things.
Pearland’s police department has become the nation’s first law enforcement agency to win Federal Aviation Administration approval to use a system in which drones controlled from a police station can be dispatched throughout a municipality to assess incidents, which officials say can save time, resources and lives.
“We’ll be able to better assess a scene prior to getting an officer on the scene,” said Herbert Oubre, a Pearland police officer and drone pilot. “We can either increase our resources going to a call or decrease those resources.”
Instead of being controlled by operators stationed nearby or trailing in a vehicle, the police drones will rely on a technology called Casia G, developed by Iris Automation Inc., that enables remote airspace awareness during flight. The drones will use another system, called DroneSense, to relay information to the operator at the station. The suburb south of Houston seems a fitting place to deploy the technology, as police have a lot of ground to cover. With 129,000-plus residents and 49 square miles, Pearland is a mix of subdivisions, hospitals, schools, colleges, and shopping centers.
The city also might become a model for other suburban police departments, many of which lack the financial resources to use first-responder aircraft such as helicopters.
In Pearland, “this will expand our capabilities exponentially because we don’t have to have a visual observer,” city police Lt. Jeff Jernigan said.
“It’s real-time accurate information,” Jernigan also said. “When you’re talking about lives, it’s seconds, not minutes that we have to get help to a scene, and that’s what this allows us to do.”
[…]
ACLU of Texas attorney Savannah Kumar said the city of Pearland and its police department bear responsibility to formulate clear, enforceable policies on use and retention of surveillance data, particularly when technological capabilities are increased.
“These programs have the power to track outdoor movements of all people wherever they go, threatening individual rights to privacy and free association under the First Amendment to the Constitution,” Kumar said. Privacy violations could occur in scenes of residents that are captured peripherally by drone cameras, she cautioned.
She said of drones, “They can end up monitoring people’s daily movement throughout the community in ways that are sensitive — for instance if someone is going to a psychiatrist. Most people would not feel comfortable sharing some of that information, and it really does become a deep invasion of privacy when you think about both the quantity and types of information this type of aerial footage can obtain.”
Regarding privacy issues, the department bases its policies for first-responder drones on legal precedents and will follow any changes in that as the Iris program becomes functional, Jernigan said. The use of the Casia G technology, he said, will be restricted to emergency-response situations.
“We put on a training course specifically regarding case law, and because the technology is still fairly new, new case law comes out often,” Jernigan said. “There are laws, rules and department regulations that govern when and how drones are used.”
As the story notes, police departments have used drones for years, but with the “operator in sight of the drone” restriction. The first PD to get approval to use drones remotely was in 2018, and I’d love to know more about how that has gone, both from a crimefighting and efficient-use-of-police-resources perspective and from a privacy and civil rights perspective. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that somewhere – maybe not Pearland, but somewhere – there will be a massive scandal along those lines. The temptation to use that kind of power for unapproved scenarios will be large. I’d like to know more about how Pearland will safeguard people’s privacy, and I hope there is some followup reporting on that. What do you think?