These developments raise a number of questions: Are drones safe enough to be flown in dense neighborhoods and cities? Is it a violation of people’s privacy for police to fly drones overhead at an event or protest? Who decides what level of drone autonomy is acceptable in a war zone?
Those questions are no longer hypothetical. Advancements in drone technology and sensors, falling prices, and easing regulations are making drones cheaper, faster, and more capable than ever. Here’s a look at four of the biggest changes coming to drone technology in the near future.
Police drone fleets
Today more than 1,500 US police departments have drone programs, according to tracking conducted by the Atlas of Surveillance. Trained police pilots use drones for search and rescue operations, monitoring events and crowds, and other purposes. The Scottsdale Police Department in Arizona, for example, successfully used a drone to locate a lost elderly man with dementia, says Rich Slavin, Scottsdale’s assistant chief of police. He says the department has had useful but limited experiences with drones to date, but its pilots have often been hamstrung by the “line of sight” rule from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The rule stipulates that pilots must be able to see their drones at all times, which severely limits the drone’s range.
Soon, that will change. On a rooftop somewhere in the city, Scottsdale police will in the coming months install a new police drone capable of autonomous takeoff, flight, and landing. Slavin says the department is seeking a waiver from the FAA to be able to fly its drone past the line of sight. (Hundreds of police agencies have received a waiver from the FAA since the first was granted in 2019.) The drone, which can fly up to 57 miles per hour, will go on missions as far as three miles from its docking station, and the department says it will be used for things like tracking suspects or providing a visual feed of an officer at a traffic stop who is waiting for backup.
“The FAA has been much more progressive in how we’re moving into this space,” Slavin says. That could mean that around the country, the sight (and sound) of a police drone soaring overhead will become much more common.
The Scottsdale department says the drone, which it is purchasing from Aerodome, will kick off its drone-as-first-responder program and will play a role in the department’s new “real-time crime center.” These sorts of centers are becoming increasingly common in US policing, and allow cities to connect cameras, license plate readers, drones, and other monitoring methods to track situations on the fly. The rise of the centers, and their associated reliance on drones, has drawn criticism from privacy advocates who say they conduct a great deal of surveillance with little transparency about how footage from drones and other sources will be used or shared.
In 2019, the police department in Chula Vista, California, was the first to receive a waiver from the FAA to fly beyond line of sight. The program sparked criticism from members of the community who alleged the department was not transparent about the footage it collected or how it would be used.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, says the waivers exacerbate existing privacy issues related to drones. If the FAA continues to grant them, police departments will be able to cover far more of a city with drones than ever, all while the legal landscape is murky about whether this would constitute an invasion of privacy.