LAPD's Drone Testing Alarms Privacy Advocates and Critics of Police

Despite months of opposition by community members, the Los Angeles Police Department has been granted approval for a year-long test to use drones—or “small Unmanned Aerial Systems” in police-speak. The mid-October decision by the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, a civilian panel that oversees the department, makes the LAPD the nation’s largest police department to use the controversial technology.

The commission’s 3-1 decision has met with backlash. The Los Angeles Times notes that only a fraction of the hundreds of emails from community members received by the police department supported the use of drones, and many in attendance when the commission voted jeered and joined a small protest outside the downtown police headquarters.

Commissioner Cynthia McClain-Hill cast the only vote against the drone program, saying she thought the LAPD did not do “what it should do and needs to do in order to build the trust that is required to support the implementation of this technology.”

Jim Lafferty of the National Lawyers Guild Los Angeles echoed her reservations. “Mission creep is of course the concern,” he said. “The history of this department is of starting off with supposedly good intentions about the new toys that it gets … only to then get too tempted by what they can do with those toys.”

The Los Angeles Times elaborates:

Advocates say camera-mounted drones could help protect officers and others by collecting crucial information during high-risk situations or searches without risking their safety. For many privacy advocates and police critics, however, the drones stir Orwellian visions of unwarranted surveillance or fears of militarized, weapon-toting devices patrolling the skies.

LAPD brass, along with police commissioners, tried to ease those concerns by promising careful restrictions on when the drones would be used and strong oversight of the pilot program. Weapons and facial-recognition technology will also be prohibited.

But some critics said they could not trust the department to follow its own rules, no matter how stringent.

Groups including Stop LAPD Spying have formed to voice concerns that the drones will enable racist policing, citing the department’s high rate of deaths in police custody. In an open letter to Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, the group noted that the LAPD led the nation in police-custody deaths—with a total of 19—in 2015.

The LAPD has defended the commission’s decision to allow the drone tests, however. Craig Lally, president of the union representing the department, said, “Whether it’s an active shooter at a school, or a suspect barricaded in a home in a Los Angeles neighborhood, this technology will help us save lives.”

The debate over police drone use began in 2014, when the LAPD received two Draganflyer X6 drones from Seattle police. Los Angeles residents expressed reluctance about permitting the department’s use of drones, especially in light of its use of a small spy plane to monitor the Los Angeles County town of Compton. Residents there were not notified that low-resolution images would be taken or that the Sheriff’s Department intended the surveillance as a crime-fighting effort.

The American Civil Liberties Union launched a petition against LAPD drone use and sent a letter to the oversight agencies of both the Sheriff’s Deparment and the LAPD, saying, “Neither agency has shown that it is capable of using surveillance technology without disregard to the privacy of millions of Angelenos. Allowing them yet another surveillance tool only provides yet another means for them to intrude on our privacy and infringe on our rights.”

In a piece in The Real News, Andrew Feinstein, author of “Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade,” talked about the effect of drones on the military industrial complex—a topic all the more relevant with the Trump administration making it easier for police to acquire military equipment:

What drone warfare does is effectively make the killing of other human beings without due legal process so much easier. It therefore makes it much easier for politicians to make those decisions to engage in conflict and warfare. In addition to which, it puts those making the decisions for killing at even greater distance from those they kill. It obviously in no way minimizes the suffering of those who are killed, and as we have seen, it in no way minimizes the trauma of those who are ordered to do the killing. What this is is a form of state murder at a distance. It is an attempt to sanitize something that can never be sanitized. It is actually, as a consequence, making it worse.

Stop LAPD Spying will hold a meeting about the use of police drones on Dec. 5 at Los Angeles Community Action Network.

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