This summary and the Key Moments below were written by AI from the interview transcript. The transcript itself is verbatim.
A police drone and a police surveillance aircraft aren’t the same machine, even when they’re the same machine. An officer who pulls a quadcopter out of a trunk to see over a fence on a specific call is doing something courts have understood for decades, and an aircraft that orbits a city all day recording every driveway in it is doing something else. McNeal told Spectrum News that the first kind of flight is worth having and the second is what state legislators should write rules for now, because if they don’t, a judge deciding a records lawsuit will write those rules instead.
The FAA spent years worrying about one question, which was whether a drone would hit an airplane, so departments flew the way a hobbyist flies: an officer drove to the scene, opened the trunk, put the drone up over the fence, and brought it back down. The rules have since loosened enough that a department can launch from a rooftop and reach a call blocks away or across town before any patrol car arrives, which is the change that created both the capability and the worry.
Chula Vista was the first American city to get FAA authorization for that kind of operation, and Santa Monica followed close behind. Both started with traffic, flying after the beaches and the concert halls emptied out to find where cars were stacking up, and only later put the drones on crime calls. Drones still read as military hardware to the public in 2015, so both departments wrote flight policies and published them, which is why city councils now call Chula Vista for a copy of its rules.
Some of what these programs do never touches privacy at all. A drone with a thermal camera finds a missing hiker or a wandering dementia patient at night in minutes, and nobody objects to that flight.
The argument that does the most work is about time. A drone overhead gives the responding officer a longer look before he has to decide whether the thing in a man’s hand is a gun or a phone, and McNeal made that case at Forbes back in 2013. Officers have shot people holding a wallet and a cigarette lighter, and in Cleveland in November 2014 two officers shot twelve year old Tamir Rice, who was holding an airsoft pistol, within about two seconds of pulling up. Sending the camera into that gap first is what a chief is actually buying.
Wide area surveillance is the aircraft that never lands, and that is the version people should be scared of. Baltimore let a contractor fly camera planes over roughly thirty square miles of the city in 2016, recording continuously, so an analyst could pull up a resident’s whole afternoon weeks later, and the city council learned about the program from a Bloomberg Businessweek reporter rather than from the police department. A drone does that same job cheaper, which is why a council that approves a drone program without a retention limit has approved Baltimore’s program without knowing it.
Instead of relying on courts to do this, we might want our legislatures to put some rules around when these can be disclosed and under what circumstances.
Gregory S. McNeal, on Spectrum News 1
California is fighting out in court right now whether police drone footage falls under the Public Records Act, and McNeal’s position is that a courtroom is the wrong place to settle it. Sacramento should pass a rule that tells every department how many days it may keep routine drone video and which flights the public gets to see, because the alternative is city attorneys and newspaper lawyers making that policy one lawsuit at a time.
Key Moments
- 0:00 Why drones showed up in policing in the first place
- 0:30 The FAA rule change that let a drone beat the patrol car
- 1:34 Chula Vista and Santa Monica write the first playbooks
- 2:59 Finding a missing hiker at night
- 4:11 Buying an officer time before he decides to shoot
- 5:16 The aircraft that never lands, and the records fight
Full Transcript
Spectrum News 1, “Inside the Issues.” Anchor Alex Cohen with Gregory McNeal. Runtime 7:36. Lightly edited for readability: filler removed, speech recognition errors corrected, no words changed.
Narration: Footage taken by a drone for the Chula Vista Police Department. These unmanned aerial vehicles are used daily to respond to all sorts of calls, like this one, where a man was spotted with what was reported to be a gun. It turned out to be a cigarette lighter. Our political anchor Alex Cohen spoke with Pepperdine University’s Gregory McNeal about the roles that drones can play in law enforcement. He began by explaining the federal rules around this technology.
Gregory McNeal: For a long time, the FAA’s regulations around this were about safety. That was their key consideration. So the thing that police officers mostly did was they took drones, they put them in the back of their police car, and they operated them like remote controlled aircraft. They said, okay, I need to look over that fence. They’d open up the trunk, they’d pop this little remote control aircraft out, they’d fly it over the fence and they’d take a look. The rules have evolved a little bit recently to now allow the police to basically deploy a drone a really long distance, to get blocks away or to the other side of town. And that’s now enabled a whole new set of capabilities, to allow the police to see things pretty far away when the police are not even on the scene.
Alex Cohen: And that’s where we get this new sort of concern around surveillance, but now also a new public safety tool in the hands of law enforcement.
McNeal: Yes. Pros and cons, as there are with so many things.
Cohen: I was kind of surprised to learn that Chula Vista, down in the San Diego region, was the first American city to actually obtain authorization from the FAA to use drones for surveillance. How did they manage to do that, and how many other Southern California cities have followed suit in their wake?
McNeal: I’ve been in this business for a long time. I founded a drone company back in 2015, and I remember running into the folks from Chula Vista. They were really forward leaning on this all the way back then, I guess eight years ago now. And the folks at Santa Monica Police Department were not that far behind. Both departments decided that they wanted to get in front of this. The initial reasons they decided to use the drones were mostly for crowd control after beaches were letting out. They decided to put a drone up and just follow where the traffic was going and say, hey, let’s redirect traffic down one roadway or another after concerts on the beach in Santa Monica, for example.
And so they had to start to develop programs, because in 2015 people were very concerned, oh my gosh, this is military technology. So they developed programs and policies and procedures around it, and then they became the leaders across the country for responsible usage, because they didn’t want there to be protests that would pull it away. In other places in the country you saw law enforcement being a little bit too forward leaning, in a way where people might say, why are you using the tool in that way. These were two departments that were being a little more careful and transparent in the way they were using the drones.
Cohen: You just mentioned maybe redirecting traffic after everyone’s leaving the beach. What are some of the other positive ways in which one might use a drone to help law enforcement operate?
McNeal: A few different examples. We’ve heard about a few examples where it might be a search and rescue mission. A 911 call comes in and you’re looking for a lost person. Maybe, like we all get those amber alerts on our phone, an elderly person is missing. There have been some examples where law enforcement has sent out a search party to look for someone, maybe they’re lost in a field, or like when we have LA County Sheriffs looking for someone in one of the canyons, hikers on a hot day like today where it’s 100 degrees. Instead, they can send the drone out, cover a lot more territory, find someone in a circumstance like that. So no real law enforcement triggers, no privacy concerns that get triggered in that circumstance. Just adding an extra set of eyes, covering a lot more territory. That’s a potential beneficial use.
Cohen: And it sounds like, too, the fact that drones, they’re not human. If something happens to them, if someone shoots or whatever, they’ll be okay, unlike human officers. One example of a drone that was able to see what officers initially thought was a man holding a weapon, it turned out to be a lighter, and the drone was able to see that. Is that, you feel, a compelling argument for using drones, that if something gets violent, they’ll be okay, they’re machines?
McNeal: I really like that use case that you brought up. Back in 2013 I wrote a piece at Forbes about this, where the idea of taking a person and pulling them back from a dangerous situation gives us time to think about what’s going on. Police officers are just like any other human, whether it’s on the battlefield or whether it’s in a law enforcement circumstance. And if we can pull them back from a potentially dangerous situation, keep the weapon holstered, and allow them to take a look at what’s happening and slow that decision cycle, and then it turns out it’s a kid with an airsoft gun, or it’s a person who’s taking their wallet out, or it’s a person who just has a lighter. Every one of these are real world examples, from Tamir Rice to kids with guns recently to people who have pulled wallets. Every one of those are real world examples of people who have been shot inadvertently by police. We can substitute a drone in and prevent that from happening. That’s a positive development I think we can all agree with.
Cohen: And yet there are concerns. What are some of the biggest concerns that you have about using drones in this way?
McNeal: Every example that I’ve talked about here is a single use example. The police send it to a 911 call, they take it out of a trunk and they look. The place where it gets bad, and where they have had a problem with this, is an example where aircraft were used, manned aircraft, not drones, but you can see drones being used for this, for what’s known as wide area surveillance. This was in Baltimore, where the Baltimore Police Department flew planes basically 24 hours a day, recording everything on the ground that was going on in the city of Baltimore. And then at any point in time they could basically just rewind the tape. So there’s Alex, she left home, stopped at Starbucks, stopped and picked up a bagel somewhere, headed down to the office, and then rewind that tape and see everywhere you went along the way. That becomes a very big sort of Big Brother type of thing, when we can track every single person’s movements. The court becomes very concerned with that, and I think all of us would be concerned with that type of all knowing surveillance.
Cohen: I think there’s concerns too about then what happens with this footage, and there’s so much of it, and where does it go, and when do you delete it, and things of that nature. I understand there’s been some question about whether or not video produced by drones should be subject to the California Public Records Act. What can you tell us about that?
McNeal: This is a difficult one, because on the one hand you think government is involved in a public activity, therefore what they do should be a public record. That’s my initial instinct. I want to hold government accountable. But then on the other side, I don’t know that I want everything that the police did when they were recorded using one of these devices to be available to anyone. So one of the things that, instead of relying on courts to do this, we might want is our legislatures, whether it’s the city of Santa Monica municipal government or a county council or the state legislature, to put some rules around when can these be disclosed and under what circumstances. Right now it’s being fought out in court about whether or not this is subject to open records requests, but this is something the state legislature should probably take up.
Cohen: It is a wild and fascinating future. I am so glad that you came by to break it all down for us. Greg McNeal, thank you so much. Good to see you again.
