It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: Police Drones and You

Episode Date: December 31, 2024

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: 2.2.24See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to Decisions Decisions, the podcast where boundaries are pushed and conversations get candid. Join your favorite hosts, me, Weezy WTF, and me, Mandy B. As we dive deep into the world of non-traditional relationships and explore the often taboo topics surrounding dating, sex, and love. That's right. Every Monday and Wednesday, we both invite you to unlearn the outdated narratives dictated by traditional patriarchal norms. With a blend of humor, vulnerability, and authenticity, we share our personal journeys navigating our 30s, tackling the complexities of modern relationships, and engage in thought-provoking discussions that challenge societal expectations. From groundbreaking interviews with diverse guests to relatable stories that'll resonate with your experiences, Decisions Decisions is going to be your go-to source for the open dialogue about what it truly means to love and connect in today's world.

Get ready to reshape your understanding of relationships and embrace the freedom of authentic connections. Tune in and join in the conversation. Listen to Decisions Decisions on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Cool Zone Media. 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, 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 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. 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. The reason why there's blinking lights flying over LaGuardia is that those are airplanes taking off and landing at an airport.

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 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 2024 about police drones.

Now in the past year, there's 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 10,000 individual flight records from July of 2021 to September of 2023, containing more than 22.3 million coordinates. 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 10 times longer than blocks on the suburban east side. And considering Trump's second term, fears over widespread police surveillance 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 2020, the San Diego Union Tribune discovered that the Chula Vista Police Department was sharing its license plate reader data directly with ICE. Now, it's still unclear

how many drones Chula Vista PD currently has, but as of 2022, they had 32 of these high-definition camera-mounted drones. Drones which have now done over 20,000 flights since 2018. All of this will get discussed more in depth in the episode. 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 California 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 case is, once again, back to trial court

to finalize details of how certain footage should be released. So without further ado, here is my episode from the 2024 Consumer Electronics Showcase Police Drones and You. Welcome to It 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 at 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 attendees of CES. 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 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. Chula Vista is the southernmost medium-sized city in California, with a population of 278,000 people. Chula Vista has a police force of 289 sworn officers, as well as 120 civilian employees. On top of their nearly 300 officers, they operate a drone fleet, 10 hours a day, 7 days a week, launching high-def 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 Chula Vista's police drones back in February of 2023. Quote, Chula Vista uses these drones to extend the power of its workforce in a number of ways. For example, if only one officer is available when two calls come in, one for an 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 a drone to surreptitiously trail the suspected shoplifter, unquote. And this really gets 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 just expand the amount of people that can be arrested and thrown into jail. Nowadays, drones are pretty common tools for police. Over 1,500 departments currently use drones, usually for special occasions though, like search and rescue, crime scene documentation, protest surveillance, and sometimes tracking suspects. But at the moment, only about a dozen police departments regularly dispatch drones in response to 911 calls. The first of which was Chula Vista PD, who launched their quote drone as first responder

program back in 2018, with the goal of having an unmanned aerial system or drone be proactively deployed before an officer is on scene. Now we'll hear from Chief Roxana Kennedy of the Chula Vista Police Department talking on the drone technology panel at CES. We are seven miles from the Mexico border and we are the second largest city in San Diego County. We have about 290 officers and we serve a community of about 300,000. But because of the close proximity to the border, we have a lot of people that travel 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 drones stationed from four different locations throughout our city. We have pilots in command that are on the rooftop. And then we have the operation center where we have sworn officers that are part 107 pilots that fly the drones. So we are responding now to calls for service.

On average, an officer on scene, a drone pilot on scene that's sharing information with our officers live streaming that information on our cell phones or in our computers, they're receiving information about the call within 90 seconds on average. And so what it's doing for us in Chula 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 the community safer, the officers are safer, and the subjects that we encounter are safer. So we're awfully proud of what we're doing. 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 2019, agencies and vendors could start applying for a Beyond Visual Line of Sight or BEVLOS waiver from the FFA to fly drones remotely, allowing for much longer flights in restricted airspace. fly drones remotely, allowing for much longer flights in restricted airspace. Chula Vista PD was the first department to get a BevLoss waiver. The MIT Tech Review estimated last year that roughly 225 more departments now have one as well.

Another thing that I always talk about because I think it's critical is the concept of why we're using drugs, what the benefit is to the community with the use of our drugs. 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, what's happening, where the individual is, if the person's pacing in the middle of the park,

there are no children around him, there's nobody that's within the reach of this individual harming, you might not have to rush into that scene so quickly. Officers can deescalate, make better decisions, and I mean, this is just a game changer for law enforcement. And right now, we're the first agency to be involved in the integrated pilot program with the FAA. We're very proud of that, that they trusted us enough for us

to be the organization that brought forward all these ideas that are now being utilized in law enforcement. Now 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 Tamir Rice if they simply had a drone watching beforehand so they could see that it was a toy gun, which is a ridiculous thing to say because in the 911 call that jump started this entire police interaction, it was a toy gun, which is a ridiculous thing to say, because in the 911 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 a pretty suspect premise. Now the effectiveness of drone technology in 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 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 Chula Vista PD's own drone response stats, the vast majority of deployments I estimate around 70 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 30% of Chula Vista's drone deployments are for what's categorized as disturbances. Almost 15% are for psychological evaluations, 10% 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 person. And another six percent for traffic accidents. Now, some drone deployments do result in patrol units not having to be dispatched. But CVPD also says that drones have existed in thousands of arrests. And I'm really not sure if having a drone following someone around is the best thing for a 5150 psych evaluation.

The 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. Funding a whole fleet of heavy duty surveillance drones and paying dedicated operators costs money. Now it's unclear to me how many drones Chula Vista PD currently has and on their website they list 10 different drone models currently being in their fleet, most of them really expensive DJI drones like the DJI Matris, the DJI Inspire, the DJI Phantom, the DJI 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 know if anyone in here is in law enforcement, but many agencies use drones. And there are all different types of drones that are available. I call them reactive drones, or ones that are like the tactical drones

that you can use to go in on a hostage situation or a missing person to check in the canyon areas or interior drones. We have drones that go underneath beds, go inside attics, all types of different drones and many organizations have drones like that. But a DFR drone is very unique and different because these drones are flying, as you can imagine, 18,000 missions. It puts a lot of wear and tear on them. So, but that is one of the biggest challenges beyond the fact of funding. So we don't have huge budgets that are allotted

for drone 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 it going forward. So funding is always going to be a challenge. And depending upon the drone that you use,

there are some drones that you can't use for acid seizure funding, nor can you get grants for. Because sometimes when it comes to foreign-made 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 have to fight some battles.

I, like I said, I'm agnostic. I want to use what's 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 be using right now.

We'll get back to the chief's offhanded mention of legal battles in a bit here, but Chula Vista's budgetary situation may not be as dire as the chief makes it out to be. On top of their current $55 million operating budget, back in 2020, the La Prensa newspaper revealed that departments in San Diego County had secretly been getting hundreds of millions of dollars in high tech police equipment, including armored vehicles, facial recognition and phone breaking software, license plate readers, drones, riot gear, among other miscellaneous technology as a part of a DHS grant program due to their close proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border.

Chula Vista was one such department, and as of 2020, so four years ago, they had already received over $1 million 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 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 quoted in the MIT article saying, quote, Up until the last like five to 10 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 cannot have a police officer standing on every corner of every

street. You can't have a helicopter flying 24-7 because of fuel and insurance is really expensive. But with all these new technologies, we don't have that check and balance anymore. That's just going to result in more people being pulled through the criminal justice system." My officers constantly are on the air now. Is UAS-1 available? Is UAS-1 available? Because it's giving them more information. Think about the fact that you can look at your cell phone. I can be anywhere in the world and I can look at it.

It lets me know whenever there's a drone flight and I can watch, I can have visual awareness, aerial overlay of what's happening in my community, no matter where I am. Advancements in technology are leading to further normalization of police surveillance. Ten years ago, would people react to news of a 24-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 and fetishized nanny state. In the V for Vanetta 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 live coverage around a whole city, which is instantly accessible 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. Tulavista PD has routinely declined to answer why their 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. And I'll tell you one thing, even some of the activists, they were very concerned about drones in the sense of privacy. What are you doing with these drones as you're responding?

You're trying to gather data and information to spy on us, right? And we have to go to a lot of detail in explaining that as our drone lifts 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 road where the scene is and giving us vital information as the officers are responding.

But one of the criticisms was, well, on the way back, is your drone just going in my backyard? What if we're smoking marijuana in our backyard? And I said during California, does it really matter? But we said, okay, we gave your your concern. And so what we did was we worked with the software company that we work with, and they created an automatic so that as a drone returns, it automatically tilts to the horizon. So we're not recording anything. If another call came out, we could immediately

go back in and it will like map it for us and it will share that information later on. But the goal is to listen to your community as well. 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 911 call, as they record everything on the way to a scene. And the way 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 911 calls. But it's still capturing footage up to three miles away the entire time it's in the air. Police in Chula Vista have flown over 18,000 missions with their drowns. That's a lot of footage. When talking about the privacy concerns had by some residents of Chula Vista, 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.

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 any type of technology. And so we have worked really hard to build very strong relationships with every aspect of our community. So it was about in 2015 when we started talking about the concept and the possibility of drones.

And I laughed and chanted and said, George Jetson, 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 drones. I said, oh, come on now. What are we going to be, George Jetson flying around with cars? And then I saw today they talked about a flying car. So it happens.

They're right over there. It happens, all right? And so with the community, we started having these conversations. We created a working group. We started doing community forums. We started asking the 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 be so supportive of these types of groups. We worked with the ACLU and asked for their input on our policy. So before we ever flew a drone, we call it the crawl, walk, run phase. We're still in the very end of crawl. We're not into walk yet. And we've been doing it again also for five years. So you have to make certain that you're transparent. And we've provided all types of information that are available if you go to, all you have to put in

is children's and police drones and it'll come up with us. And you can look at all the 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. Every year we do a community forum, twice a year where we ask for input from our community. 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 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 Chula Vista Police Department has denied all FOIA and public records requests for any drone program. For years now, the Chula Vista Police Department has denied all FOIA and public records requests for any drone footage. In response, Arturo Castanares, a Chula Vista resident and owner of the local bilingual newspaper, La Prensa, filed a lawsuit against the city. CVPD argued that all drone footage should be categorically exempt from the public records requests on the basis that the footage could be categorically exempt from the public records requests on

the basis that the footage could be used for a future investigation. Just last December, only a few weeks before CES, the California 4th 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 a pending or ongoing criminal investigation, pointing to examples such as 911 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 Chula Vista police as the chief herself expressed at the panel. And we're real good about telling our story. If you don't tell your own story in law enforcement, other people will tell it for you. 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. 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 in Chula Vista, and whether

police are even following their own rules about when and whether they record sensitive places like 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 Chula Vista. With drone first responder programs spreading to police departments across the country, modeled after the one in Chula 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 responding to 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 Chula Vista PD is planning to expand their 10 hour a day drone first responder program to a constant 24 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 of the drone piloting team with AI assisted piloting and autonomous devices. You've clearly been a leader with drones as first responder technology. Looking forward, what is the future goal for the department? I assume you're spending a lot of time telling others about the program in addition to using drones,

but beyond that, what's it look like? Well my hope is that we'll be moving towards 24-hour operations. Right now we're from sunrise to sunset. We go until close to 10 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 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 a piloting command and that piloting command is contracted through a company

and 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. I believe for each site right now with the operations that we have we're paying about $100,000 per year so that's $400,000 for four locations beyond all the other processes here. So it can get expensive. My hope is that and we keep hearing about it, we've seen some of the testing,

and we've been testing it as well in our area, are what's called Drone in the Box. Or there's some of the systems that are out there right now that organizations are using that are 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 for us. So we're very, as I mentioned, 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 an area to do surveillance. And you can call it back when you're 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 gonna become more common and cheaper. Imagine having 10 of these throughout a city launching from like 10 different rooftops, being able to fly around by themselves, constantly going around in communities, constantly going to GPS coordinates linked

to 911 calls, creating a whole wealth of footage instantly available to police live streamed from the air. Matt Sloan, the founder of Skyfire Consulting, a company here 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 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 a major part of that. The website for the city of Chula Vista also lists projects like electronic transportation, adaptive traffic signals, an app for non-emergency city services, as well as quote, crime mapping and police dispatch modernization unquote, as also being smart city initiatives.

We have this called live 911. And that allows my officers to hear incoming 911 calls before dispatch even puts it into the system, they can hear what's going on there. And that is tremendously invaluable to them. We have so many different layers of technology that have really showcased the value. Live 911 is a new piece of software that allows patrol officers to listen to live streamed 911 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 911,

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 2020 article in the newspaper, Lepreza, cities in San Diego County like Chula Vista have received equipment such as tethered drones used for stationary surveillance, pole 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 I was walking around the show floor at CES, 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 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 AI systems can 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. This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that have historically suffered from over-policing." 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 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, unquote. These drones, they're revolutionizing the world.

I mean, people who are not taking drones seriously right now will be left behind. We have flown 18,150 missions. You can go on our webpage, you can see the flight data. We're extremely transparent. We share all that with our community. We have nothing to hide. We are in the business of saving lives and I believe drones are one of the best

de-escalation tools. 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 fighting to keep every second of drone footage from being seen by the public. Luckily, after Chief Kennedy talked for like 30 minutes about how much they care about 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 drones at protests. Let's take a listen. Yeah, a question for the chief. 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 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 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. It's, that's kind of gonna be a little bit difficult for me to answer because the court case is still moving forward. It's an active case. If you read it, we didn't lose the case.

It was recommended to go to a lower court to go back for some clarification under three categories. Now, this is either a straight up lie or a huge cope and a gross mischaracterization. But more on that in a sec. I think it's really important, as I mentioned, there are ethics involved in the ethical responsibility that you have as a law enforcement agency is super important.

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, 100%. So if people were out 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. So my hope is that other people look at it the same way that we do. And hopefully I've been able to answer it as much as I believe me. I'm dying to give you more, but I can't. Okay. Thank you for those questions about folks who are out of time. Maybe there could be questions after the session.

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 times, actually. So just moving on from that immediately. Let's go back to the court case.

The city of Chula Vista did lose the argument that they were trying to make. They did lose the case. The city of Chula Vista did lose the argument that they were trying to make. They did lose the case. The 4th District Court of Appeals ruled that claiming exemption from the Public Records Act was unlawful and sent the case back to trial court to hammer out the details of how much footage is subject to public disclosure and figure out a process for standardizing the release of the footage. Now, the same day I attended this panel in Las Vegas, January 9th, 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 60 day waiting period where the high court will decide whether or not to take the case.

And if they decline, finally, it 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 in the first place.

I'm gonna 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 recording to protect information considered personal, such as the images of faces, license plates, backyards, and more."

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 a pending 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 and backyards would take a full-time employee around 230 days. I'm going to read a little bit more from the city's recent statement, quote, while the city takes very seriously its obligation

to provide the public access to public records, the city is concerned that the court of appeals opinion may compromise significant privacy concerns of members of the public in this case or in future requests, unquote. Somehow the city is missing 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 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. So 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 precedent 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 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 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 probably end up not taking 230 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 dates all the way back to April of 2021. So hopefully, hopefully more than three years later, we'll finally get a look. Special thanks to Leprenza for starting this 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.org, as well as the MIT Tech Review piece, which provided some really, really useful information

to fill in the gaps between my own research. So yeah, thank you for listening to It Could Happen Here. It certainly could happen here in terms of seeing more of these little fuckers flying around in the air. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen here, updated monthly at coolzonedmedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

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