LA Police Commission Approves Drone Pilot Program Despite Recent Study Stating Body Cameras Have No Effect on Police Actions

646 postcards weren’t enough to convince the LA Police Commission to vote no on drone use. 

The use of drones has become a highly disputed issue for law enforcement in Los Angeles. After months of debate, the LAPD Police Commissioners approved a yearlong test of drones. The 3-1 vote followed roughly 30 public comments, all of which were in opposition to drone use. 

One opposition group, Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, had a prominent presence at the commissioners meeting. “[The use of drones] is disingenuous to the veneer of Los Angeles as a sanctuary city,” said Meagan Ortiz, the Executive Director of the Instituto de Educación Popular del Sur de California, whom voiced the sentiments of the over 100 immigrant domestic laborers she works with who feel the LAPD community outreach has not reached them. 

A recent 18-month study of more than 2,000 police officers in Washington found that officers equipped with cameras used force and prompted civilian complaints at about the same rate as those who did not have them. These results have led people to wonder what experiences with body cameras and dashboard cameras can be interpreted to help us understand potential outcomes from the use of drones.

“There are some specific instances where the body cameras video have been very effective, especially with certain crimes and certain uses of force,” said Jeffery W. Carroll, Assistant Chief of Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, D.C. where the study was conducted, “I don't think that [the study] really says that body cameras themselves aren’t ever beneficial because there are cases that they have been helpful in.”

The drones are intended to be used in incidents such as standoffs with hostage-takers or barricaded suspects, bomb scares, or shootings where a gunman is still targeting people. The devices end goal is to gather crucial information as dangerous situations develop without risking the lives of officers. 

Although there are clear benefits for the police department, those opposed to drones still fear potential misuse of the video footage gathered.  “You have to have very stringent policies in place of how these tools are going to be used and what they are used for,” Carroll said. “The policy will have to have been specifically tailored to ensure that we're protecting everyone's rights as we would any video or audio recording.” 

“Moving forwards as more and more departments acquire drones we should be asking how these departments seem to use them and certainly if there are not policies in place how do we go about formulating those policies,” said Dan Gettinger, Co-Director of the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bart College. “As soon as we do that, we can take lessons from other emerging technologies.”

Drones do have one clear distinction from the dash and body cameras, that they can fly and reach new vantage points, which will pose new problems and learning experiences as drone use becomes status-quo. 

“In Los Angeles [effectiveness of drone use] will certainly be constrained to a large degree by the fact that it is an urban environment and by the fact that you're operating in close proximity to multiple airports and in an airspace that's already heavily trafficked,” said Gettinger. “That high eye in the sky view might not be very useful in a crowded urban landscape.”

“I think that the LAPD example is going to be instructive in some cases, not only in how the department deals with community outreach on this issue but also in terms of policy,” he said. “Operationalizing this technology in an urban environment is going to be more challenging than the departments that have acquired drones so far.”