It鈥檚 a hot and windy Thursday afternoon at the Boulder County Regional Fire Training Center. But that doesn鈥檛 stop officers on site from powering up the drones for a practice mission.
鈥淵ou are inspected and clear to fly,鈥� one officer declared.
鈥淟aunching!鈥� another officer said in reply.
The high-pitched buzz rings out as the drone approaches the entrance to the mission. The goal is to fly the drone through numbered plastic hoops scattered throughout a building. It鈥檚 a test of skill and speed, with some hoops in dark stairwells or on top of fridges and other furniture.
The pilot works through the course before landing on a big target on a table on the second floor.
鈥淣icely done. Creative through a couple of them, but well done,鈥� said Stephen Meer, the UAS Program Manager and a reserve deputy with the Boulder County Sheriff鈥檚 Office. 鈥淪ome of those were not but three-quarters of an inch bigger than (your drone).鈥�
Just next to the building, more officers are using drone cameras to look at labels inside of buckets. It鈥檚 a test designed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) as a good training opportunity for officers who want to start using drones in policing.
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鈥淚f we're flying into a room and we're looking for booby traps, victims or suspects, we want to make sure that we can find all of those things,鈥� Meer said about the test. 鈥淵ou have to show that you have enough skill to actually locate small objects and do precision flying.鈥�
More than 1,400 law enforcement agencies across the country are using drones, according to the . The Denver Post reports departments are using them in Colorado. The Boulder County Sheriff鈥檚 Office will start their program up this summer.
The Boulder Police Department, which hosted the recent training for officers from multiple Colorado law enforcement agencies, has one of the oldest drone programs in the state. Since it started in 2017, the department has acquired more than a dozen drones and used them on over 400 missions.
Most of those drones were used outside. A little over a year ago, they introduced them indoors.
鈥淚've flown everything from a foot pursuit all the way to mass-casualty events to wildfires,鈥� Sgt. Andrew Heaton said. 鈥淪o anything and everything that a drone might be useful for, we're going to try to use it.鈥�
Boulder Police describes its drone-assisted response as a 鈥渞eactive鈥� measure, meaning officers are not using drones to look for incidents without cause. When a call comes in, officers respond to the scene first. If officers think the event would benefit from drone use, they bring it in after the fact.
鈥淲e encourage a patrol officer to be proactive, drive their district, look for crime, but we don't do that with the drone,鈥� said Bryan Capobianco, the team supervisor for Boulder Police鈥檚 drone program. 鈥淭he drone is strictly a supplemental tool for the officers on the ground to use.鈥�
The drones have many sizes and capabilities. Heaton said they can quickly get to the scene of a crime, maneuver tight spaces and use thermal imaging to find people at night. The drones don鈥檛 have weapons, facial recognition, or the ability to record audio.
鈥淭he value that it has provided to me outweighs any concerns that anybody can have,鈥� he said of drones. 鈥淚t is keeping our community safer and it's keeping our officers safer.鈥�
Drones have been used in some big cases. they helped document how big the burn area was and where the fire started. They've also been used in smaller cases, like finding missing people and .
Heaton recalled a case where a man drove off with his kids, headed toward to the top of a building. The drone鈥檚 camera allowed Heaton to keep eyes on the subject the whole time.
鈥淚 was able to update dispatch of, 鈥楬e's got his hands in his pockets. This is his movement. This is his location,鈥欌�� he said. 鈥淭hat information, plus having an officer at a distance, is only capable of being acquired through this type of technology.鈥�
But it wasn't well received. In of that incident, the late suspect, Jose Gallegos, questioned why drones were being used and how they kept him and the officers safe.
For many community members, the use of drones in law enforcement is a hot button issue.
鈥淭hey've got to go into the community, get buy in from civic leaders, from community people," said Jim Dudley, a retired deputy chief and a national police practices consultant. 鈥淭hey've got to go out there and talk to the usual critics and get their buy in as well.鈥�
He thinks drones can be an effective policing tool that saves time and money. They can help fill personnel gaps in rural areas, especially mountainous areas that can be hard to get to by car. Their audio capabilities can also allow drones to communicate to a person in crisis.
鈥淭o say, 鈥楬ey, we're here. Police officers are going to come to your door and they want to talk to you,鈥欌�� Dudley said. 鈥淚n those situations where it is a total mystery what cops are going to get walking through the door, we can eliminate those possibilities.鈥�
But with great power comes great responsibility. The same drone cameras that can catch a suspect could also violate someone鈥檚 privacy. Some drones even start a recording as soon as they leave the ground.
鈥淒rones have a much higher ability to look inside these spaces where we, rightly so, perceive that we have a heightened level of privacy,鈥� said Anaya Robinson with ACLU Colorado. 鈥淚 don't think a drone has the adequate abilities to get a full picture of what is happening in the human experience as opposed to what is happening in the visual experience.鈥�
But Dudley said surveillance technology already exists in everyday life.
鈥淐ameras on the streets, cameras in your ATM, cameras in your Uber, your taxi, your bus, your rail system, all those places,鈥� he said. 鈥淚s there an expectation of privacy in public spaces? There is none.鈥�
But Robinson is worried drones are a step toward greater surveillance. Just last year, the New York Police Department during Labor Day weekend.
鈥淭hey're gathering a lot of information that is very unnecessary,鈥� Robinson said. 鈥淚n a lot of cases, (it) really skirts up against and sometimes violates the constitutional rights of everyone being recorded.鈥�
This also has implications for communities of color, . If the technology is not rolled out equitably, it could lead to skewed data and unrealistic rates of crime.
鈥淎 lack of police presence inevitably determines that data points are going to look lower鈥攏ot necessarily that crime isn't happening in predominantly white, suburban, affluent neighborhoods,鈥� Robinson said.
Boulder Police has implemented a practice of only recording the scene of the crime, but their policy . Other departments, like the Fort Collins Police Department, that bans drone recordings where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.
Additionally, policymakers haven鈥檛 caught up with the technology advances. Colorado that regulate how law enforcement agencies use drones. Don Bell with independent watchdog group , said there are often policy holes on how long police retain the drone footage and what they do with it.
鈥淚 think that this is a trend that we just generally see,鈥� Bell said. 鈥淭here's a new technology that can be useful in a positive way, but in the rush to deploy it for efficiency's sake, or being on the cutting edge, a lot of a conversation and necessary policymaking around protecting civil rights, civil liberties, and privacy rights gets cut from the entire conversation.鈥�
There is that would prevent drones made by DJI Technologies, a Chinese drone company, from being sold in the United States. In addition, the bill would remove the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) authorization from current DJI-made drones in the states. The law was made as a privacy guard against foreign powers. But DJI made up in 2022, leaving questions around what law enforcement agencies would do. Boulder police officers said they primarily use DJI drones.
Robinson and Bell agree that if law enforcement is going to use drones, they need to have a policy in place and the community needs to have consistent conversations about it as the technology adapts.
鈥淚've sat in the rooms where you may have a good relationship with your police department today, and they may be fantastic, but it's important to ask questions,鈥� Bell said.
Boulder Police officers said they gathered public feedback through the city鈥檚 website before the program launched and had a hearing with city council. They said that while there were some concerns about surveillance, there was 鈥渁 lot of support鈥� overall.
These community engagement measures, along with proper training, are what make the drone program safe, Heaton said.
鈥淎s long as we do our job of keeping up with that technology and using it to benefit our communities, I believe we're going to continue helping people out,鈥� Heaton said.
In the future, Boulder Police hopes to send drones out first when a 911 call is placed to assess a scene before an officer arrives. The department plans to add more drone-trained officers as well as drones with different capabilities in the coming months.
