Law enforcement agencies along the Front Range are getting a new recruit: drones

By Emma VandenEinde, KUNC (Via AP Storyshare)

It’s a hot and windy Thursday afternoon at the Boulder County Regional Fire Training Center. But that doesn’t stop officers on site from powering up the drones for a practice mission.

“You are inspected and clear to fly,” one officer declared.

“Launching!” 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’s 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.

“Nicely done. Creative through a couple of them, but well done,” said Stephen Meer, the UAS Program Manager and a reserve deputy with the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office. “Some of those were not but three-quarters of an inch bigger than (your drone).”

Just next to the building, more officers are using drone cameras to look at labels inside of buckets. It’s 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.

“If 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,” Meer said about the test. “You have to show that you have enough skill to actually locate small objects and do precision flying.”

An officer outside a training building directs a drone through two numbered hoops in the building. This test helps determine if a pilot is ready to fly a drone through tight and narrow spaces at different heights. (Emma VandenEinde/KUNC)

More than 1,400 law enforcement agencies across the country are using drones, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The Denver Post reports at least 20 departments are using them in Colorado. The Boulder County Sheriff’s 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.

“I’ve flown everything from a foot pursuit all the way to mass-casualty events to wildfires,” Sgt. Andrew Heaton said. “So anything and everything that a drone might be useful for, we’re going to try to use it.”

Boulder Police describes its drone-assisted response as a “reactive” 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.

“We encourage a patrol officer to be proactive, drive their district, look for crime, but we don’t do that with the drone,” said Bryan Capobianco, the team supervisor for Boulder Police’s drone program. “The drone is strictly a supplemental tool for the officers on the ground to use.”

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’t have weapons, facial recognition, or the ability to record audio.

“The value that it has provided to me outweighs any concerns that anybody can have,” he said of drones. “It is keeping our community safer and it’s keeping our officers safer.”

Drones have been used in some big cases. During the Marshall Fire, 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 stolen cars.

Heaton recalled a case where a man drove off with his kids, headed toward to the top of a building. The drone’s camera allowed Heaton to keep eyes on the subject the whole time.

“I was able to update dispatch of, ‘He’s got his hands in his pockets. This is his movement. This is his location,’” he said. “That information, plus having an officer at a distance, is only capable of being acquired through this type of technology.”

But it wasn’t well received. In the bodycam video of that incident, the late suspect, Jose Gallegos, questioned why drones were being used and how they kept him and the officers safe.

Stephen Meer of the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office holds a Lemur 2 drone that the department leases at the Boulder County Regional Fire Training Center on June 20, 2024. Law enforcement officers met to train and test out drones on practice missions. (Emma VandenEinde/KUNC)

For many community members, the use of drones in law enforcement is a hot button issue.

“They’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. “They’ve got to go out there and talk to the usual critics and get their buy in as well.”

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.

“To say, ‘Hey, we’re here. Police officers are going to come to your door and they want to talk to you,’” Dudley said. “In those situations where it is a total mystery what cops are going to get walking through the door, we can eliminate those possibilities.”

But with great power comes great responsibility. The same drone cameras that can catch a suspect could also violate someone’s privacy. Some drones even start a recording as soon as they leave the ground.

“Drones have a much higher ability to look inside these spaces where we, rightly so, perceive that we have a heightened level of privacy,” said Anaya Robinson with ACLU Colorado. “I 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.”

But Dudley said surveillance technology already exists in everyday life.

“Cameras on the streets, cameras in your ATM, cameras in your Uber, your taxi, your bus, your rail system, all those places,” he said. “Is there an expectation of privacy in public spaces? There is none.”

But Robinson is worried drones are a step toward greater surveillance. Just last year, the New York Police Department used drones to respond to complaints about large gatherings at private places during Labor Day weekend.

“They’re gathering a lot of information that is very unnecessary,” Robinson said. “In a lot of cases, (it) really skirts up against and sometimes violates the constitutional rights of everyone being recorded.”

This also has implications for communities of color, which already are overpoliced. If the technology is not rolled out equitably, it could lead to skewed data and unrealistic rates of crime.

“A lack of police presence inevitably determines that data points are going to look lower—not necessarily that crime isn’t happening in predominantly white, suburban, affluent neighborhoods,” Robinson said.

Boulder Police has implemented a practice of only recording the scene of the crime, but their policy does not explicitly state that in writing yet. Other departments, like the Fort Collins Police Department, have a specific section in their policy that bans drone recordings where there is a reasonable expectation of privacy.

Additionally, policymakers haven’t caught up with the technology advances. Colorado doesn’t have statewide laws that regulate how law enforcement agencies use drones. Don Bell with independent watchdog group Project on Government Oversight (POGO), said there are often policy holes on how long police retain the drone footage and what they do with it.

“I think that this is a trend that we just generally see,” Bell said. “There’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.”

There is also a bill making its way through Congress 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 nearly 60% of the U.S. drone market 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.

“I’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,” Bell said.

Boulder Police officers said they gathered public feedback through the city’s website before the program launched and had a hearing with city council. They said that while there were some concerns about surveillance, there was “a lot of support” overall.

These community engagement measures, along with proper training, are what make the drone program safe, Heaton said.

“As 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,” 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.