The Oro Valley Police Department is set to have four new drones after a Wednesday vote by the town’s council.
The council voted unanimously to approve a grant from the Arizona Department of Public Safety meant for policing border-related crimes. The grant will allow Oro Valley police to sign a one-year contract with Flock Safety, a controversial policing technology firm, for its first-responder drone product, police told town council members.
Currently, the department’s drones require an operator to bring a drone to a crime scene to pilot it, said Lieutenant Kevin Peterson with the Oro Valley Police Department. The new drones can be piloted remotely to scope out crime scenes in advance of officers arriving, he said.
He said this can help the department evaluate calls for service. In more dangerous situations, live drone footage would allow officers to remain further away from armed suspects, he said.
Oro Valley resident Sean Glaser criticized the new purchase during a public hearing.
“This resolution effectively imports a warzone mentality into a safe suburb,” he said.
Glaser quoted Founding Father James Madison’s argument that “the means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”
“By accepting border funds to fly drones over our backyards, we are proving him right,” Glaser said.
According to a press release by Flock Safety, its first-responder drones have the company’s license-place reader cameras built in. Those cameras have raised privacy concerns over their ability to generate large amounts of location data for specific vehicles. The data generally belongs to local departments with Flock contracts, but those departments can run searches on behalf of other law enforcement agencies, including federal agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Locally, University of Arizona police ran searches for the federal U.S. Marshals Service even after a department official said it would not and after the department left a national information-sharing network, AZPM News reported.
In Oro Valley, police drones only record footage when its operators deem it essential to gathering evidence at a crime scene, said Commander Zachary Young.
“We do not do random surveillance with this platform,” he said.
The town council’s vote allowed Oro Valley police to accept about $146,000 for a one-year agreement with Flock. Oro Valley police can back out of extending their contract if grant funding is not obtained for future years, Peterson said.
He said the department’s plans are border-related because it foresees using the drones for chases involving drug smugglers and human traffickers.
