By Paul Kiefer
Capital News Service
On an afternoon in mid-January, a Montgomery County police drone tracked a shoplifting suspect as he made his way from a Wheaton CVS to the entrance of a nearby Metro station, where a patrol unit intercepted and arrested him.
Police flight records show that the drone, piloted by officers at a command center in Rockville, then returned to its station on a nearby rooftop to await the next 911 call.
The drone is one of four operated by the Montgomery County Department of Police. The year-old drone response program is the first of its kind in Maryland, with drones stationed in Gaithersburg, Silver Spring and Wheaton. The drones have responded to nearly 2,000 calls since the program’s launch, often reaching the scene before police officers get there.
“We hear the emergency as you’re describing it, and we can just send the drone,” said Commander Jason Cokinos, who leads the department’s drone program. “We’re cheating time.”
Reactions to the program are mixed, with some observers enthusiastic about the flexibility it provides and others concerned about the technology’s privacy implications. This year, Maryland lawmakers are considering regulating the use of drones for police responses before a more widespread adoption of the technology occurs.
Some Maryland lawmakers worry that current state law doesn’t offer clear guidance on how or when law enforcement can use drones as the first or only responders to emergency calls.
The police are operating in a legal gray area, said Del. Robin Grammer Jr., a Republican representing Baltimore County and a member of Maryland’s House Judiciary Committee.
“Now, it’s reactive enforcement,” Grammer said. “You can come back to this moment in time in a year, two years from now, and some jurisdiction’s going to be sending out drones proactively. That’s not the world I want to live in.”
Montgomery County police say they reached out to community members and civil liberties groups to develop rules for their use of drones and the storage of aerial surveillance footage before implementing their program in November 2023.
But it wasn’t until this month that the Maryland General Assembly began weighing whether to set state-level rules for more expansive drone programs. House lawmakers summoned police and a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union to Annapolis last Jan. 15 to review Montgomery County’s program.
In that meeting, Cokinos emphasized that his department has taken a narrow approach to aerial surveillance.
“We want to have the least amount of visual intrusion anybody on the ground level that we can,” Cokinos told lawmakers.
Police only dispatch the drones in response to emergency calls involving “safety issues,” Cokinos said, and they do not send drones to calls without a suspect present. Those can range from assaults in progress to children playing hockey on potentially thin ice, according to the department’s flight records.
Pilots do not point the drones’ cameras downward nor begin recording until they reach the scene, he added, and the drones do not record audio or use facial recognition technology. Members of the public can view details of drone responses within 24 hours of a deployment.
Cokinos said that the drone’s live feeds have helped officers avoid at least one confrontation with an armed suspect. He argued that the use of the drone helped to de-escalate a response that “very well could have resulted in an officer-involved shooting.”
While the drones aren’t a replacement for police officers, Cokinos said, the department has responded to nearly 300 emergency calls with drones alone since November 2023. If there’s no need for a police officer, he said, they don’t dispatch one.
More widespread adoption of the technology by law enforcement agencies appears to be just over the horizon.
As the prices of drones fall, other law enforcement agencies across the state will likely be able to launch their own programs for far less than the roughly $773,000 the Montgomery County Department of Police spent last year. The FAA could offer a less costly waiver to fly surveillance drones over large areas, potentially enabling smaller departments to launch their own programs. The Prince George’s County Police Department is currently considering whether to launch its own first responder drone program.
But civil libertarians say Maryland lawmakers should get ahead of that trend.
Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, warned lawmakers against allowing the use of surveillance drones to proliferate without guardrails.
Law enforcement agencies have used drones in less sophisticated ways for years, Stanley said, but so-called “Drone as First Responder” programs raise a much larger range of privacy and transparency concerns for civil liberties groups.
“When there’s a brand new technology that’s controversial … government agencies tend to be on their best behavior,” Stanley said. But as the technology becomes more ubiquitous and scrutiny subsides, he added, “We could see it expand to routine patrols to cover an entire city.”
Stanley also underscored that other law enforcement agencies may not adopt Montgomery County’s transparency mechanisms and privacy protections.
“ this technology spreads to other counties in Maryland, and perhaps someday all counties in Maryland, are they all going to have these same protections?” he asked.
Even Montgomery County’s program, he added, may still evolve in ways lawmakers do not anticipate.
Grammer, the Republican lawmaker, shares Stanley’s concerns.
“These marginal benefits – I don’t think they outweigh the costs of, frankly, living in a society where the state’s surveilling you 24/7 in 10 different ways,” Grammer said.
After the Baltimore Police Department launched a controversial aerial surveillance program to capture images of nearly the entire city in 2019, Grammer introduced legislation to require law enforcement to obtain warrants before using aerial surveillance to gather evidence in criminal investigations. Despite reintroducing the bill each year, Grammar hasn’t managed to pass it.
Grammer told Capital News Service he approached fellow lawmakers for signatures on the latest iteration of his bill ahead of the Jan. 15 hearing.
“I’m talking with people in the committee on both sides of the aisle that are uneasy about how we didn’t take this unmanned aerial surveillance put guardrails there,” he told CNS.
Though the General Assembly has yet to act on the subject, Stanley says Maryland may actually be ahead of other state legislatures by taking an interest in the Montgomery County program.
“I’m not aware of any other state legislatures that have begun to really think through the questions that the DFR programs bring forth,” he said.
So far, legislation has yet to materialize in Maryland’s General Assembly.