Military drones are in the air, perpetually, in the war-torn skies of Ukraine and Gaza, the civilians who live underneath them constantly not only being watched by government cameras, but sometimes under bombardment by them.
Here in otherwise mostly peaceful Los Angeles County, do we really need flying government cameras permanently in formation in a grid above us, 24/7, 365, recording all that happens on the ground?
We do not. But that is precisely what one local police department, that of Pasadena, is proposing under the guise of “traffic reconstruction drones” that would supposedly be used to keep a record of automobile accidents to better understand what happened and who is at fault, easing the work of officers.
And would the permanent surveillance possibly be used for anything else? Well, you never know, do you.
Certainly Pasadena police Chief Gene Harris says the proposed drones are all on the, well, up and up. I asked Pasadena City Hall for a quote on the situation, and this is what he said: “They are not surveillance drones that are following cars, but rather accident reconstruction drones that work in unison with the department’s FARO crime scene cameras. These cameras are tools that help to quickly and accurately record and document traffic collisions and/or crime scenes to provide investigators with detailed data that can create 3D imagery at a much faster rate than previously.”
A group of civilians is keeping some kind of watch over the watchers. Pasadena’s Community Police Oversight Commission is looking at creating “a work plan that would create a standardized workflow for reviewing police technology and equipment — with the drone acquisition serving as the test case. The police department may acquire the drones soon, making them ideal for piloting the review process,” the local news site Pasadena Now reports.
CJI Enterprise, one company that manufactures such drones, says that its Matrice 4E “offers unparalleled portability” for the job of “reconstruction missions” by observing all traffic in a city.
With police cameras on more and more corners on more and more streets in the Southland, we are already in danger of having all of our movements in public be under the watchful eye, it is no exaggeration to say, of Big Brother. Now the police want a permanent grid of drones always in the sky?
One Facebook commentator says of the plan: “The problem isn’t that we don’t spy on regular Pasadenans enough. It’s that the police can’t be bothered to make themselves a regular and helpful presence in the community where crime is actually occurring.”
Here’s what I think: The Oversight Commission should go on the record as saying permanent flyovers are not what the citizenry wants from its Police Department.
But there’s no mission creep like the insatiable desire for law enforcement worldwide to have an electronic eye on everything, all the time.
We may as well just agree to wear body cams, all 8 billion of us, and never ever turn them off, forking over the footage on demand. That’s certainly the direction in which we are heading.
Thursday at random
Ever since the big rains of November and December, that favorite Angeleno sport and pastime of complaining about potholes in our roads has turned into a roar. “Potholes everywhere” is one favorite Reddit feed. And that is precisely because there are indeed potholes everywhere, and all the pounding rain just made them worse. I hit one particularly teeth-jarring one the other day on the 2 Freeway in Glassell Park. This kvetching has been a parlor game for years. Local governments usually at least pretend to say they are getting right on it and filling in the holes. So I was really taken aback to read in the Times the other day that not doing anything about individual potholes is now the official policy of the city of Los Angeles: “L.A. hasn’t repaved a single street since early summer … crews have resurfaced zero miles since July 1, the beginning of the city’s fiscal year. And this isn’t a temporary or unintentional stoppage: In its draft budget, the city is proposing to repave zero miles next year too.” Instead the city will emphasize “large asphalt repair,” only repaving on a grand scale rather than a targeted one. City blames ADA requirements to build curb ramps as making the old way too expensive. Teeth, get ready to rattle.
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com
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