Denver Mayor Mike Johnston’s use of Flock license plate cameras has been met with considerable resistance. The Denver city council voted against the continued use of the cameras — and when Johnston overrode their vote, hundreds of concerned citizens expressed their anger in town hall meetings.
The outrage with the city’s Flock contracts is unsurprising after the harm that automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, have already caused in Colorado. In 2020, for example, the Aurora police held a group of Black girls at gunpoint due to an ALPR match between their minivan’s license plate and that of a stolen motorcycle from Montana.
What is surprising is the lack of comparable outrage to the city’s Skydio contracts. Since Denver signed drone contracts with Flock and Skydio this fall, the Denver police have flown Skydio drones hundreds of times over Denver. This should be alarming to Denverites due to the ways that police robots are being used for covert and overt surveillance nationwide.
In some cases, overt surveillance robots are being used to create a panopticon-like surveillance system where civilians know they’re being watched, but not by whom. Police use of overt airborne surveillance has historically been performed using helicopters, such as the Los Angeles Police Department’s “ghetto birds,” flown 13 times a day over hot spots selected by racially biased predictive policing software.
Today, police are increasingly turning to much cheaper drones like those from Skydio to engage in similar intimidation tactics. For a window into what overt police drone surveillance programs might look like in Denver, we can consider the case of Chula Vista, Calif., where the police made 20,000 drone flights over their first six years, predominantly over Latinx and working-class neighborhoods.
The sound of the drones in Chula Vista is so pervasive that residents have stated that “it feels like our home is not ours anymore. It’s like it belongs to the Chula Vista Police Department.” At least one Chula Vistan has been hospitalized due to the stress imposed by the drone program, and the constant feeling of being harassed. Meanwhile, more covert surveillance robots are being used to surveil musical festivals, homeless encampments, and social justice protests.
Whether overt or covert, surveillance drones will combine with ALPRs to feed what author Sarah Brayne calls the “big data dragnet” — the new normal of police surveillance in which surveillance is “suspicionless, programmatic, ongoing, cumulative, remote, invisible, automated, preemptive, and embedded into routine activity.”
This should hit especially close to home for Denverites due to the role that notorious Denver company Palantir has played in building and enabling the big data dragnet. Under the big data dragnet, data from drones and ALPRs is fed to software like Palantir’s Thunderbird (their APLR data application), and then into Gotham, where license-plate sightings are tracked over time and correlated with other information known about the cars and their owners — with little to no meaningful policy oversight.
This information is then used to feed predictive policing systems. In Los Angeles, for example, Palantir systems have been used to create daily lists of individuals to target for surveillance based on factors such as race or that have been found to be falsified.
It’s not hard to see the future that police robots are drawing us toward in Denver and beyond. When used as part of the big data dragnet, the police drones of the future will seek out and follow individuals, targeting them for enhanced surveillance on the basis of predictive policing algorithms, and using their recordings to feed the next generation of predictive policing models.
And, while police robots are sometimes motivated as mitigating the stressors that lead to police violence, the opposite may well be true. Police violence has been found to be uncorrelated with the amount of danger encountered (or even with crime rates); and experts like former fighter pilot Missy Cummings have highlighted the ways that arms-length actions performed through robots can increase the use of violence due to moral buffering.
Robots may also increase violence by making violent solutions more cognitively accessible. While an officer walking a beat has the full breadth of human actions at their disposal, an officer interacting with the world through a drone can only do so through the movement of the drone — and through the use of whatever is mounted on it. Indeed, police in other cities have “joked” that their intended use of drones is to wipe communities of color “off the map.”
The police’s new eyes in the sky will see all, and further enable police violence — if we let them.
Tom Williams, of Denver, holds doctorates in Computer Science and Cognitive Science and is an associate professor of Computer Science at the Colorado School of Mines. He is the author of “Degrees of Freedom: On Robotics and Social Justice.”
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