The next time residents of Brooklyn Park, Minnesota, dial 911, it may be a drone that shows up to help.

That's because in January, the Brooklyn Park Police Department became the latest local law enforcement agency to implement a "drone as first responder" program.

DFR programs use autonomous drones rather than human officers to respond to emergency calls, allowing police to drastically reduce response time and handle more incidents with less manpower, according to the programs' advocates.

"If you look into the future and ask yourself: How are we going to be able to do more with less? How are we going to be able to supply better information to our police officers? How are we going to be able to enhance safety in the city, leveraging technology is the answer," BPPD Inspector Matt Rabe told Law360.

But privacy advocates warn that these DFR programs could amount to mass, warrantless surveillance and help private drone companies build huge databases of information about citizens with little insight into how that information will be used.

Those concerns are now finding their way into court as a smattering of lawsuits begin to challenge municipalities' use of the technology. Experts say those legal challenges will likely only increase as the drones themselves become more common.

"We worry about people not feeling free because from the moment they walk out of their home in the morning till they get home at night, there's constant eyes in the sky belonging to the authorities looking down on you, filing away in a computer data bank everywhere your car has driven, everywhere you've walked," said Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the American Civil Liberties Union's Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.

'One Butt in the Seat, Multiple Drones in Multiple Locations'

Chula Vista, California, is credited with launching the first DFR program in the country in 2018.


Since then, San Francisco, Denver, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Cincinnati, Baltimore, New York City, Dallas, and Portland, Oregon, along with many smaller municipalities, have started their own programs or announced plans to create one.

The recent growth in law enforcement's use of DFR programs has been "drastic," according to Keith Kauffman, director of DFR strategy for law enforcement technology company Flock Safety, which currently has contracts to provide DFR programs to 85 police departments.

"It's happening quickly," Kauffman said. "I'd say it's almost exponential."

That growth is due, at least in part, to regulatory changes implemented by President Donald Trump's administration, according to experts.

In May, the Federal Aviation Administration made it easier for police departments to obtain waivers to the requirement that drones be flown within the operator's direct line of sight. As a result, 410 such waivers — a third of the 1,400 ever granted — were approved within two months of that change, according to the FAA.

In August, the Trump administration went further, announcing a new proposed rule called Beyond Visual Line of Sight that would significantly loosen the line-of-sight requirement.

"When we first started getting into this, nobody was getting a waiver to fly a drone beyond visual line of sight," Kauffman said. "Now we're getting those issued all across the country."

The ability to operate drones beyond a pilot's line of sight means that police officers no longer have to carry a drone in the trunk of their vehicle and deploy it once they arrive at the scene of an incident.

DFR programs instead preposition drones at strategic locations throughout a jurisdiction. When police receive an emergency call, one of those drones can fly autonomously to the scene, arriving before police officers, and send live video back to a remote command center.

This process allows DFR drones to respond to emergency calls far more quickly than can human officers, according to police and drone companies.

The programs' most important benefit, however, is that they are "force multipliers," since a single officer at a command center can operate several drones in response to several incidents rather than dispatching individual officers to each incident.

"That's usually many officers, many drones and many trunks, and many people that have to be trained," Kauffman explained. "We can do it with one. One person, one butt in the seat, multiple drones in multiple locations."

By letting officers see what's happening at the scene of an incident before they arrive, DFR programs sometimes eliminate the need to dispatch officers to a scene at all, freeing those officers up for other tasks, the programs' advocates say.


"It's a much more effective way of policing," Rabe said, adding that those capabilities make a "huge, huge, huge difference."

'Everybody's Privacy Is Implicated'

Law enforcement's growing use of DFR programs raises serious concerns, however, according to privacy advocates.

The drones, each of which carries a camera, don't simply take the place of human police officers. They can also go where officers can't, including flying over people's homes and yards and in front of their windows, pointed out Beryl Lipton, senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"These drones are basically being pushed as flying cops, but a cop is not allowed to just take a peek in my backyard whenever they want," Lipton said. "And they're certainly not allowed to just be taking notes about what's going on in a private space."

The drones don't just record video at the location they've been dispatched to but all along their flight path, for instance. And some are equipped with far more powerful surveillance equipment than simple cameras, according to experts and the companies.

Flock's DFR drones are often outfitted with license plate readers, which can record a vehicle's make, color, and features like roof racks and bumper stickers, as well as audio sensors that can detect and distinguish between gunshots and car crashes, according to the company.

Las Vegas police reported using a DFR drone equipped with thermal imaging to find a missing child in early January. Axon, the company working with Brooklyn Park to set up its DFR program, advertises its drones as equipped with the ability to 3D-model crime scenes.

Vendors in the United Kingdom Lipton has spoken with are considering arming their drones with cell site simulators, which trick cellphones into connecting to them instead of cellphone towers, she said.

Those tools generate a lot of data, and it's not entirely clear how that data is being stored and used, or even who owns it, say privacy advocates. They worry that while police departments operate their drones on a day-to-day basis, private companies often manage the data the drones collect.

Some companies are now using that information to create nationwide databases.

Flock, for instance, incorporates the information obtained from its license plate readers into a nationwide database that connects more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies, according to the company.

There are few, if any, checks on how these databases are used and how long the information can be retained, potentially giving private companies — and their law enforcement customers — the ability to know every place a particular car has driven, for instance, according to Stanley.

Flock insists it only retains its data for 30 days, but admits in its marketing materials that this window can be increased or decreased if required by a customer.

There's no law that mandates that companies stick to promises like these, and no way of predicting how they may monetize that data in the future, according to experts.

"The name of the game right now is: Vacuum up the data and connect the dots where you can," Lipton said. "And that means that everybody's privacy is implicated, not just in the current structure of law enforcement surveillance but private surveillance, too."

Police and drone companies insist they go to great lengths to protect citizens' privacy.

Some police departments have launched online transparency portals that allow the public to see the details from police drone flights, including flight paths, response times and the reasons the drone was flown, according to Kauffman.

BPPD plans to post DFR drone flight paths publicly as well, according to Rabe. And under Minnesota state law, any drone video that isn't part of an active investigation must be deleted within seven days.

Law enforcement agencies own and control all their data, which is subject to the same privacy standards as any other means of police information-gathering, according to a spokesperson for Axon.


"Responsible use is foundational to adoption, and we work closely with departments to make sure their programs are not only effective, but community-aligned and accountable," that spokesperson told Law360.

Those assurances don't satisfy privacy advocates like Stanley and Lipton, who say police department guidelines and even state laws governing drone programs are inconsistent and often ignored.

Since many of those rules are tied to the procurement process, police departments can get around them by using private donations rather than taxpayer funds to pay for their DFR programs, according to Lipton.

San Francisco announced in August, for instance, that it was accepting a $9.4 million donation from crypto-transfer company Ripple Labs to pay for the investigation center from which its DFR program will operate.

"It does a huge disservice to a city's constituency to circumvent some of the existing laws and regulations that would provide them an opportunity to conduct oversight," Lipton said. "Just because it's free, doesn't mean that it's less dangerous."

San Francisco Police Department doesn't have any concerns about the implications of accepting the donation, and has worked closely with the city attorney's office in the matter, SFPD Director of Strategic Communications Evan Sernoffsky told Law360.

"SFPD takes privacy very seriously and drones are being used in conjunction with our city's values," Sernoffsky said.

Flying Into Court

These privacy concerns around police drone use are now starting to be tested in court.

Spanish-language newspaper publisher Arturo Castañares sued the city of Chula Vista in 2021 after it refused him access to video footage recorded during its police department's DFR drone flights.

The lawsuit claimed that the refusal violated the California Public Records Act, which requires government agencies to make all records available to the public, with certain exceptions. Chula Vista countered that the videos were exempt from CPRA because they constituted investigatory information, which falls under one of the law's exceptions, according to Castañares' attorney, Cory J. Briggs.

The fact that those videos were taken as part of a DFR program undercuts Chula Vista's assertion that the videos are part of investigations since DFR programs dispatch drones before an investigation is initiated, Briggs explained.

"How are all of these videos investigative records if you're launching them before you even know whether you need to conduct an investigation?" Briggs asked. "Is it a cat up a tree? Is there a car accident? I mean, it could be something completely benign. If you're using the drone as a first responder, you can't say everything's an investigation."

A state trial court originally sided with the city and determined that the video footage was exempt from public records laws. But an appellate court overturned that ruling, and the state's Supreme Court has rejected the city's requests that it weigh in on the issue.

"The City of Chula Vista has long recognized that drones have the potential to capture video that is of a sensitive or private nature, and we have always considered the privacy rights of our community to be of paramount concern," a statement by the city said. "Based on community feedback and California laws that protect privacy rights, the city incorporated privacy controls limiting access to drone video footage."

In June, Sonoma County, California, residents sued the county and its code enforcement agency claiming that the county's drones "surreptitiously monitor and record fenced-in yards, swimming pools and hot tubs, and areas under awnings or through curtainless windows" without warrants.

One plaintiff learned that a drone had been used to photograph her outdoor bathtub and shower, explained Matthew T. Cagle, an attorney with the ACLU of Northern California who represents the residents and said the drones' warrantless surveillance violates the California Constitution's guarantee of privacy.

"What started out as a program focused on using drones to look for unpermitted cannabis grows in hard-to-reach rural areas suddenly had become this massive surveillance program that was impacting people's privacy around the county," Cagle told Law360.

Sonoma County declined to comment on pending litigation, but said in a statement that it "takes the allegations in the complaint very seriously and is committed to ensuring that civil code enforcement is conducted in accordance with the law, regardless of whether drones are used."

The Michigan Supreme Court unanimously rejected similar claims in May, ruling that Long Lake Township could use photographs taken by a drone of a couple's property without a warrant as evidence in a civil case against the couple.

Rules excluding evidence gathered in violation of the Fourth Amendment don't apply in civil proceedings, said the Michigan justices. But they cautioned that they "decline to address whether the use of an aerial drone under the circumstances presented here is an unreasonable search in violation of the United States or Michigan constitutions."

Courts won't be able to keep declining to address those constitutional issues for long, according to experts, who say legal challenges like these are likely to increase as the number of DFR programs also increases.

So will the number of questions these programs raise.

"Should we be okay with our police departments having the ability to type in your license plate and find out everywhere you've ever driven in the last two months? Should the police departments be able to put cameras over communities 24/7?" the ACLU's Stanley asked.

"There are a lot of questions that are arising and will arise, and they need to be answered through the democratic political process, not by police departments acting unilaterally," Stanley said. "These are questions that speak to the relationship and the balance of power between the government and the governed, and so this gets to the real fundamentals of our democracy."

--Editing by Alex Hubbard.