The Milwaukee Police Department launched its 'Drone as First Responders' program earlier this year, after using drones for "event management" since the 2024 Republican National Convention. The Milwaukee County Sheriff's Office uses drones for similar purposes.
Proponents of the technology note that drones can fly faster and see farther than human officers, making them useful in search-and-rescue or first-responder situations. Critics point to the use of drones for surveillance purposes, such as monitoring protests during the RNC, and the potential to be used with facial recognition technology. MPD currently logs drone deployments in a public tracker.
Adam Rogan is a freelance journalist who wrote about police drones for this month’s Milwaukee Magazine. He sat down with Lake Effect’s Sam Woods to talk about what the technology can do, and the current lack of guardrails around it.
The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Sam Woods: Can you start by giving an overview of what this technology is and what we know about its use?
Adam Rogan: The Milwaukee Police Department and local law enforcement for the first time used the remote control drones above Milwaukee during the Republican National Convention for just keeping an eye on crowds, that kind of thing, looking for threats. It's since expanded, and this year they've fully launched what is called the ‘Drones as First Responder Program,’ through which they have, I believe it's 12 drones in the department that can be flown to emergencies. They use drones for things like, for example, a lost hiker or a swimmer swept out into a lake. The sergeant boss who leads the program shared with me that the first time he ever used one on an actual call was a shooting scene. He was able to, the drone is able to fly itself generally to the area of where a report is made, and then an officer will control it thereafter. He's able to find the victim before a police officer was able to get to the scene and render aid, and then during that time he was able to do crowd control, make sure nobody was hiding in the bushes. If you see somebody running, he can report that to the officers, that sort of thing.
The concerns are largely based on the Fourth Amendment and reasonable search and seizure. That's where I think there's some very interesting legal questions come in and some very important ethical questions that come in of what do we want to see from our government, what do we not want to see from our government? Because both our state and national governments have not passed a bunch of legislation regarding law enforcement use of drones yet.
What has that discourse between critics that you mentioned bringing up issues with the Fourth Amendment rights, privacy, protester rights, and someone who says this technology is helpful in police work?
So the governing Supreme Court decision that kind of defines how drones and also helicopters can be used by law enforcement is called Florida v. Riley. It came in 1989 in which a helicopter was used to identify an illegal marijuana grow operation. The defendant in the case said ‘they flew over my property, but that's my property. It was an illegal search, they shouldn't be able to admit that as evidence.’ The Supreme Court found that no, that is legal, because you can't stop a plane from flying over your house and thus you can't stop a helicopter from flying over your house.
One of the officers I spoke with said, ‘we don't care what you're doing in your house in your underwear.’ I think for most officers that would make sense, but the concerns are when it is misused. For example, when the Wisconsin legislature in 2013 passed its first law around law enforcement drones, they basically just said drones can be used by law enforcement for legal operations. They cannot be used for illegal search, which would have basically been covered anyways, but it's just giving law enforcement a green light, like, ‘hey, go use this technology.' There hasn't been any follow-up and there isn't really any impetus right now.
The Wisconsin ACLU is trying to pressure municipalities, for example, the City of Milwaukee, to put up some parameters to say, here's when drones can and cannot be used. The Milwaukee Police Department, for its part, has a tracker online that shows every flight they've been on. You can look at them. I thought it'd be more interesting but really it’s just a bunch of lines over Milwaukee. So there is transparency there, but a lot of it is not codified in law. It is just what has been done. A lot of the critics were saying, we don't want to ban this technology, but we want to have more guardrails on it, especially regarding how long evidence is kept for. What can be done with the videos in the next year or 10 years or 100 years?
I want to get into facial recognition technology, also a new technology and also carrying similar privacy concerns. Have you seen any evidence that police drones have been used and then the video that they capture is used in a facial recognition technology database?
Locally, I haven't seen any evidence of that, but that doesn't mean that couldn't happen. For example, I spoke with John McCray Jones, who works at the Wisconsin ACLU, and he asked me ‘what if J. Edgar Hoover could have used facial recognition technology during the Selma March?’ Which is a chilling thought, knowing the FBI’s history with civil rights. One thing that we've seen with the Trump administration has really tried to break down these walls between local and national law enforcement and departments to allow the federal government to have more access to local information. ICE has pretty much been open that there have been databases of protesters or what they're calling agitators. And we've seen this, including in 2020 in the Milwaukee area of known protesters being kept in a database. And so there is a very strong concern about the chilling effect that this facial recognition technology applied to ample drone footage and police camera footage could have on legal protesting and also privacy concerns there.
I also spoke with Paul Bucher, who is a former Waukesha County District Attorney. When I brought up that concern, he kind of laughed because his take was that every police car already has multiple cameras on it, at least most of them do. A lot of police officers have body cameras. There's cameras in the city. A lot of times businesses and other organizations will share their security footage if something happens with law enforcement upon request. So it's an interesting question we must wrestle with as Americans dealing with the Fourth Amendment, but drones are in a sense just a different way of applying a camera, which have been around for however long. It’s the facial recognition technology that is new.
What's the future for this technology?
Drones have been around for a while. They're incredibly cool technology in the same way that airplanes are super cool. They're going to stay around. But I think we're going to see a lot of change in the next 10 years, especially if, for example, at some point evidence is challenged in a case where somebody said this drone use was illegal. The prosecutors say no, it was completely legal. It's probably going to end up at the Supreme Court level. I very much expect me to be here maybe in two, three years doing a follow-up of the Wisconsin Supreme Court is considering so-and-so because x-and-y happened and it was recorded with a drone. I'm not a legal expert by any stretch of the imagination. I'm just here to tell you what's going on and what happened.
