Portland Police Bureau spent nearly $68,000 on drones and equipment between April and September of 2023. Some of the drones used by the bureau feature cameras that can closely zoom in on people or cars and are made by a manufacturer based in Shenzhen, China. The FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency have warned companies to be wary of drones manufactured in China because using them can jeopardize U.S. national security. That’s according to a report by independent journalist and researcher Kate Kaye. She covers Portland’s use of surveillance technology and is the founder of RedTailMedia.org. Kaye joins us with more on how the police bureau uses drones.
Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. The Portland Police Bureau (PPB) spent nearly $70,000 on drones in a few months last year. And they are putting those drones to use. Kate Kaye is an independent journalist and researcher who focuses on surveillance issues. She has been digging into the bureau’s drone purchases and their practices, and she joins us now to talk about what she has found. Welcome back to the show.
Kate Kaye: Thanks, Dave.
Miller: Why did you make a request for procurement records for PPB drones? What is at stake here?
Kaye: Well, I wanted to learn more about what the police department’s drone program entailed, what kinds of capabilities of those devices exist, how are they being used. We know a little bit through some open data that the police bureau makes available publicly, but there’s a lot we don’t know. And so those procurement documents, and my analysis of them, really is helping fill in some of the gaps.
What’s at stake is, right now, the city is implementing the surveillance resolution that it passed a little over a year ago. And the first step of that is determining a framework for an inventory of surveillance tech. An example of surveillance tech that the city uses is the drones, used by the police. They really are a very helpful illumination of a lot of theoretical things – it really helps provide some context, to understand what these things actually do? What do we want in an inventory? What kind of information would be helpful? What I wanted to show with this report and why I thought it was important to publish something about this was because I wanted to show that, here’s all the additional information that is very valuable to have in an inventory, as the city determines how to implement its resolution.
Miller: So let’s talk about some of the specifics that you found. You basically said, “what did you buy?” And then they told you. They bought about a dozen drones last year, from the records that you found. What are the various capabilities of these? There’s a handful of different models.
Kaye: I think the most important capabilities that have really profound privacy and invasive impacts are the ability to, the way the system’s documentation refers to it as “lock in” on a target, and zoom in. These drones have cameras. They’re zooming in the way your regular old camera that you use when you’re traveling zooms in. And then it actually can track a person or a vehicle or some other object that it’s zooming in on, and capture the actual location coordinates of that person or object. It’s gathering images, photos and video of the person or vehicle being tracked. And then it’s also gathering a lot of additional data.
Miller: I got a little bit confused about the capabilities, but it seemed like algorithmically, some of these drones have the ability to predict where someone or something is going, and say “it seems like this car is going this way” so this is the likely route of, say, this fleeing suspect or this Portlander.
Kaye: My understanding of the way that works, and that that is the capability of at least some of the drones – let’s say you’re using that tracking mechanism, you’ve zoomed in the camera, you’re tracking a person, and they’re blocked by a wall or something. The drone camera can’t actually see it. What it’s gonna do is use some kind of predictive analysis to gauge “we think they went in this direction.” Then the drone can continue tracking that person, maybe even once they become more visible again.
Miller: I should note that you submitted personal comments to Portland officials regarding the implementation of the city’s surveillance resolution that you mentioned earlier. That resolution called for privacy impact assessments before bureaus employ these technologies. If I understand correctly, they basically have to say “this is what we intend to do with this technology.” What did the police bureau say they were going to do with their drones?
Kaye: When the city council originally approved a budget, they approved a budget of $80,000 for the pilot of the program. So the police department at that point said, “we’d like to use these drones to assess critical incidents, to assess major crash events, if there is a crash or some other situation to assess whether or not maybe there might be an explosive on the premises.” The impression that I got from the different examples that they gave of how they’d want to use it, it was really around major incidents, critical incidents, emergency situations.
Miller: How does that assessment mesh with what the bureau has actually been doing with these drones?
Kaye: I think that there may be some mission drift here. It’s not entirely clear, because without knowing exactly what happened during an incident in which a drone was flown over during a police call, we don’t know positively. From the police open data, we know that drones have been flown over behavioral health incidents, a police label essentially for a type of a police call. And those could be related to a suicide attempt, or it could be related to somebody getting taken into detox. There’s any number of reasons why that could happen, and that’s definitely not something that was mentioned originally. Another example is just a regular old traffic stop. There’s a lot of examples in the public information that shows that drones have been flown over just a traffic stop, and suspicious people-related incidents.
Miller: Portland Police Bureau Sergeant James DeFrain wrote this to you in an email. You, asked the bureau of various questions and this is part of what you heard from the bureau:
“In most cases, UAS,” that’s an acronym for these drones, “has proven to lessen the impact on communities by reducing the need for officers or the time required for officers to clear a scene. Police activity is already taking place if a UAS is requested.” He also told you that police do not operate their drones “without an articulable and appropriate request from a police supervisor.”
What does that last part mean? He clearly said an “appropriate request.” Do you have a sense for what appropriate means?
Kaye: No, I don’t. That’s in part because I haven’t had any actual conversations with the bureau about this. It’s an example of a rule that we don’t have. The bureau might be creating its own rules around how it uses drones. And we might not want that as a city, we might want some additional oversight here in terms of when and how these things are deployed.
Another thing that he did mention that I think is important is he suggested that there’s lesser impact on people and communities when the drones are used because, well, the cops aren’t showing up, it’s just a drone. There’s a lot of questions here we have to ask: whose criteria for impact are we talking about? If we’re thinking about data capture and privacy related stuff, and invasive surveillance, those are impacts that it’s questionable whether the police bureau is really concerned about those impacts. Those are impacts that a lot of people are concerned about.
Miller: Did you get the sense of what he was saying was that a police officer with a gun is less likely to be on the scene, so there’s less of a chance of, say, lethal force used by an officer, because we have a drone with a camera instead?
Kaye: Possibly. But drones can be fitted with weapons. That’s a thing that exists. We absolutely might want rules against that. It sort of seems to diminish the very profound privacy and invasive surveillance impacts here.
Miller: You point out that some of the city’s drones could become significant as Portland police revive their protest response team. What do you have in mind?
Kaye: I guess I thought about that because I had just read about it, and I noticed that in the procurement documents that I was assessing, one of the pieces of equipment that was purchased is an appendage that can go on a particular kind of drone. It’s like a searchlight and a broadcast thing. And I thought, well, that sounds like something that the police might want to use in a protest situation, where they’re telling people to disperse. I don’t know. We don’t know what the rules are around that either.
Miller: You also point out that most of the drones that the PPB bought were made in China, a country that the FBI has said basically “watch out, we don’t think you should be buying drones from China for use like this because there are serious security concerns.” What did the bureau say directly in response to those concerns?
Kaye: Well, the bureau suggested that there’s national security concerns, there are cybersecurity related concerns, in terms of just the data security of the drones. As legislators and the White House are concerned about TikTok, that’s another example of a technology produced in mainland China, there’s concerns about the collection of data related to US residents, and whether or not that could be susceptible to the Chinese government, because they have some rules there regarding tech companies having to supply information about people.
Miller: Kate, thanks very much.
Kaye: Thanks.
Miller: Kate Kaye joined us. She is a Portland-based writer focused on privacy and surveillance. She wrote recently about the Portland Police Bureau’s use of drones. This is separate from her work as the deputy director of the World Privacy Forum. That is a nonprofit public interest firm.
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