The Feds Have No Idea Who's Flying Drones

It bears repeating: The federal government has only a vague sense of which government entities are flying unmanned aerial vehicles, particularly at the state and municipal levels. Lax oversight and lack of coordination between departments are precisely what landed police in Brunswick, Georgia, the Justice Department money to buy its drone without any of the pesky oversight or requisite approvals.

As of last year, the city of Brunswick had 15,640 residents and four annual homicides to its name. Located on the Georgia coast about 30 miles north of Florida, the self-styled “Shrimp Capital of the World” has fewer than 100 sworn officers on its police payroll. And since 2011, documents reveal, the Brunswick Police Department has had a drone on hand for “hostage negotiations,” funded by a grant from the federal Justice Department.

This will be news to both the Federal Aviation Administration, which approves the deployment of drones by all government entities nationwide, as well as to the Justice Department itself. The purchase underscores a curious blindspot in the domestic dronescape: The DOJ has the funds to buy and fly drones, only those privileges, or seemingly any record of them, don't appear to be crossing with the FAA.

In a September 2013 report, the Justice Department (DOJ) Inspector General chided DOJ grantmaking offices for handing out cash to state and local law enforcement agencies without so much as noting which were buying drones with the money. The Inspector General’s review found three known instances from 2001 to 2013 when DOJ funds were granted to buy drone equipment: police in Miami, North Little Rock and Gadsen, Alabama, all purchased their unmanned aerial vehicles using Justice Department grants during that time.

But the report noted with concern that “we cannot rule out the possibility that additional DOJ grant recipients could have used DOJ funds to purchase UAS [unmanned aerial systems],” since grant approval officers long neglected to keep track of whether applicants planned to use award money to buy drones. Nor did grant officers verify whether applicants had obtained the appropriate approval from the FAA to fly drones in the first place.

In this way, the Brunswick Police Department’s June 2011 grant application apparently raised neither eyebrows nor flags.

Documents released to MuckRock as part of the Drone Census 2013-2014 reveal that Brunswick police put in for $39,000 in Justice Department grants in fiscal year 2011. Easily lost amid the $36,487 for radios and $1,995 for a commercial-grade shredder was the more modest ask of $750 for a drone and iPad controller.

In their grant application, the Brunswick police explained that the drone would “enable the Support Services Division to better engage in hostage negotiations and reduce or even eliminate property damage and safe [sic] lives during the negotiations." The iPad, in turn, “will allow hostage negotiator the ability to ‘see’ the critical condition in which the hostages might be and evaluate the criminals' environment and weapon possession."

Now, $750 doesn’t buy you a Predator. Rather, the Brunswick police spent their DOJ grant on a popular hobbyist model, the Parrot AR.Drone. Essentially a video camera with four rotors, the battery-powered Parrot AR.Drone can hover for 12 minutes when fully charged and stream video or images to the smartphone or tablet piloting it. Anyone with access to Amazon or a Brookstone store can buy the same unit.

Brunswick Lieutenant Russell Berger acknowledges that the unit’s light frame and limited range mean that it is “is not suited for patrol type area surveillance.” But the quickly-plunging price and rapid advances in battery life and image quality for Parrot AR.Drone and similar units have drawn the attention of law enforcement across the country. The Maine State Police purchased the same model this past January, despite noting that it “probably wasn't made to be used for tactical missions.”

Just as the Inspector General warned could easily happen, Brunswick’s drone slipped through the grant process unnoted. It didn’t even garner a mention in the grant officer’s summary, but was lumped in with the miscellanea: “The city of Brunswick will use the grant funds to purchase portable digital radios, a commercial grade shredder, and other law enforcement equipment.”

It’s unclear whether authorities in Brunswick, even, are aware that the police department has a drone. More than a year after his department submitted the DOJ grant proposal, Major Greg Post told MuckRock unequivocally, “We do not have a drone program and do not anticipate to have one in the near future,” in response to the initial round of Drone Census requests in October 2012.

Accordingly, Justice Department officials never followed up to ensure that the Brunswick police had obtained the appropriate approval from the FAA to fly their new toy. As part of its roadmap to integrating drones into domestic airspace by 2015, the FAA requires all government agencies to apply for a special license to fly drones, regardless of the model or purpose. Public safety departments have a special fast-track approval process for these waivers, but Brunswick Police Department appears on none of the applicant lists released by the FAA through the beginning of 2013.

Captain Kevin Jones, Support Services Commander of the Brunswick Police Department, confirmed that his department has not asked for FAA approval, nor has the Justice Department required any followup reporting on use of the grant funds. Lieutenant Berger relayed that a representative from the FAA's Atlanta office told Brunswick police that the agency "does not require unmanned vehicles flying up to 500 feet to be approved." This guidance contradicts the federal statute requiring all government agencies to obtain waivers for their drones, regardless of model or flight altitude.

Jones says that the drone has not yet been used in the field, but only in training exercises and SWAT team simulations, where the drone has proven useful for advanced warning of suspect location and crime scene layout. The captain indicated that the drone's restriction to training exercises was not due to any policy restriction on its use, FAA or otherwise.

Indeed, federally sanctioned or not, the department hasn’t had many opportunities to field test drones as a hostage negotiation tool. An online search suggests that there have been only two hostage-related situations in Brunswick since the department submitted its drone grant application: one bona fide armed robbery and kidnapping in July 2011 over a $20 salon bill, and one string of hostage threats in August 2013 that turned out to be a phone scammer. The captain did not say whether his department planned to obtain FAA approval for drone operations moving forward.

For its part, the Justice Department has vowed to beef up its tracking of drone grants and to vet applicants more thoroughly. In response to the Inspector General’s concerns, DOJ has added additional keyword functionality to its grant management system, including project identifiers for “unmanned aerial vehicle,” “unmanned aircraft” and “unmanned aircraft system.” While it’s baffling that this functionality didn’t exist before, it’s a critical (if years late) step to prevent future oversights.

DOJ grant officers have also put a stop on grants for drone equipment unless agencies demonstrate that such purchases are “essential to the maintenance of public safety and good order.” According to grant officials, no public safety agencies, state or local, have requested funds for unmanned vehicles under this new provision.

But the technology’s ubiquity and ease of acquisition has many concerned that practical and bottomline limitations to law enforcement surveillance are falling away before rigorous policies have been put in place to head off overuse or abuse. This possibility has been broached not only by advocacy organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU, but also by the Justice Department Inspector General itself.

The IG’s September 2013 report notes that, as drone technology continues to improve, “UAS surveillance will be capable of extended flight times of several hours or even days at a time, far beyond the capabilities of manned aircraft. Such a capability could permit law enforcement to conduct pervasive tracking of an individual’s movements.”

With money continuing to flow into drone purchases and research at all levels of government, transparency, disclosure and appropriate monitoring are critical to shaping appropriate policy, as well as determining efficacy. Critic or proponent, it doesn’t matter: you can’t even begin to talk about drones until you know where they are.