I was the first reporter to cover the threat of Automatic (or Automated) License Plate Readers in Massachusetts. Long before the letters ALPR crept into the common lexicon, and more than a decade before companies like Flock Safety were declared public enemies, my team was asking hard questions and filing public information requests about the quiet proliferation of increasingly shady technology.
That early coverage was largely of ALPR use for parking enforcement. Cars from the Boston Transportation Department had license plate readers affixed to roof racks, alerting meter maids to tags belonging to overdue ticket scofflaws—and, as it turned out, much more. In 2013, the Boston Police Department indefinitely suspended ALPR use. But as trackers of so-called smart surveillance discovered two years later, while BPD claimed that it stopped using ALPRs due to privacy concerns, several hundred daily emails between the police and BTD indicated that BPD was, as Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts explained, “still engaged in the tracking of license plates, albeit using data collected by the transportation department.”
In interviewing cops about the devices they foisted onto BTD, only to query them all day long about license plates, I learned that ALPRs could scan more alphanumerics in minutes than two officers could manually search for in a 10-hour shift. So I was surprised to hear that many of them absolutely hated the equipment; as several explained, some neighborhoods had so many damn vehicles in violation that the readout in their squad cars would ping nonstop.
That was only one source of early cop disillusionment with nascent omnipotent tech. One Boston detective suggested that with so much accumulated metadata in the haypile, it could be harder to nail down the needles they’re searching for. And last but definitely not the least hilarious, some officers told me they heard that the hardware under their seats which powered the rooftop plate readers could lower their sperm counts.
All things considered, I wasn’t as surprised as some other law enforcement watchdogs to see the Boston Herald report this week that the “city’s largest police union blasted a new drone safety program being piloted by Boston Police as ineffective and invasive surveillance technology that’s already led to a crash where a drone ‘destroyed’ a car on private property.”
Here’s some background from the tabloid of record: “The crash involving a Boston Police drone occurred around 1:30 p.m. last Thursday, Sept. 3 at 11 Hatherly Road in Brighton, just days after the department touted its new drone pilot program as a potential ‘tool to improve safety for residents and first responders.’”
The article quoted the BPD incident report: “Upon arrival, the officer observed the drone … that had crashed in the driveway … was in pieces, [and] appeared to crash onto a vehicle.”
In short, the department has a dystopian new “Drone as a First Responder” pilot program, which it literally launched less than a week before this crash landing in Brighton. It’s a partnership with Motorola Solutions and the Seattle-based drone maker BRINC. Last year, the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism was the first to report on alarming unprecedented permissions from the Federal Communications Commission that make many of these urban unmanned flights possible. It’s a page out of the same playbook as the ALPR-transportation department hoodwink: introduce cringeworthy concepts through a Trojan Horse, like community safety or healthcare, then once people let their collective guard down, unleash the darker aspects on a nonconsenting public via the authorities.
As for Boston police—the actual individual cops, in this case, as opposed to the institution—and their beef with advanced drone technology … I assure you it has absolutely nothing to do with privacy concerns, even though Boston Police Patrolmen’s Association President Larry Calderone told the Herald, “We have a problem with Big Brother. We have a problem with super surveillance.” While there may be some rightwing anti-government sentiment riding the anti-Flock wave among BPPA ranks, their leader is just clamoring for more police and fatter paychecks.
Calderone also said: “The idea of replacing a compassionate police officer who knows how to practice community policing with a robot is something we will never embrace.” And in a juicy closer, he cuts even closer to the chase: “We’re calling for more and more bodies on the street to aid and assist and protect our members and the general public. … It seems that instead of attempting to do that in a serious fashion, this department secretly worked on a drone program as opposed to working harder to hire more police officers.”
In a city that already has an outrageous police budget with multiple problematic officers making in excess of a quarter-million dollars a year, it’s a separate issue altogether whether more cops are in fact needed on the beat, and how the city should (or shouldn’t) go about funding that. But as for the notion that the concept of “Drone as a First Responder” is euphemistic at best and at worst a crashed diaper cake with syphilis frosting, that may be the rare thing me and Boston police union crybabies agree on.
