The Policing Project at New York University School of Law will conduct an independent, civil rights and civil liberties impact assessment of the Baltimore Police Department’s Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) pilot program.
In line with our previous work in evaluating policing technologies , we will assess the impact of the AIR program on a number of factors, including privacy, racial justice, implications for the exercise of First Amendment rights, over-criminalization, and potential intrusion into the rights of criminal defendants.
Our final evaluation will be made public when completed, approximately by Fall 2020.
Background on the Baltimore Police Department AIR Program
The AIR program will use plane-mounted cameras to capture images of the city of Baltimore that can be used by the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) for investigative purposes. The planes and cameras are both operated by a private company, Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS).
On December 20, 2019, Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison announced the department would initiate this new pilot of the aerial surveillance program around May 2020. This will be the second time BPD has utilized PSS planes in Baltimore. In the summer of 2016, media reported that BPD had engaged PSS to use its plane-mounted camera surveillance in criminal investigations for several months with no public disclosure of the program. In response to this media coverage, and negative reaction, the program was terminated.
In April 2020, the Baltimore Board of Estimates voted to approve the contract for the new iteration of the program, and the ACLU of Maryland also filed a challenge to the constitutionality of deploying a wide-area aerial surveillance program.
How We Became Involved
This six-month pilot of the AIR program is being funded by the private philanthropic foundation Arnold Ventures with the condition that the program include third-party auditing teams and research partners to conduct independent evaluation along several dimensions.
The Schaefer Center for Public Policy at the University of Baltimore will conduct community surveys to better understand how Baltimore residents perceive the technology, the police department, and the intersection of the two.
The RAND Corporation will conduct a study to understand how useful the technology is to police investigators, and how the pilot affects crime rates, clearance rates, and prosecutions in Baltimore.
The Policing Project was invited to evaluate the program on civil rights and civil liberties issues. We were brought in for two reasons: First, we have worked with Arnold Ventures before; the organization previously funded our work in applying cost-benefit analysis to public safety, including our 2018 public convening in New York and our ongoing field assessments in partnership with communities throughout the country.
Second, the Policing Project has conducted a number of civil rights and civil liberties audits of policing technologies across the country, including our 2019 personal privacy audit of the ShotSpotter gunshot detection system, our role in facilitating the research and public reports of the Axon AI and Policing Technology Ethics Board, and many more forthcoming projects.
Although the Policing Project, along with all the auditing teams, is receiving funding from Arnold Ventures to cover the expense of these audits, our evaluations will be carried out independently and in line with our organizational best practices, without oversight from Arnold Ventures, BPD, or PSS.
Our Process for Conducting this Audit
The Policing Project’s audit will focus on various civil rights and civil liberties issues that may arise from the use of the surveillance planes, including the potential intrusion into the rights of criminal defendants; privacy; racial and socioeconomic justice; implications for First and Fourth Amendment rights; increased criminalization; and other related social costs.
At the conclusion of our evaluation, we will produce a public report that documents how the technology works, how it is used, and what implications we see for civil rights and civil liberties.
As an independent evaluator, the Policing Project will not have a direct say in whether the AIR program continues beyond the pilot period—that decision will be left to the city’s policymakers. Our role is to improve public understanding of the program, including its potential cost and benefits, so that BPD and Baltimore communities can weigh this information and make informed decisions together.
As with many current initiatives, the timeline for this project has been impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, and much remains unclear at this moment. We hope to produce a final report by Fall 2020 and will continue to post updates to our website as the audit progresses.