Public Safety Commissioner Keith Flynn says the state has no immediate plans to use domestic drones for law enforcement purposes and Flynn says the Shumlin Administration will implement a comprehensive public vetting process if it decides to use this new technology.
Domestic drones are currently being used by a number of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies and this number is expected to grow in the next few years.
The drones come in many different sizes – some have a wingspan of 60 feet while others are as small as 3 feet. They carry high power zoom lenses that allow them to track activity on the ground from as high as 50,000 feet.
The U.S. Border Patrol has been using drones along the Mexican border for several years and several large cities are tracking illegal drug activity with drones.
Keith Flynn is Vermont’s Commissioner of Public Safety. He says he’s approaching this issue cautiously and he wants to see how other law enforcement agencies use their drones.
"We’re certainly aware of the technology, we’re aware of the various uses that it has been put to in other places," said Flynn. "But at this point we have no immediate plans to make that part of our response to any of our various tasks that we cover in Vermont."
And Flynn says a drone policy in Vermont would be put into place only after a lot of public and legislative review.
"We need to see how these develop and before we would look at utilizing something like that we’d want to make sure that we vet it and that we get a lot of community input, we identify specific needs but we’re not there yet," he said.
Allen Gilbert is the director of the Vermont Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. His organization has a lot of concerns about the use of drones for domestic surveillance.
"I think it is good that the commissioner is saying there would be a lot of public input before any police agency in the state starting using these things," said Gilbert. "I think we all have to believe that down the road there are definitely going to be drones flying about Vermont."
And Gilbert is concerned that drones might be approved for one specific activity and then be used for another.
"Because it’s so attractive in what it can do for other things you end up using it for very different purposes and that’s what’s worrisome about all these systems that are surveilling and collecting and retaining large amounts of data about us," said Gilbert. "It’s really the mission creep the possibility of what these things could do beyond what was originally intended that’s a little bit scary."
Gilbert says he won’t be surprised if the Border Patrol begins to use drones on the northern border with Canada in the near future.