When members of Cleveland City Council interviewed nominees to the Cleveland Community Police Commission (CPC) in January and February, drones came up again and again. It was the only technology that prospective commissioners were asked about, and the questions were specific to one use: keeping an eye on crowds.
Last year, CPC — the final authority on police policies — prohibited the Cleveland Division of Police from using its drones for “surveillance of individuals or groups within large gatherings or for crowd control.” Some members of City Council believe that’s a mistake.
At the hearings, Council Member Kris Harsh brought up a recent neo-Nazi rally in Cincinnati as an example of a situation that Cleveland police would want to monitor from above. Council Member Charles Slife rejected the idea that there’s a difference between cameras mounted on buildings or poles and cameras mounted on drones and said that limiting the latter “calls into question the entire ability for Cleveland” to rely on technology for policing.
Council Member Mike Polensek said that drones could have helped police identify the “anarchists and communists” who he said incited violence at a May 2020 protest downtown.
“I’m extremely disappointed in the position that the CPC took on the drone policy,” Polensek said.
A few of the CPC nominees indicated they had no problem with police drone use. Others expressed a desire to balance it with people’s rights. Sharena Zayed, a past co-chair of the commission who’s been reappointed, said she voted for the existing policy and suggested she would again.
“We used experts to come up with that policy, so I stand by that work,” Zayed said. (Read more in the Cleveland Documenters notes from the January and February hearings.)
CPC could revisit the policy, but only after the new commissioners are “sufficiently trained and briefed,” said current Commissioner Piet van Lier. In the meantime, they may be under pressure to reconsider whether Cleveland should continue to be the only big city in Ohio that prevents police from using drones to surveil crowds.
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Cleveland is behind the police drones trend
More than 1,600 law enforcement agencies across the country are using drones — or UAS, unmanned aerial systems — according to Atlas of Surveillance, a database maintained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that defends civil liberties.
Cleveland is years behind the trend.
City Council authorized the purchase of drones in 2022. In April 2023, the city’s Board of Control approved a $255,000 contract for nine of them.
But they weren’t ordered until February 2024. Then-interim Director of Public Safety Wayne Drummond told Fox 8, “We’re gonna slow-walk [drone use], make sure that we’re doing the right thing relative to our residents and what they want and what they need.”
The Cleveland Division of Police wrote a general police order, or policy, for drone use and submitted it to the Community Police Commission in October 2024.
The division’s draft included a section on “protection of rights and privacy” and said, “UAS operators shall not fly over large crowds or freeways unless exigent circumstances exist.” (The Federal Aviation Administration restricts flying drones over people for safety reasons.)
But CPC’s surveillance technology working group, which included outside experts, went much further, adding the prohibition on “surveillance of individuals or groups within large gatherings or for crowd control.” A drone can surveil people without flying directly “over” them.
“The police had given some thought to privacy issues, but they don’t have deep expertise in that, and their interest is obviously in using these for security and safety,” said Brian Ray, a Cleveland State University College of Law professor and privacy expert who served on the CPC working group.
The working group’s draft was also much more specific about approved uses and added more requirements for flight record keeping; data collection, retention and sharing; and reporting back to the CPC and the public. You can compare the early and approved Cleveland policy drafts here.
The full commission approved the new policy, amid some dissent, on Nov. 20. Cleveland police violated it almost immediately.
‘Repositories of videos of protesters’
“You’ve never seen like this before.” That’s the central boast that drone manufacturer Skydio makes about its X10 model in a promotional video that opens with a gentle piano version of Richard Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” playing under the narration.
The Skydio X10 weighs less than 5 pounds, measures under 14 inches and can be launched in about 40 seconds. Its cameras can identify a human at 2,600 feet and read a license plate at 800 feet. A thermal imaging camera can find people in the dark. Artificial intelligence helps it avoid obstacles even when it’s out of visual range of the operator. It can be controlled from up to seven and a half miles away or farther if equipped with the optional 5G capability.
On Nov. 24, CDP officers used an X10 to monitor peaceful demonstrators as they marched near the home of Cuyahoga County Executive Chris Ronayne to protest the county’s investment in Israel Bonds. Video captured by the drone — obtained by Signal Cleveland through a public records request — shows how effectively it can zoom in on faces and clothing (much closer than the clips in this YouTube short).
Police can and do monitor demonstrations for law-breaking activity, but drones provide far more invasive views of participants than what can be seen by officers on the ground, fixed video cameras or even aircraft.
Because drones are relatively cheap and easy to use, they “threaten to greatly expand police aerial surveillance of gatherings in the United States,” warned Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
“We worry that this low cost may tempt some law enforcement agencies to create repositories of video of protesters, allowing those protesters to be systematically identified and cataloged.”
In 2020, police in at least 15 cities used drones and aircraft to record hundreds of hours of video of protests, according to The New York Times.
“The footage was then fed into a digital network managed by the Homeland Security Department, called ‘Big Pipe,’ which can be accessed by other federal agencies and local police departments for use in future investigations,” the Times reported.
The U.S. Constitution — specifically, the First Amendment — guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” In other words, peaceful protests are legal.
Cleveland’s drone policy is unique in Ohio, and unusual in the country, because it wasn’t written exclusively by law enforcement officials, said Brian Hofer, executive director of Secure Justice, a non-profit organization that advocates against state abuse of power. Hofer helped craft the policy in Oakland, California, which Cleveland’s is modeled on.
“If the police find that it’s too restrictive, they can always go back to the commission and point to specific instances in which they would have liked to use drones and they weren’t able to,” said Ray, the Cleveland State professor. “And the commission has the authority to amend the policy … But it doesn’t make sense at the start to just have an open-ended ‘OK, if there’s a large gathering, we can employ them.’”
Grounded until further notice
Cleveland’s drones have been grounded since the protest incident and will remain so for weeks, perhaps months. Mayor Bibb shares city council’s frustration.
“The calls from residents and our colleagues in city council have been loud and clear — they not only want these drones up in the air, but they are demanding they be utilized to their fullest extent to protect the entire community,” Bibb said in a statement to Signal Cleveland. “It is imperative the community knows that although these drones are new technology, we will utilize them in manners that still protect everyone’s civil liberties and constitutional rights.”
Soon after approving the policy in November, CPC submitted it to the U.S. Department of Justice officials who oversee the city’s consent decree. CPC got feedback from them earlier this year (none of which pertained to the crowd surveillance prohibition).
That feedback needs to be incorporated into the policy, but that can’t happen until nine new commissioners are sworn in, brought up to speed on the issue and are ready to vote. (City Council has approved seven of Mayor Justin Bibb’s nine nominees.) After the vote, the policy will go back to DOJ for final approval.
