By Canadian Press

Time for scrutiny of police drones, says privacy researcher, after Vancouver arrest

Sep 5, 2024 | 3:23 PM

VANCOUVER — A privacy researcher and civil liberties advocate says the use of drones by Canadian police forces has evolved with the technology, but scrutiny of their use is lacking.

The concerns come after Vancouver’s Chief Const. Adam Palmer revealed that investigators deployed drones to help locate a suspect in a pair of gruesome stranger attacks in the city’s downtown on Wednesday, that left one man dead and another with a severed hand.

Palmer paid tribute to the role of the drone operator in the arrest of a 34-year-old White Rock man.

Brenda McPhail, an instructor in the public policy and digital society program at McMaster University, says the public only tends to hear about police use of drones “where there’s been a success.”

She says says the public rarely gets a “line of sight into a failure” or misuse of the technology.

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McPhail says drone technology has changed a lot in the last five years, including newer and better cameras, and the potential to couple them with facial recognition technology, making it “time for renewed scrutiny” of police drone programs in Canada.

She says the Vancouver Police Department’s drone program, launched in 2019, went through a “policy process” that included consultations with privacy and civil liberties advocates.

The policy includes a ban on drone flights “for surveillance purposes,” except where there’s an “imminent risk to life or safety.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 5, 2024

The Canadian Press