MIT Technology Review’s daily email newsletter surfaced this older story from February of 2023 this morning, which was a good thing. I’m always interested in colliding trends and stories that gather additional context when placed together.
In this case, the article concerns the way that police in Chula Vista, California—as well as across the nation—are using drones without clear policies about transparency and citizens privacy in place.
The connected story concerns the recent Supreme Court ruling that the city government in Grants Pass, Oregon (a small city in the southern half of the state) can make it illegal to sit or sleep outdoors in public places.
(See this OPB piece about the Supreme Court decision.)
Although the decision does not explicitly say that it is against folks experiencing homelessness, that’s clearly what the statute is about.
The connection: flying police drones will make it harder for the unhoused to sit or sleep outdoors, expanding the reach of police surveillance. While today the drones (per the MIT Technology Review article) only observe in silence, I can easily imagine a future in which the drones, out of reach hovering a few yards in the sky, will boom out a recording or a live remote officer’s voice saying, “you can’t sit or sleep here; move along” when it finds somebody camping outdoors.
This speculative combo of stories vexes me because I’m of two minds.
First, as a property owner, I sympathize with the folks who don’t want an influx of the unhoused suddenly camping or living outside their homes or businesses. I live in a small suburb of Portland (Oregon), and whenever I go to the city I’m aghast at how the large unhoused population has changed parts of the city. My wife rows as a form of exercise, and there is a startlingly large encampment right next to the place where she parks… including a man who wears a scary mask at all times and carries a machete. When my daughter was a student in the dorms at Portland State, there was another large (albeit mostly quiet) encampment across the street.
Second, on the other hand, I’m concerned about the civil rights of the unhoused who will now have to deal with another form of surveillance, about how that surveillance will extend to the rest of us (that is, the housed), and I wonder about the priorities of city and municipal governments that spend money on drones that might be deployed towards mental health services and affordable housing.
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