“You are being watched, constantly!” We all know this as we live in what’s become a surveillance society.

But when public servants are doing that watching, we should and do have a say in that matter. Recent efforts by Hawaiʻi law enforcement should elicit a public outcry.

Last month, the Hawaiʻi Department of Law Enforcement announced plans to increase public surveillance through the expanded use of drones and ShotSpotter (gunshot sensing devices). This is part of a broader trend of intensifying police surveillance, also including the use of body-worn cameras, robots and portable parking lot cameras.

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According to the Department of Law Enforcement, drones over Waikīkī will enhance public safety and police effectiveness. We might imagine scenarios in which drones would help police do their jobs more safely and effectively, for instance by providing additional information when approaching a suspected armed individual. Such information can mitigate danger for officers, the suspect and bystanders.

But the benefits need to be weighed against serious pitfalls. Perhaps most intuitively, many are concerned about potential invasions of privacy. Law enforcement officials pledge they will not violate privacy with these drones.

But that’s cold comfort given that the Honolulu Police Department refuses to be publicly transparent regarding its drone usage, citing “operational security.” This constitutes a lack of transparency coupled with a lack of oversight considering the Honolulu Police Commission’s record of impotence.

Privacy concerns are not limited to police drones buzzing by residents’ bedroom windows. When drones are used alongside other measures, such as portable parking lot cameras, traffic light cameras and the unknown extent of police access to private security cameras, it’s not unreasonable to worry about a digital panopticon growing around us all.

Moreover, these cameras are monitoring public spaces. They are gathering data. The public should ask how the data are stored and used in the future. It’s reasonable to wonder if surveillance data could be aggregated and used by private companies to develop even more insidious forms of surveillance such as facial recognition and behavioral prediction models, which can then be deployed to further monitor and control the public.

We should also consider how expanded police surveillance contributes to the criminalization of poverty in Honolulu. Surveillance advocates will point out that there is no right to privacy in public spaces. They seldom, if ever, acknowledge the corollary that the unhoused, forced to live on the streets, then get zero privacy.

Public policies are overwhelmingly written to protect those who are already healthy and housed, while they ignore the welfare of the marginalized. Thus, greater police surveillance threatens to deepen the crisis of poverty criminalization that translates to over half of those in our jails suffering houselessness, substance dependency and/or mental illness.

And, they languish in cells not because of a determined threat they pose to the community, but because they cannot afford cash bail. Criminalizing poverty is an inequitable and corrosive strategy that more surveillance threatens to intensify.

The criminalization of poverty is a modern trend that’s coincided with another important change: the militarization of policing. Intensifying police surveillance is happening while police are adopting other military tactics and technologies, such as armored transport, siege weapons and “warrior training.”

Some might refer to this intensification as the militarism of policing. Yet the term “militarism” is too vague as it fails to elucidate how the overall paradigm being adopted here is one of counterinsurgency that was developed by the U.S. military and the Israeli Defense Forces in the course of operations like the Global War on Terror and the decades-long siege on Gaza. Is this really how order is maintained in a democratic society?

Advocates for the drone program argue that it will help our police manage an officer shortage. That is dependent on these technologies working as intended and the lack of better alternatives.

The actual effectiveness of technologies like drones, ShotSpotter, and AI tools for writing police reports is debatable. HPD acknowledged after the New Year’s holiday that drones were not as useful as they hoped for combating illegal fireworks displays.

A 2024 study by Professor Ian T. Adams and colleagues found that AI tools did not significantly aid police in writing reports. Studies by independent researchers have not found ShotSpotter to be an effective crime reduction tool, but did find that it enhanced surveillance of minority communities.

Most claims touting the effectiveness of these technologies can be traced back to their manufacturers, companies whose primary motivation is profit, not public service. The public should treat these claims with skepticism and demand actual proof that the purchase of these products is worth the expenditure of our tax dollars.

Conversely, we should consider the alternatives for enhancing police capacity for stopping serious and violent crime. The HPD consistently points out that they have a vacancy rate of around 20%, which, they assert, limits their effectiveness. Often left out of the officer shortage conversation though is that police are tasked with an unrealistically broad range of duties.

Reallocating some of these tasks, such as wellness checks, to other parties, like crisis responders (a tactic validated by research), would allow police to focus on serious threats to public safety. Strategies and resources that center care and community well-being over additional surveillance and punishment should be considered — and even meaningfully debated — before resorting to unproven technologies.

As is the case with any technology, the potential utility of drones should not be disregarded reflexively.

Yet, thoughtless and unreflective pursuit of technological fixes for social problems is one of the most dangerous ways to engage new technologies. Police surveillance technologies need to be subjected to hearty and robust public scrutiny before being widely implemented.