The magic of drones can lead to magical thinking, in this case by Honolulu’s new police chief, David Lazar.

The chief recently introduced the department’s new program, Drones as First Responders, or DFR, like this:

“We have the responsibility to thoughtfully embrace innovations that improve public safety.  Drone technology is one of those tools.”

That’s a sales pitch, and like with any sales pitch, we need to look under the hood.

A Special Commentary Project

Civil Beat is focusing on transparency, accountability and ethics in government and other institutions. Help us by sending ideas and anecdotes to sunshine@civilbeat.org.

Read More

Don’t do any embracing yet. Most claims about DFR’s impact, including Lazar’s, are unproven. 

By now DFR is a trend. Many law enforcement agencies use it. Even so, there’s almost no well-designed evidence that it is effective.

Here’s how DFR, which for now will only be used in downtown and Kalihi, is designed to work. 

When the police get a call, they can send a drone as first responder to survey the scene. This information gets relayed back, then a decision is made whether or not to send flesh-and-blood officers to the scene.

A drone gets to a scene faster than an officer, so the first assessment is faster. The research shows that’s a fact. Response time is faster with drones.

But so what? Faster is not necessarily better.

The real question is not how fast police, human or mechanical, respond. It is what are the results of the encounters. That’s where DFR doesn’t look so good.

There is very little evidence that DFR reduces the crime rate or that victims feel better about the outcomes when a drone is involved.

It’s far from clear that DFR reduces the use of force or the number of officer or civilian injuries. 

DFR does not even appear to be cost effective. 

None of these results should be a surprise. Police reform often begins with limited evidence because it is unrealistic to try something new until all the evidence is in. Meanwhile the innovation is promoted as if it was created in God’s own little green acres. Understandable maybe, but also a red flag.

Let’s say even with this bad report card so far, you think it’s worth a try. Outcomes might get better as time goes on as departments adjust and find new ways of making it work. Research about DFR’s impact is still limited.

Before you give DFR the benefit of the doubt, though, there is something else to consider as part of the equation, something not at all a part of the chief’s public safety pep talk.

It’s this: Does a technology designed to make policing faster and more efficient weaken key parts of Hawaiʻi’s traditions and culture?

A technology like DFR is more than nuts and bolts, getting the drone up in the air, communicating, and getting it back.

Drone technology is social, just like smartphones are social. Both change the way people relate to one another and the way they see the world. They change the culture.

People in Hawaiʻi take particular pride in the strength of personal relationships. Local knowledge is so important. Knowing, helping, and relying on the people around you. “Talking story.” Knowing your neighborhood.

When crises are involved, it’s easy to think about cops simply as law enforcers. “Book ’em, Danno.”

But in real life, we think of policing in more one-on-one personal ways as a concrete presence: a school resource officer, the cops on patrol who come to Starbucks to fill their reports while schmoozing with the patrons about what’s going on, the patrol officer who knows which old folks sit at which McDonald’s every morning and what the people at an address are really like because she’s been there before.

In fact at the same time police departments have moved toward technical solutions, they have also moved toward personal ones like community policing.

It can be hard to keep these softer, more subtle things in mind when the power terms like “public safety” and “efficiency” threaten to take over the room.

But when you complain about how Hawaiʻi is changing for the worse, think of how often you mean that impersonality has replaced the old values.

Yet traditions change for good reasons, too.

It’s a question of getting the balance right. Begin by seeing the DFR for what it really is: an unproven technology with an impact that may go well beyond crime fighting and change traditions. That may be acceptable, or it may not.  

Considering all of these things together — tradition and drone alike — is DFR worth continuing?

That’s not the chief’s or HPD’s responsibility to answer. It’s the public’s.

This is a real challenge because once a law enforcement policy goes into effect it develops a momentum of its own, fueled by true believers who give us only one side of the story. (By the way, that’s also true with all kinds of policies that aren’t about law enforcement.)

Here are a couple of examples highlighting what’s involved.

One is the strong community resistance to new FLOCK on-the street-camera technology. It’s an example of how divisive law enforcement tech can be.

The other, which is right on point because it shows how a community raises all the right questions about tradition and technology, involves Orthodox Jews using scooters to get to the synagogue on the Sabbath instead of walking, which has been the tradition for thousands of years. The question has become not simply whether or not tradition is violated but whether or not this change is beneficial overall. That’s also the Hawaiʻi question.

For this examination and accountability to work, there has to be a Honolulu Police Commission that takes commissioning seriously, a police administration that takes assessment seriously and presents the results publicly, and a public that doesn’t let technology and claims of “public safety” drive everything else that’s important out of the room.