Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment

During the winter of 2019, the Baltimore Police Department (BPD), began working with Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) on a program of aerial surveillance of high-crime areas of the city. The technology employed had originally been used by the U.S. military to identify targets during the war with Iraq. This program grew from a secretive and short-lived program in the early 2000s in Baltimore. Snyder (sociology, Williams Coll.; The Disrupted Workplace: Time and the Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism) was allowed to observe the program in-person until it was shut down in 2020. He continued his research until 2023. He explains in-depth the process used by PSS and the BPD and details the problems with the program, which started with the technology itself but went beyond it as well. Low-resolution video, which needed trained analysts to decipher; bad weather and nighttime grounding the plane; ethical concerns about spying on people who were not involved in criminal activity; and the small number of actual convictions doomed the program.