“It is about speed and a bird’s-eye-view where you can track suspects a lot easier than you could on the ground,” said Ward 5 Alderman Brooks Schandelmeier.
Since June 2023, council members and city police officials have been in discussion with officials in Hagerstown, who have an existing drone program, to learn more about the capabilities of the unmanned aircraft.
Law enforcement in Washington County began using drones in 2023 to track and apprehend dirt bike riders pulsing through the city’s streets and sidewalks. The drones allowed police to follow the vehicles to their final destination without endangering the public.
“It expands our capabilities and allows our officers to operate much more safely,” said Hagerstown Police Captain Tom Langston. In November, Langston demonstrated the drones to several Annapolis officials, including Schandelmeier and Police Chief Ed Jackson.
Though talks continue — a follow-up to another, more recent demonstration will take place soon, Schandelmeier said — launching the program will take some time.
Annapolis Police Maj. Stan Brandford, the department’s deputy chief, has also seen what the new drones can do. The department has an older model that’s deployed “sparingly,” he said, but only a couple of officers are trained to fly it.
Brandford said the idea of bringing more drones to Annapolis was still in its “infancy” and that making sure the public understands how the technology will be used is an essential step before any drones hit the sky.
“There’s always concern. … Big Brother is watching,” Brandford said Thursday. “There has to be some groundwork as to what this structure is going to look like, and some policies need to be written to figure out what they’ll be used for.”
In Hagerstown, the drones do several things, Langston said. According to department policy, the drones can be used to look for missing persons, monitor large events or reconstruct traffic accidents. They can provide information to first responders in tactical or emergency situations, and in the minutes after a crime is committed, they can be used to locate suspects and document the scene.
Schandelmeier said the drones can track people’s body heat and pinpoint where they are in a covered area, like the woods.
The Annapolis government is still deciding what roles the drones would play locally.
“We haven’t really talked about potential uses as it pertains to crime or law enforcement,” Brandford said.
As he envisioned it, Schandelmeier said the drone fleet would not be a “constant monitoring tool,” like the spy plane deployed by Baltimore City Police in 2020. A year after it was launched, once nearly 6.7 million images were taken, federal judges deemed the program unconstitutional and most of the data — which slightly helped detectives make arrests — was deleted.
Schandelmeier said the council will ask residents for input.
The Hagerstown Police policy does include restrictions on the drones. Broadly, they may be used only “to support official law enforcement and public safety activities,” such as “actual deployments [and] training exercises.” And only FAA-trained officers may operate them.
Their recordings and data are stored, but may be released through public information laws, the policy states.
The city’s Office of Law would have to draw up language in its policy to address privacy concerns and ensure civil rights, Schandelmeier said.
By Thursday, it had been over a year since the alderman first learned about the drones in Hagerstown. He said he’s impatient to bring them to Annapolis but understands it is something that needs to be done judiciously.
“It’s something we want to get right,” Schandelmeier said. “So, I understand a good part of it, where we want to make sure when we do things, we do them right, we cover our bases, we dot our i’s. But I want to play with my toys now.”
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