Last Sunday, a huge sideshow on International Boulevard resulted in a chase of one of the participants by two Oakland police officers. When the fleeing perp reached a speed of 100 miles an hour, the two cops gave up the chase—too dangerous. But the perp crashed into a line of parked cars and motorcycles, as a result of which an innocent pedestrian who just happened to be walking by was killed. The two officers were placed on routine administrative leave, OPD Chief LeRonne Armstrong announced on Monday at a hastily-called news conference. (In addition to this most recent death, last March a man was shot to death, and possibly struck by a rogue vehicle, at a sideshow near I-880.)
At the news conference, I asked the Chief if drones had been utilized in investigating the more recent incident. He replied that they had not, but it got me thinking about the potential role drones can play in sideshows, which are a serious and growing problem in Oakland. So I did a little investigating.
Given the danger of officers physically entering a sideshow and making arrests—they and their vehicles are routinely attacked if they try to do so—drones would seem the be the ideal solution: Take a video of the cars and participants at a safe aerial distance. Zoom in on license plates. Trace the plates to owners. Show up at their houses the next day, arrest them if possible, and seize their cars. Do this enough, and perps, who aren’t the brightest bulbs, will figure out that Oakland isn’t a very good place to have sideshows.
Sounds good, but it’s not that simple. Never is.
Oakland currently owns 4 drones: Two large ones and two smaller ones that can actually “go interior,” through a window or doorway. In fact, OPD recently sent one of the small drones into a house in which an armed man who was fleeing the cops took refuge. The man was apprehended.
The City of Oakland did not pay for the four drones; city law prohibits that. Instead, the drones, valued at $80,000, were paid for through a grant from the Oakland Chinatown Improvement Council and California Waste Solutions, with the approval of the City Council, the city’s Privacy Advisory Commission and the Oakland Police Commission. Chief Armstrong, announcing the grant in March, said the drones would not be used for general surveillance, but only for high-risk situations in which a bird’s-eye view would be helpful, such as search and rescue missions, searches for persons who are missing or wanted, standoffs with barricaded suspects and as a tool to help with de-escalation. Sideshows were not mentioned, but in fact there have been recent uses of drones in Oakland to investigate sideshows. For instance, in May, on Cinco de Mayo, a drone helped police bust up a sideshow, resulting in 60 cars being seized and two arrests.
Yet there are considerable obstacles to the use of drones in any circumstances, including sideshows. As Chief Armstrong noted, they can only be used for certain purposes. Drone operators need to get OPD Command approval; they can’t just launch a drone because they feel like it. Another challenge is that sometimes OPD actually has to call the Federal Aviation Administration, in Washington, D.C. or one of its field offices, to request permission to launch: with so many nearby airports, the FAA requires “remote pilots [to] receive FAA authorization to fly in airspace near airports.” In addition, FAA rules “include not flying over people or at night,” although police agencies “may apply for waivers…”. All this adds to the time required to get a drone actually up in the air, and of course, criminal situations do not await the timetables of bureaucrats.
Drone operators themselves are not immune to violence. I had thought that the operators sat somewhere safe, in a computer room at OPD headquarters, operating the machines remotely through their computers, the way that we see, in movies and on T.V., CIA operators in Washington running drones thousands of miles away in Afghanistan. While such technology does exist, OPD doesn’t have it. Instead, every time a drone is used here, three officers are required “in the field,” at the actual location of the incident: an operator focusing on the drone itself; a lookout person, who watches out for potential problems or threats; and a third officer, to protect the first two. (The officers must also, of course, act to prevent perps from shooting the drone down.) In the middle of a chaotic sideshow, this isn’t easy. As a longtime OPD officer told me, the evolution of sideshows has resulted in them being far more dangerous. “When I was out there, 20 years ago,” he recalls, “I felt comfortable walking into a crowd of 500 cars. It was a social scene, a dating scene, an American pastime. Now, you can’t do that. They’ll throw bottles, assault officers, police cars get shot at, bricks through windows, weapons fired. Long gone are the days of cruising. There’s now a very dark element to it that has never been there before.” All this makes the use of drones even more vital.
Another challenge to using drones is that California law is not up-to-date in dealing with sideshows. Currently, state law prohibits “vehicle exhibition speeding” or aiding or abetting in that type of street racing. A conviction results in jail time for not more than 90 days, a fine of not more than $500 or both jail time and the fine. A new law (AB3, by Assemblyman Vince Fong, R-Bakersfield) adds a driver’s license suspension for up to six months to the punishment and restricts the convicted offender to driving only for the purposes of their employment. Still, these anti-sideshow laws always seem to be fighting yesterday’s battles. As the longtime OPD officer observes, “You need legislation that goes after event organizers, the participants, those who are actually doing the sideshows and those who are there observing.” Such legislation does not currently exist.
The good news, despite all these obstacles, is that OPD is making steady progress against sideshows. They have to negotiate, as always, a treacherous path, treading carefully between hawks on the City Council, the PAC and the Police Commission, many of whom don’t like cops and wish to limit their effectiveness. What OPD has going for it is that valuable but intangible factor, public opinion. As long as people feel unsafe—and we do--we will pressure anti-police electeds to put their ideologies aside and do what they’re supposed to do: protect us.
Steve Heimoff