“A Great, Looming Concern”: Law Enforcement Pushes for Local Counter-Drone Authority

By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill

Earlier this month, sheriff’s deputies in Marlboro County, S.C. arrested two men after recovering a large package of drugs and cellphones, which the men allegedly dropped from a drone flying above the Evans Correctional Institution in Bennettsville.

The incident is just the most recent example of the use of drones for criminal purposes and one reason why leaders of state and local law enforcement agencies and organizations are calling on Congress to pass legislation that would give them greater authority to detect – and possibly even interdict – UAVs flown by bad actors.

D.J. Smith, senior technical surveillance agent and unmanned aerial and counter-UAS systems program coordinator for the Virginia State Police, said that at the minimum Congress should pass legislation to give state and local police agencies the authority to employ advanced detection capability, to decode the radio signals traveling between a drone and its pilot.

Such authorization is contained in House Bill 124N, one of several pieces of counter-UAS legislation pending before Congress.

Currently law enforcement personnel can use DJI Aeroscope, which enables them to identify DJI drones by monitoring and analyzing their electronic signals, but they have no way to accomplish the same analysis on non-DJI drones.

“Technically we could probably hit 70 to 80 percent of the market with DJI Aeroscope or Aerial Armor which is a cyber-sanitized version of it. The problem is, with all the other ones we’re not able to track and classify what they are,” said Smith, a covert surveillance and counter-UAS expert.

Smith said the increasing number of incidents involving drones flying in airspace where they have no right to be — such as over prisons, critical infrastructure facilities such as dams and power plants, and stadiums full of sports fans – has led to a bipartisan push in Congress to increase local oversight of drone traffic.

“I think it’s not a contentious issue across the aisle. I think Democrats, Republicans and Independents all agree it’s something that has to happen,” he said.

In April 2022, the Biden administration issued the Domestic Counter-Unmanned Aircraft Systems National Action Plan, which created a roadmap for dealing with nefarious drone activity. Much of the legislation currently being proposed is based on that plan.

For example, Senate Bill 1631 would create a pilot program to allow a select group of state, local, tribal and territorial (SLTT) law enforcement agencies take actions “that are necessary to mitigate a credible threat” from errant drones. The bill would allow the U.S. attorney general to designate up to 12 SLTT agencies for participation in the pilot program, and designate addition agencies each year thereafter, for a total of up to 60 agencies over the five-year period of the pilot program.

The bill would also authorize the creation of “a federal database to enable the transmission of data concerning security-related incidents in the United States involving unmanned aircraft and unmanned aircraft systems between federal, state, local, tribal, and territorial law enforcement agencies for purposes of conducting analyses of such threats in the United States.”

Smith said the creation of a database to record all the drone incursion incidents taking place across the country is a critical piece in establishing a national counter-drone security system. “Right now, we’re not tracking incidents with drones,” he said. “911 taught us a painful lesson, which was that with all the small things, if we tied them together, we would have seen the bigger picture.”

He gave the example of a drone pilot in California caught improperly flying a drone above a nuclear power plant or a dam. “It may seem very innocuous at that particular time, but maybe a week later, or a week before that, he was here in Virginia, at a nuclear power plant shooting video,” he said. Taken together, the two seemingly unrelated incidents could point to a larger potential security threat.

“Malicious actors with drones are probably one of our fastest growing concerns that needs capable response,” said Oakland County, Michigan Sheriff Michael Bouchard.

As head of government affairs for the Major County Sheriffs of America, an organization representing the largest sheriff’s offices in America, Bouchard said he thought that SLLT police agencies should have the same counter-drone authority as federal agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of Defense (DOD).

“The only time it would be utilized is if they’re operating in a manner that’s illegal or dangerous,” he said. “We’re not concerned about hobbyists or anybody that’s operating under the parameters of the law.”

Bouchard said he thought that Congress was not moving fast enough to pass counter-drone legislation in the face of what he thinks is a fast-emerging threat.

“We see this as a great looming concern,” Bouchard said. “You’ve seen NFL football games have to stop because of a drone flight. You’ve seen massive concerts have to stop because of drone flights.”

He added that in some cases, even medical helicopter flights have been interrupted because of interference by unthinking or malicious drone pilots.

“Most people see that it’s a problem, and agree it’s a concern, but they’re just taking far too long to do something about it,” he said. “In my opinion, Congress will be holding hearings within a couple years saying, ‘Why didn’t we do something about it before something terrible happened?’ And we can get in front of it now.”

Smith said his congressional sources have informed him that it’s unlikely the any counter-drone authorization legislation will pass this year. “I’m being told probably not, because of the budget and some other bills like that,” he said. “They’re saying maybe in first quarter of next year, it’ll be taken back up in Congress.”

He said he thinks that some form of advanced detection legislation will pass before any more extensive drone mitigation bill does. However, he thinks that any bill that increases law enforcement’s abilities to police the skies will be a good first step.

“I think if the federal government does the rollout of expanded authorities to SLTT public safety and critical infrastructure right, and puts in the financial support it will need, that can be the foundational piece for advanced air mobility projects, as well as securing the homeland,” he said.

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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.