California Senate Bans Warrantless Police Drones – Hooray!

Earlier this month the California State
Assembly voted to require
police to obtain warrants to use drones for surveillance except
in exigent circumstances. Now the State Senate has handily passed
the legislation with a 25 to 8 vote. The bill would
require the police to obtain a search warrant based on probable
cause before using a drone for surveillance.

When the Assembly passed the bill, some astute Reason
commenters wondered if police do not have to obtain a warrant for
helicopter surveillance, why should they be required to get one for
drone surveillance? In the 1989 case Florida
v. Riley, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that since airplanes and
helicopters often fly over private property that citizens do not
have a reasonable expectation of privacy that their activities will
not be observed. Consequently, the police were permitted use a
evidence obtained without a search warrant from helicopter
observation of a greenhouse in which they suspected marijuana was
being grown.

Despite this disappointing Supreme Court decision, citizens,
nevertheless, could generally count on the fact that police would
not be resorting to extensive aerial surveillance due to the cost
and trouble in arranging for helicopter flights. That would no
longer be the case with development of inexpensive drones.

What the California legislation does is establish that citizens
do, in effect, have a reasonable expectation that they will be free
of pervasive police drone surveillance. Hooray! Every state should
pass such bans as speedily as possible.