Drones Decipher Crash Causes: Drone use continues to grow, saving time and money but raising privacy concerns.

• Author: Bergal, Jenni
• Position: DRONES

When police investigators tried to figure out what caused a multivehicle crash that killed an elderly woman in Morton, Ill., last summer, they looked to the sky for help.

Like a growing number of police agencies throughout the country, the sheriffs office in Tazewell County relied on a drone to quickly take photographs of the scene from on high to help investigators reconstruct the crash.

"It's about a hundred times more detailed than what we could do with people taking the measurements," Chief Deputy Jeff Lower says. "And it means that there's much less time for the road to be closed and traffic to be backed up."

For decades, police investigators at crash scenes used chalk marks, tape measures and roller-wheels to record measurements and skid marks to help them assess what happened. More recently, many have used a laser scanning tool to map the scene. But often, those measurements can take hours, during which lanes may need to be shut down or the road closed entirely, putting emergency responders and crash investigators in harm's way near traffic whizzing past.

Now, more police agencies are turning to drones, unmanned aerial vehicles, to do that work. Remote pilots send up the drones, which take high-resolution photos that are fed into a computer and run through software. That creates 3D models that piece everything together for investigators.

And while privacy and civil rights advocates strongly oppose law enforcement using drones for mass surveillance, such as at a protest rally, or for gathering criminal evidence without a warrant, they generally are not as concerned when it comes to car crashes.

"Filming a traffic accident overhead to get a better view, if it's strictly limited to that purpose, is not the sort of thing that we would necessarily object to," says Chad Marlow, a senior counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union in New York.

Jeramie D. Scott, national security counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research group, agreed that it is "less likely" his group would be concerned about using drones for crash reconstruction, as long as there wasn't some type of surveillance involved in collecting information about individuals.

"The risk," Scott says, "is that without rules protecting privacy, law enforcement will use drones to conduct surveillance, including general surveillance of groups."

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