Editor’s note: This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

The Baltimore Police Department’s aerial surveillance pilot program likely strayed outside its own civil liberties assurances by tracking some Baltimoreans over multiple days and failing to delete images after 45 days, according to a new report by New York University’s Policing Project.

The city’s recently concluded Aerial Investigation Research (AIR) pilot program, better known as the “spy planes,” launched into the skies over Baltimore in May. The six-month police department experiment was aimed at helping identify suspects or others linked to violent crimes—primarily murders, shootings, and armed robberies.

In public statements and contract documents, the Baltimore Police Department and private company, Persistent Surveillance Systems, have stated that the Cessna plane’s 12-camera array would only record “short-term surveillance” and track images “linked to a crime scene” based on police requests for that data. The BPD has repeatedly emphasized privacy limits, assuring that individuals would not be tracked over multiple days (the planes did not fly at night) and that any imagery data not related to investigations leading to arrests would be “stored for 45 days, after which point it will be deleted.”

The Policing Project at NYU School of Law found that’s not exactly how things went down.

For example, city police asked Persistent Surveillance Systems to track “any vehicles that may be arriving or leaving” a home belonging to “the mother of the person of interest” (not a crime scene), according to the NYU audit. One vehicle’s movements in mid-July were later tracked during several days as the AIR program captured the same automobile stopping at nine street addresses and two gas stations—noting that, on one day, “a female [was] observed driving Vehicle 1.”

The aerial surveillance alone, Persistent Surveillance Systems and police maintain, cannot specifically identify people. But, as the NYU report emphasized, the pilot program did not solely rely on the plane’s wide-area imaging system. Instead, the AIR program utilized the private company’s software, iView, to integrate BPD’s network of ground-based tech, including CCTV cameras and automated license plate readers. In that way, the whole surveillance package identifies people’s faces and their vehicles, according to NYU. This integrated network was also noted in the police department’s contract with Persistent Surveillance Systems, though not widely discussed publicly. That contract also enables PSS to use the Baltimore Police Department’s computer-aided dispatch, CitiWatch (which includes other private, business, and residential surveillance cameras) and Shot Spotter information to “make all of the systems work together.” The Ohio-based Persistent Surveillance Systems—founded by former Air Force Col. Ross McNutt, who earned a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and first deployed his technology to track Iraqi insurgents—also owns that synthesized data, the contract notes.

In a statement on Friday, the Baltimore Police Department says it stuck to the contract limits, repeating that any aerial images not linked to an arrest will be deleted “after 45 days,” and that aerial imagery of people’s movements in the city was captured “only during the day and never at night,” meaning the program “did not allow for continuous, long term-tracking.” In a Dec. 6 court filing, BPD attorneys admitted the surveillance program specifically tracked the vehicle for short-term tracks on multiple days.

NYU’s Policing Project was brought on by the Baltimore Police Department to audit civil liberties and civil rights issues related to the pilot project. The research was conducted with no expectation of outcomes, project leaders say. The $80,000 evaluation was funded by Arnold Ventures, a data-oriented philanthropic LLC that also paid for other outside evaluations, as well as the $3.7 million aerial surveillance pilot itself.

Among NYU’s findings: For the most part, BPD abided by its contract and public statements “with a few significant deviations.” The six-month Aerial Investigation Research pilot was advertised as a means of tracking individuals “to and from crime scenes,” yet the BPD also issued “supplemental requests” not mentioned in the contract, including requests for data not tied specifically to crime scenes. “Much more data is being stored, and for far longer, than public statements would suggest,” the NYU report found.

Because of where the surveillance planes fly, and where ground surveillance is located in Baltimore, the program “inevitably involves disparate racial impacts,” NYU investigators found.

“The AIR Program presents serious concerns about individual liberty,” the Policing Project noted, proposing stringent privacy limits and lamenting the lack of democratic approval via an elected City Council. It was Baltimore’s bureaucratic Board of Estimates, which approved the agreement championed by then-Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young in April. “AIR collects data on countless Baltimoreans daily,” the report added, “the vast majority of whom have done nothing wrong.”

Overall, the program’s image retention policy is about as clear as the fuzzy human “dots” police and PSS have not-quite-accurately described as “pixels” (vehicles, in fact, can clearly be made out as such). In recent federal court filings involving the ongoing dispute of the project’s constitutional legality, BPD attorneys said movements of people linked to crime scenes, known as “event tracks,” could not be separated from other daily footage stitched together for 30-plus mile views of the city, calling the issue “a ‘matter of semantics’ (e.g., the meaning of the word ‘image.’)”

“This debate is anything but semantic,” countered Farhang Heydari, executive director of NYU Policing Project, whose brief last month prompted the BPD’s response. Heydari says the indefinitely saved data is “readily available for additional future viewing and searching. That isn’t much of a deletion policy at all.”

Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, said the NYU report shores up why the ACLU filed suit against the aerial surveillance program in the first place. “This really just confirms what we have been concerned about and why we thought this program is unconstitutional,” Kaufman says. “We laid out not only why it was possible for government to track people across days, but why it absolutely was part of the intention of the program.”

In April, the ACLU of Maryland, representing Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle and other community advocates, unsuccessfully sued to block the six-month pilot in Baltimore—the first program of its kind in the nation—as a “historical surveillance battle,” citing potential violations of individuals’ First and Fourth Amendment rights. AIR’s last flight landed on Oct. 31, and it’s unclear if the program will resume. Newly sworn-in Mayor Brandon Scott has voiced opposition, saying there’s no proof it works and voicing concerns about residents’ civil rights.

In November, a three-judge panel of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower federal court ruling, which had allowed the pilot (even though the planes were grounded since the six month-period was over at that point). That opinion, and the NYU report, has set off a recent flurry of legal filings, including a supportive brief by the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund to request a rehearing of the case, and noting the program, if continued, would further erode community trust in police and “create additional opportunity to exacerbate racial disparities in policing.”

The aerial surveillance program, however, does have some support in the community, including among churches and organizations now urging the city to launch the planes once again. Joyous Jones is a staunch supporter and an elder at Simmons Memorial Baptist Church, whose parishioners witness open market drug dealings and shootings on nearby streets.

“NYU cannot come into Baltimore to tell us what we need,” says Jones, who has comforted mothers grieving over the loss of their sons to street violence. “They can’t speak for me and for the citizens of Baltimore.”

Mid-term AIR data provided by another BPD-contracted program evaluator, RAND Corporation, in September indicated a slight benefit in crime-solving using aerial surveillance technology. Nineteen of 107 cases (17.8 percent) aided by air evidence were “provisionally closed with arrest” between May 1 and August 20—including six homicides. That data was compared to 124 of 874 target crime cases (or 14.2 percent), in which police made arrests without any help from the plane. The percentage difference: 3.6 percent. The Baltimore Police Department said the data was not complete and drew “no conclusions” about its effectiveness.

That hasn’t stopped PSS, and its owner, McNutt, from closing in on deals elsewhere. A three-year agreement is now being considered by the St. Louis Board of Aldermen, with one alderman on Friday promising the program “would have a significantly positive effect.” St. Louis suffered 247 homicides by Dec. 6, with 179 unsolved. That city’s program, funding to be determined, would track a wider array of crimes beyond the Baltimore Police Department’s four categories of homicide, shootings, car-jackings, and armed robberies. The St. Louis proposal would include burglary, arson, motor vehicle theft, drug trafficking, felony larceny from a motor vehicle, and illegal dumping.

David Rocah, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Maryland, described the group’s battle against the aerial surveillance project as an “Orwellian nightmare come to life” in Charm City.

“If we do not stop it here,” Rocah said, “this technology will surely spread and trample the rights of people in other cities across the country.”

Edited by senior editor Ron Cassie.

I stood underneath the bridge, not looking down more than 800 feet to the river below. 

I had already walked, untethered, along a narrow open catwalk. I grabbed a metal railing, stepping up to climb over and launch off one of the tallest arch bridges in the world, the New River Gorge Bridge in Southern West Virginia.

I should mention—heights terrify me.

My mouth dry, I managed to step blindly backwards, my toes trying to find the lower rim of a girder. I asked the rigging guide: “Can I hold your hand? 

“Yes,” he replied, “but you can’t take me with you.”

The next second, I broke free. And whooosh, I was sailing down the gravity zipline, out beyond bridge steelworks, whirring past a glorious autumnal tree canopy.

“Wooohoooo,” I yelled to the tiny people below.

My zip line exit—designed for amateurs, which I am—is a big hit with visitors to this adventure-charged region of Wild and Wonderful West Virginia, a stretch of Appalachian Mountains also home to eclectic towns like Fayetteville, abundant national forest lands and parks, and some of the East Coast’s most challenging whitewater rapids.

I was in town for Bridge Day 2019—the region’s signature bash which just celebrated its 40th anniversary as America’s largest legally sanctioned BASE jump event. That October weekend, about 400 BASE jumpers plunged from the bridge’s edge (nearly Eiffel Tower height), relying on nothing but the extreme sport’s modified parachutes. Most athletes floated down onto beaches along the New River Gorge National River. Or, if the winds were squirrely, they plunked into tree branches or chilly shallow waters. 

Sadly, Bridge Day, which draws more than 80,000 visitors, is cancelled this year due to the pandemic, though one can get a taste via Virtual Bridge Day this Sat. Oct. 17 with past BASE jump videos, local history chats, and a virtual day-long raffle. (If you’re interested in going to still-planned Bridge Day 2021, area lodgings are often booked well ahead, so no harm in reserving.) The cherished event also features a 5K race, “Taste of Bridge Day” fundraiser, massive craft-and-food fair, and a Chili Cook-Off & Craft Beer Festival in downtown Fayetteville. There’s plenty of spectacle too: BASE jumper “toys” include a red, yellow, and green catapult aptly named “The Human Rastapult.” (An activity definitely not for the faint of blood pressure.) 

Despite the canceled event, this Appalachian wonderland remains a breathtaking outdoor getaway during the pandemic, or any season. The region’s fall color hits its peak in late October, with a sunset-colored tableau of Red Maple, Tulip Poplar, and American Beech. The area boasts hundreds of miles of hiking and biking trails, family-oriented and world-class whitewater rafting, rock climbing, kayaking, stand-up paddle boarding, and a plethora of other adventures.

In fact, Fayetteville, 1.8 miles from the bridge, was named among USA Today’s 2020 Best Small Towns for Adventure for its “small town vibe with big adventure right at its doorstep.” A few town favorites have closed partly due to the pandemic, such as the Twisted Gypsy’s boutique, though new businesses are quickly filling spaces, like The Thread vintage shop on West Maple Avenue. Downtown also spotlights 75 historic homes and buildings, as well as a throwback Ben Franklin Five & Dime, a vintage shop called The Hobbit Hole, and NRG Ink with its welcoming sign: “YAY TATTOOS.” Many of the restaurants have quickly adapted, setting up outdoor seating and staying relatively busy. 

“In a sense we’re lucky,” says Tabitha Stover, executive director of the Fayetteville Visitors Center. “We’re an outdoor town and lean toward outdoor spaces. Social distancing is kind of our jam.” 

In fact, there’s a boom-and-bust, survivalist spirit of reinvention in this longtime coal country. Abandoned, ghost-signed company stores can be seen along winding country roads. And King Coal history can be widely explored, including by car on the 187-mile Coal Heritage Trail, part of the National Coal Heritage Area.

Wider Fayette County is also a rural, patriotic locale. A highway sign in nearby Oak Hill marks the “38th Parallel North: In Honor of Korean War Veterans.” A blend of country traditional and eco-minded hip, there’s something here for nearly every age and point-of-view. (And that’s not surprising, as Fayetteville was apparently fought over during the American Civil War no fewer than four times, held by both the North and South.) 

Here’s what to note when planning a trip:

→ STAY

 

The Fayetteville area is about a five-and-a-half-hour drive from Baltimore and an hour east of Yeager Airport in Charleston, WV, so staying over is a must. Since I was focused more on adventure than lodgings, I bunked at the Comfort Inn New River, which was comfortable, clean, reasonable, and included a free hot breakfast. 

A bit of Fayetteville history: Though he didn’t actually sleep here, Marquis de Lafayette, advisor to George Washington, inspired the town’s name. Lafayette’s statue resides downtown, standing tall in front of the Fayette County Courthouse, and you can stay close by at the historic-yet-modern Lafayette Flats.

Area lodgings range from quaint B&Bs, such as the Historic Morris Harvey House, to rustic park cabins, secluded mountain home rentals, and various chain hotels. A nearby woodsy resort, Adventures on the Gorge, specializes in cabins, including those with cable, WiFi, and hot tubs. The resort also boasts an accordion-brochure full of outdoorsy activities, such as mountain or Fat Kat biking tours, smallmouth bass fishing, tree canopy courses, rock climbing, and rafting.

Numerous private vacation rentals are also available, with names like “Red Roost” and “New River Lofts.” Or digs like “The Bungalow on Maple” if you’re into a townie vibe. (See possible listings at Visit Fayetteville.)

If your goal is getting much closer to nature, camping options also abound in the New River-Greenbrier Valley, including 52 tent sites at Babcock State Park, and other park or private campgrounds with names ranging from Rifrafters Campground to Cooter’s Cabins & Campin’.

→ EAT

 

To get the lay of the culinary land, before travelling I asked BASE jumpers where the best eats could be found. Top of the list: Secret Sandwich Society, where sandwiches are named for world leaders. (The “Roosevelt,” for example, stacks roast beef, bacon, horseradish mayo, and white cheddar on a toasted baguette.) Also on the carry-out menu: fries seasoned with Society “magic powder” and a litany of dipping sauces, such as French onion. (If you can’t decide, each additional sauce only costs 75 cents). 

Fayetteville, in fact, provides fabulous foodie fare: farmer’s markets, restaurants, and cafe combos such as The Stache, where you can buy ice cream and toys. Heartier fare can be found at Pink Pig pit-cooked BBQ or The 304, whose specialties have included the “Southern Mother Klucker” sandwich. (Just be careful how you pronounce that, though I doubt anyone in town would really mind.)

If you want takeout, there’s trendy Pies & Pints pizzeria. And for a down-home feel, stop by the famous Tudor’s Biscuit World for biscuits any time of day. 

“If the apocalypse comes, we’ll always have a Tudor’s and Ben Franklin,” says Stover, who adds that her grandmother is obsessed with the Ben Franklin Store, town purveyor of jams, crafts, and Amish bulk food for 65 years. “Whenever she comes to visit, Ben Franklin is always first on the list.”

→ DRINK

 

At Rafters Lounge in the Holiday Lodge Hotel, where BASE jumpers gather throughout Bridge Day weekend, sports bar-style beers are on tap. Fayetteville visitors can also easily find locales for coffee and tea, or tap into the best of micro-brewed beers or signature heart-of-Appalachia craft moonshine.

For morning bean grinding, there’s Cathedral Cafe, Range Finder Coffee, Wood Iron Eatery, The Station, and elsewhere. (Note: check establishments’ websites for possible closures or COVID-19-related adjustments.) Check out craft beers at Freefolk Brewery or Bridge Brew Works. Or grab a draft at Southside Junction Tap House, Maggie’s Pub, and other dives where patrons can social distance on outdoor patios.

 

→ SHOP

 

For such a small town, there’s a robust downtown shopping scene with one-of-a-kind independent shops, such as dog-friendly Wild Art Wonderful Things—which celebrates West Virginia with handcrafted local crafts, art, and eco-items including Sasquatch stickers and natural pumpkin spice deodorant. One can go antiquing or thrifting and, in the spirit of supporting small businesses, virtual shopping options exist even if you can’t make the trip. 

In fact, one of my favorite stops was The Hobbit Hole, a tucked-away retro store on South Court Street specializing in antique furniture, clothes, jewelry, and “ephemera knickknacks and paddywacks to help you enhance your unique style.” Among the shop’s evolving showcase, online or in-store: a country farmhouse-style lard bucket and a 1988 Buffalo Nickel belt buckle. As owners sum up on the store’s Facebook page: “It is of absolute importance that we keep it kitschy and vintage and weird at all times.”  

 

→ DO & SEE

 

The New River—which is actually one of the oldest rivers on the continent—has worked its geological magic for millions of years, carving out layers of sandstone to create the massive V-shaped gorge, whose deep cliff sides have contained rich, accessible seams of coal. Remnants of the boomtown coal mining industry can be spotted via the nearby Kaymoor Miners Trail (also called Kay Moore), which winds down steep stairs to the abandoned mine with its old coking furnace.

To learn more about regional history and landscapes, visit the Canyon Rim Visitor Center—a beautifully crafted sandstone-and-red oak building off U.S. Route 19 at the bridge. The center, which documents the span bridge’s construction, is closed amidst the pandemic, but park rangers are staffing an outdoor information site. There’s also a short hiking trail, handicapped-accessible wooden boardwalk, and bridge observation decks. And, if you like a catwalk adrenaline rush, you can book an official tethered Bridge Walk, a dizzying bridge-underbelly tour.

Overall, the region’s famous multi-season draw will always be the righteous whitewater rapids—which are relatively calm along the Upper New River and ramp up to Class V on the Upper Gauley River, known as the “Beast of the East.” If you’re in need of gear, Fayetteville is also packed with outfitters such as Water Stone Outdoors and New River Mountain Guides.

Those bound to the earth for exercise can check out abundant hiking trails in the 70,000-acre New River Gorge National Park, including the signature 12-mile Arrowhead Trails (mostly easy to intermediate) created by national Boy Scouts in 2011. Biking trails crisscross the county, including the eclectic Arrowhead Bike Farm and Campground, where you can rent a mountain bike, nosh on a Mojo pork taco, throw back a Punk IPA, and sleep over via RV or tent.

Yet overall, Bridge Day is truly the uber-exciting annual attraction. The High Line I zipped down (launching near one end of the bridge, you slide diagonally 700 feet, dropping 300 feet, or Statue of Liberty height. So take that, fear!) is staged only that weekend. I was inspired to hit the gravity line by all the BASE jumpers’ infectious enthusiasm.

While Fayette County and environs vibrate with fun, Bridge Day is juiced with adrenaline (and Red Bull), yet also remarkably chill. BASE, after all, carries the relaxed, rebel vibe of surfers, skateboarders and snowboarders: Wild West athletes on the forefront of their not-always-sanctioned sport.

As I heard one jumper, who witnessed a multi-backflip freefall, respectfully toast: “F*ck, dude. That’s rad.”

Editor’s note: This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

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On the sweltering afternoon of June 6, thousands of protesters gathered in front of Baltimore’s Harriet Tubman Solidarity Center on North Charles Street. Organizers passed out dozens of backpacks full of water bottles, granola bars, first aid kits, and hand sanitizer to volunteer medics. An informal motorcade, including a van spray painted with “Black Lives Matter,” accompanied the demonstration, which eventually wound past the city jail, the Douglass Homes public housing complex, Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) headquarters, and City Hall. Trucks bore poster images of unarmed Black men and women killed at the hands of police: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and a litany of others.

The Saturday demonstration grew into one of Baltimore’s largest public protests against police brutality and police department militarization since the death of Freddie Gray in 2015. Rev. Annie Chambers, an East Baltimore community activist who marched with Rev. Martin Luther King, addressed the crowd via a megaphone before the march began: “We are ready. We are fired up! We won’t take it anymore!” An estimated 8,000 protesters turned out, chanting “No Justice, No Peace,” joining solidarity marches in cities worldwide.

In the sky above Rev. Chambers and the throng of protesters, a plane could be seen briefly circling, passing behind a cloud, and re-emerging. No one seemed to be looking up, but the Cessna T207’s battlefield-developed HawkEye II Wide Area Surveillance System cameras were looking down, and recording people’s movements as protesters began marching, chanting “Say His Name” and “George Floyd” as they reached the shadows of Green Mount Cemetery.

Almost daily since late April, that Cessna propeller plane—equipped with a 192 mega-pixel, full-color video camera system—has been flying in circles over Baltimore at altitudes between 4,000 and 9,000 feet, up to 11 hours a day. Launched after surviving an ACLU court challenge filed on behalf of local civil liberties activists, the Baltimore police “spy plane” program, as it is derided by critics, has hit the halfway point of its six-month pilot run.

After more than 700 hours aloft over the city, just one arrest has been made with aid from the program’s imagery data, according to BPD. Meanwhile, major Black Lives Matters protests have been among public street activities widely captured and recorded.

In late June, a second video camera-equipped Cessna also took off over the city, sporadically migrating out into surrounding counties. A third is on the way, police say. Soon, everything that Baltimore’s 600,000 residents do outdoors in 90 percent of the city’s 92 square miles could be recorded by a near-constant eye-in-the-sky. Known formally as the BPD Aerial Investigation Research Pilot Program, the initiative is, for all intents and purposes, a high-cost reboot of the secretive 2016 surveillance collaboration between an embattled BPD and the private Dayton, Ohio-based company Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS). The tab for the $3.7 million experiment is being picked up by a third-party—Arnold Ventures, LLC, a data-oriented philanthropic fund run by a billionaire former Enron trader and hedge fund manager, and his wife. Arnold Ventures funded the 2016 surveillance flights, too.

For Baltimore police, the purpose of the do-over is not to track protesters, who are likely scooped up in the automatic surveillance net (along with residents, visitors, and workers in the city), but to locate witnesses, suspects, and vehicles related to serious “target crimes” such as homicides and armed robberies. For Persistent Surveillance Systems, the intention goes beyond helping city detectives solve crimes: Baltimore is a testing ground to help market the company’s technology nationwide. Why the repeat performance here? For starters, poor record-keeping by the police department apparently hindered any real study of the 2016 surveillance effort. According to reporting by the Baltimore Sun two years later, the best anyone can tell is that aerial footage may, or may not have, played a role in closing one of the roughly 100 murder cases during the 2016 flights.

Despite the hue and cry after Bloomberg Businessweek broke the surveillance story in 2016, Baltimore Mayor Bernard C. “Jack” Young and the Board of Estimates, where Young influences the majority of votes, approved the current pilot contract on April 1. In doing so, Baltimore earned the dubious honor of becoming the first U.S. city to contractually agree to be continually monitored by surveillance planes.

This time, at least, outside researchers from New York University and the RAND Corporation—albeit funded by the same entity paying for the pilot, Arnold Ventures—have been hired to evaluate the initiative. Morgan State University researchers, with funding from the Abell Foundation, will be also provided with imagery, investigative reports, and other information.

In April, David Rocah, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of Maryland, had called it “absurd” to consider the plan in the midst of a pandemic and stay-at-home orders. That said, community response has been mixed. Though controversial, the aerial surveillance program has some local support, including more than 70 percent of 500 city residents polled late last year. Ross T. McNutt, a former U.S. Air Force officer and PSS founder, has claimed his surveillance operation can dramatically reduce cities’ murder rates­—throwing out a figure of 20-30 percent—by solving and deterring crimes. City Council President Brandon Scott, the Democratic nominee for mayor and an outspoken opponent of the surveillance planes, tried to defer a contract vote, then voted against it.

“It’s nothing other than a gimmick,” Scott says of the promise that surveillance planes will put violent criminals behind bars and reverse the shooting epidemic in Baltimore. “It’s nothing other than someone trying to play against a city that’s hurting with violence, and that’s why people will reach out to something like this because they’re looking for anything. But it won’t replace a real plan for public safety…We shouldn’t be the guinea pigs. But we are.”

A researcher with a doctorate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as former Air Force officer, McNutt developed his wide-area persistent surveillance system—multiple cameras placed at different angles at the bottom of a plane, with their video feeds stitched together by computers—for hunting down bombing suspects on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan. Seeing its effectiveness in the Middle East, McNutt has said, it dawned on him that his surveillance system could be converted for use in urban America. After leaving the military in 2007, he set up his venture in the hangar of a small airport outside Dayton, Ohio—home to the airplane’s inventors, the pioneering Wright brothers, whose 1903 first flight was soon weaponized when the U.S. Army became the brothers’ first government customer. For more than a decade, he has been trying to sell his technology to cities and local law enforcement agencies.

McNutt, whose jocular high football coach demeanor belies a sharp engineering mind and relentless salesmanship, has compared his technology to “a live version of Google Earth,” with a rewind button. Under the Baltimore agreement, surveillance footage is to be played back later, like TiVo, upon request from police investigators. “You can follow someone back from a murder scene, to the house they came from, and then to the house they go to,” McNutt explained for a pitch just a few months ago in Kansas City, MO.

McNutt has tried to work his magic coast-to-coast, and beyond. In 2012, the Los Angeles County’s Sheriff’s Department and McNutt’s planes tried wide-area surveillance over Compton, California, without notifying residents or elected leaders. In 2014, he pitched Dayton the idea, but ran into stiff civil liberties opposition from the community. In 2016, without knowledge of the mayor, City Council, or citizens, then-Baltimore Police Department Commissioner Kevin Davis permitted the months-long surveillance until the program was exposed. (Ever the true-believer, the publicity-seeking McNutt fully cooperated with Bloomberg Businessweek to break the story of the undisclosed flights.)

In 2017, Miami-Dade police expressed interest, but that inquiry was also beaten back by privacy advocates. He tried Philadelphia, to no avail. McNutt did get a brief commission from the city of Juarez, Mexico, in 2009, where his company tackled various crimes, including helping solve a murder via a rather impressive analysis. He has also landed one-off coverage of events, including a NASCAR race and the Ohio political rally where Sen. John McCain announced Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, but otherwise he failed to nab a big contract from a city.

“I don’t have good statistical data yet,” McNutt told Bloomberg Businessweek in 2016, referring to Baltimore, “but that’s part of the reason we’re here.”

With homicides totaling more than 300 annually for the past five years and the highest per capita murder rate in its history last year, Charm City serves as a seemingly irresistible test site for McNutt and Persistent Surveillance Systems, but the plan is problematic for other reasons: Surveillance so far has predominately centered on majority Black neighborhoods in the city. Since taking off this spring, the initial plane has generally flown in wide circles around Southwest and West Baltimore—sections of the city with large Black populations—as well as Southeast neighborhoods and downtown, according to online flight trackers based on FAA and other flight data sources. Overall, the police department says, flights are scheduled over areas where BPD data indicates most homicides occur, and the images it records are used after a crime has been committed and an initial investigation determines aerial footage might be helpful.

“The route for the AIR Pilot Program is based on data to support investigation of only serious offenses, to include murder, non-fatal shootings, armed robberies and car-jackings crime categories,” BPD communications director Lindsey Eldridge says. “The program is not real-time, active surveillance, but is only used for investigative look-backs for crimes within the specific categories described above [and] can only be accessed if an incident has occurred within those categories.”

Vehicles can be seen in the images, though McNutt—who did not respond to several requests for a comment for this story—and Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison have said the planes’ cameras only collect low-resolution “dots,” which indicate a person but cannot identify physical characteristics such as race or facial features. (The “dot” often looks more like an elongated “line” during analyses, according to McNutt’s presentations, and the PSS website says the HawkEye II provides a 1/2-meter resolution—the ability of a sensor to pick up objects a half-meter in size or more. McNutt told viewers watching a recorded murder during a presentation to the ACLU: “This is your victim. And you can actually see the guy doubling over, there.”)

Police plan to identify suspects or witnesses partly by cross-checking images with the department’s 750-plus CitiWatch CCTV video cameras, as well as license plate readers and other policing tech. It’s worth noting that PSS, not the police department, owns the imagery data collected. Under the contract, however, unrequested data is to be deleted by PSS after 45 days, and PSS cannot sell images elsewhere. Data requested by police for investigations becomes part of a case’s permanent file.

How are things going at the halfway mark? As of July 27, according to the police department, 72 aerial imagery analysis, or “evidentiary packets,” have been forwarded from PSS, at the request of the BPD, to police investigators. According to BPD, one homicide arrest to date has been made at least partly based on aerial surveillance. In a second shooting case, a vehicle and person of interest have been identified with the assistance of aerial surveillance. Those investigations are ongoing. Meanwhile, homicides in Baltimore continue unabated despite the planes and a raging pandemic that is keeping many people indoors.

The city counted 191 homicides by late July, compared to 196 by the same time last year, as reported by the Sun, keeping pace to approach last year’s 348 murders, a rate of 57 killings per 100,000 people, the worst homicide rate in the city’s history.

More recently, a second Cessna T207, has started widening the surveillance range, circling or crisscrossing neighborhoods including Charles Village, Belair-Edison, Hampden, and Roland Park. A possible red flag: the second plane has also taken unexplained jags out into Baltimore, Howard, and Anne Arundel counties, according to publicly available flight data. Police say images are only captured within Baltimore city limits, though even the BPD project’s “Total Coverage” plan appears to go outside city boundaries. During some orbits, PSS-hired planes have flown over Towson, Lutherville-Timonium, and Middle River, among other areas, meaning they’ve at least been capable of recording county residents’ movements outside as well.

Both Commissioner Harrison and Baltimore County leaders said they are unaware of such flights. Harrison points out that BPD doesn’t control precisely where the planes go. “Though we don’t control the planes, we’re under contract and it’s to their advantage to live up to it, because we’re their first client,” Harrison says.

Dori Henry, Baltimore County’s communications director, said PSS has not contacted county officials nor the police department about its flights, and they have no knowledge of data being collected in the county. “We currently have no plans to use such technology,” she adds. Baltimore County Councilman David Marks, who represents Towson and other areas, said he was unaware of any notifications to the county when presented with an aerial map. “I am not opposed to surveillance planes to reduce crime,” Marks says. “I believe we need many tools to reduce what seems to be an escalating crime rate, but I do not appreciate city-operated surveillance without consultation with Baltimore County officials.”

Meanwhile, concerns about the infringement of civil liberties, in particular the potential for abuse in the filming of Black Lives Matter activists and other protesters, remain. So does uneasiness about putting a massive new surveillance tool in the hands of a police department currently under a U.S. Department of Justice consent decree, in the wake of a 2017 federal finding of widespread racial bias, corruption, and police brutality.

Federal aerial surveillance planes are in the air, too, across the nation. The Department of Homeland Security has surveilled Black Lives Matter protests from the air in at least 15 U.S. cities, recording weeks of protesters’ movements on the streets following Floyd’s death—dispatching drones, helicopters, and planes, according to reports by The New York Times.

On June 1 in Baltimore, the city’s PSS-operated surveillance planes were in the air when thousands of protesters flooded I-83 and other areas, and airborne during the massive protest on June 6, and later on June 12, when the flight path encompassed City Hall as protesters painted “DEFUND THE POLICE” on Gay Street as the City Council debated the proposed $550-million police budget.

The Cessna T207 and its battlefield-developed cameras flew overhead the next day again, circling near protests outside Douglass Homes. A week later, during a Juneteenth tribute, the plane’s path tracked close to other peaceful demonstrations downtown, according to flight tracker data. And when the statue of Christopher Columbus was lassoed, pulled down, smashed up and rolled away by protesters chanting: “Hey, hey, ho, ho, this racist guy has got to go!” on Independence Day? The surveillance plane flew nearly directly overhead as Columbus was dumped, headless, into Baltimore’s Inner Harbor.

Baltimore police say the planes are not targeting protesters at all. “Protests are not included in the scope of the AIR Pilot Program and there are no scenarios of the [aerial surveillance] following public protest on city streets,” Eldridge says. In an e-mail responding to a Baltimore magazine query about the Columbus statue removal by protesters on July 4, which Harrison said is being investigated, Eldridge emphasized that “the AIR Pilot Program is NOT being used in any investigation of the Columbus Statue.”

While police say they aren’t surveilling protesters, under the contract it appears they technically can. The police commissioner, if he requests in writing, can access surveillance “in addition to target crimes…in extraordinary and exigent circumstances,” and in “real time.” Harrison has not requested any real-time footage, Eldridge says.

Regardless, critics argue that incessant, Orwellian-style surveillance affects individuals’ sense of freedom to express First Amendment-protected speech.

Rocah, of the ACLU of Maryland, says the planes are a problem for everyone, including those “who came to a demonstration and who they met with, and where all those people live and what they do….That is dangerous [and] fundamentally incompatible with a democratic society. That is not a power that the government should have in a democracy.”

The FBI, which contends it does not monitor activity protected by the First Amendment, keeps a fleet of higher-resolution surveillance planes, one which flew over Washington, D.C. protests in June. According to BuzzFeed, which has tracked the plane’s flight paths, it’s the same aircraft that notoriously flew over Baltimore during unrest after Gray’s death in 2015. At the time, the FBI claimed the planes took video surveillance of Baltimore streets to help local police prevent violence. Yet footage later acquired by the ACLU and reported by BuzzFeed revealed apparently peaceful protests and marches in Baltimore were recorded as well.

At the moment, there is nothing Baltimoreans can do to stop the remainder of the pilot from continuing. A U.S. District Court judge allowed the pilot to go forward in April, but that decision is being appealed by the ACLU, with a court hearing likely later this summer. The ACLU argues that Baltimore’s aerial surveillance pilot program poses a long-term threat, whatever the current limited-scope guarantees. “Although there are no indications that the BPD has used this program to target particular protesters, it continues to record video of every protester’s daytime movements in Baltimore, in violation of their First Amendment rights,” says Ashley Gorski, staff attorney for the ACLU National Security Project. “We have serious concerns about how it may be used in Baltimore and throughout the country.”

Harrison, not surprisingly, sees things differently. He compares the recordings to smartphones that have been used widely to livestream or record protests and “many other devices and cameras that are being used without regulation.” Unsaid, of course, is that those smartphones are not in the hands of local or federal law enforcement. Still, he assures that the police department intends to stick to the intended purposes in the contract.

In truth, Harrison appears ambivalent about the whole project. About 18 months into the job, after arriving from New Orleans amid high expectations, he has helped reform police department operations, but been unable to curb shootings thus far. Under pressure, like so many other Baltimore leaders, he seems willing to try almost anything, including 40-year-old Cessnas equipped with 21st-century tech. “It’s not a single tool that leads to arrests,” he says. “Sometimes even the best technology just can’t give you what you need. It seems as though it has taken us a long time to get to where we’re using it effectively,” adds Harrison, who initially resisted using the “untested” approach. “We started off with zero expectations. I’m not either happy or sad about the results yet. We’re just waiting to see what the data shows.”

Harrison also admits the program likely is not worth taxpayers funding the hefty price tag, potentially as high as $8 million annually based on the pilot, after the privately-funded pilot program runs out. “It probably would not be supported publicly, because of the dollar amount and its outcomes thus far.”

Meanwhile, on the PSS website, the company is already advertising the program’s efficacy. On its homepage, the “Information on Baltimore” tab links to a “Community Support Program” featuring an image of Baltimore and unproven claims, including “Our program helps law enforcement [in] deterring crimes before they are committed.” Harrison partly opposed the program over the company’s prediction the technology would reduce the city’s “the murder rate by 20 to 30 percent,” and other “unsubstantiated claims.”

In a March virtual community forum, Harrison admitted “the hardest thing to track is deterrence.”

“For me, the planes shouldn’t be there, period,” says Scott, the 36-year-old City Council President, who knows something about experimental policing programs and describes them as a distraction that won’t resolve Baltimore’s wider crime problems. He grew up in Baltimore’s Park Heights neighborhood when the now-controversial Zero Tolerance era of policing launched in the 1990s.“The plane has not been proven to do what they say it’s going to do.”

There are other downsides to aerial surveillance over the city, beyond First and Fourth Amendment issues. Already, some residents have protested the oppressive, unceasingly loud drone when the large Cessna T207 Turbo Stationair 8 with its 300-horsepower engine, flies at 6,000 feet or lower, sometimes due to clouds, other times in fair weather, flight data shows.

Many city residents, particularly in West and East Baltimore have essentially grown up in neighborhoods already surveilled, including the old police “blue light” cameras and now CitiWatch CCTV video cameras and the noisy Foxtrot helicopter, with its high-powered beams. And there are questions to consider about whether constant aerial surveillance is likely to build trust between communities and police—an established key to solving and preventing crime—or erode it further.

There are also considerations about the trauma associated with living under unceasing police surveillance.

Andre Powell of the Peoples Power Assembly helped organize the June 6 march. Wearing a black T-shirt reading “Stonewall still means fight back,” he stepped inside the Tubman center’s small office to talk about the surveillance plane, which has been on his mind.

“Surveillance can create insecurity in the community. I know it. I’ve lived it,” says Powell, who described police helicopters as a constant overhead presence for decades over Black communities in the city, especially during the hot Baltimore summers. “Police say it’s for crime prevention purposes. Now they just have a sanctioned way to track people day after day.”

“You can’t walk down the streets in peace,” he adds, describing one afternoon strolling along St. Paul Street. “A helicopter stopped above me, shining its light down on me, so I looked up to see what they were looking at. And this was in the middle of the day,” he says. Three police cars pulled up. “They asked where I was going and what I was doing. They were looking for a guy in a short gray coat, and I was wearing a long black coat. It was all just because I was Black.”

“It creates a feeling of helplessness, a feeling that you are trapped and constantly being watched, and that creates resentment,” Powell adds. “It’s all part of the constant targeting of people of color that creates resentment that builds up. So we march in the streets.”

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Baltimore Senior Editor Ron Cassie edited and contributed to this report.