Since Congress passed legislation in February ordering the Federal Aviation Administration to fast-track the approval of unmanned aerial vehicles—more colloquially known as drones—for use by law enforcement agencies, police and sheriff departments across the country have been scrambling to purchase the smaller, unarmed cousins of the Predator and Reaper drones which carry out daily sorties over Afghanistan, Yemen, and other theaters of operation.

Alameda County in California has become one of the central battlegrounds over the introduction of drones to domestic police work. Earlier this year, Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern raised the hackles of local civil libertarians (and there are quite a few of those in the county, which encompasses Berkeley and Oakland) by declaring his intention to purchase a drone to assist with “emergency response.” According to Ahern, Alameda Sheriff's personnel first tested a UAV in fall 2011 and gave a public demonstration of the machine's usefulness for emergency responses during the Urban Shield SWAT competition in late October.

Were Alameda County to purchase a drone, it would set a precedent in California, which has long been an innovator in law enforcement tactics: from SWAT teams (pioneered in Delano and Los Angeles) to anti-gang tactics such as civil injunctions. The first documented incident of a drone being used to make an arrest in the United States occurred in North Dakota in June 2011, when local police received assistance from an unarmed Predator B drone that belonged to US Customs and Border Protection. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and Drug Enforcement Administration have also reportedly used drones for domestic investigations.

However, the Alameda County Sheriff will have to wait until next year for its drone proposal to even be considered by the County Board of Supervisors. In a rapid-fire sequence of events, the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California and the Electronic Frontier Foundation succeeded in forcing the Board of Supervisors to pull a last-minute agenda item from the December 4th meeting that would have approved $31,646 in grant money from the California Emergency Management Administration for purchasing a UAV.

ACLU-Norcal and the EFF both accused Sheriff Ahern of trying to secure funding for the drone without public scrutiny. “Public policy shouldn't be made by stealth attack,” said ACLU-Norcal attorney Linda Lye. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Ahern denied trying to evade public scrutiny and claimed the UAV wouldn't be used for blanket surveillance, as feared by opponents. “This device is used for mission-specific incidents. We strive to gain the public's trust in everything we do, and I would never do anything of this nature that would destroy the public's trust beyond repair,” Ahern told the Chronicle.

Despite the sheriff's assurances that drones would be primarily used for emergency and disaster response, internal documents obtained by the EFF indicate sheriff department personnel have different conceptions of how they would use UAVs. A July 20th, 2012 memo written by Captain Tom Madigan of the Alameda County Sheriff elucidates potential uses for drones in emergency response, explosives disposal, search and rescue—and a range of policing uses that appear to be at the heart of the ACLU and EFF's concerns. The memo reads:

The Alameda County Tactical Commanders were consulted, a regional group of SWAT team commanders throughout the County of Alameda. A UAS would be valuable to assist with barricaded suspects, surveillance (investigative and tactical) perimeters, intelligence gathering, rough terrain, suspicious persons, large crowd control disturbances, etc.

“UAVs have unprecedented capabilities to infringe on our civil liberties,” said Trevor Timm, an attorney with the EFF. Timm noted that UAV-mounted cameras can be equipped with Forward Looking Infrared technology, which reads heat signatures through buildings, or intelligent video programs such as facial recognition software, which acts as a sort of automated license-plate reader for people.

The EFF and ACLU want a public dialogue over the use of drones by local law enforcement and seek to establish a set of guidelines that would protect individual privacy and restrict how drones could be used during domestic policing. The proposal will be taken up again by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors in January.

Documents released earlier this week by the ACLU of Northern California show the Alameda County Sheriff already received bids for drones from Aeryon, Lockheed Martin, and ING.

Other California law enforcement agencies are eager to purchase drones. Documents obtained by the EFF in collaboration with the open records website Muckrock reveal the San Francisco Police Department had a $100,000 request to purchase a Remotely Piloted Vehicle rejected by the local Urban Area Security Initiative, a regional Homeland Security administrative agency. In San Diego, where the Border Patrol already operates several Predator B drones for reconnaissance along the US-Mexico frontier, County Sheriff William Gore announced his intention to purchase an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) earlier this week. Opposition to UAVs in San Diego has taken on unusual dimensions—on December 6th, artists affiliated with a University of California-San Diego gallery staged a drone crash in front of the main campus library to raise awareness about the unmanned vehicles' growing presence in quotidian life.