Birds-eye View
Sociology professor Ben Snyder takes readers behind the scenes of Baltimore’s controversial spy plane policing project.
Ben Snyder’s eyes were fixed on one of the two dozen giant screens showing pixelated footage of a 32-square-mile swath of Baltimore City. An analyst sat before each 50-inch monitor, using software to zoom in and out of neighborhoods, pointing and squinting as they tried to identify cars and people moving on the ground.
It was 2020, and Snyder, a sociology professor at Williams, was getting a rare, behind-the-scenes look at an experiment as it unfolded. Seeking to turn the tide on violent crime, the Baltimore Police Department contracted with a for-profit startup called Persistent Surveillance Systems (PSS) to deploy high-tech aircraft that reportedly “could put the entire city under watch,” as Snyder writes in his new book, Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment, published in October by University of California Press.
Based on roughly seven months of fieldwork in Baltimore—much of it at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic—and informed by six years of research, Spy Plane is a deep dive into what Snyder says are “the power and perils of high-tech policing.” The book recounts real cases investigated by city police working alongside civilian employees of a company seeking to market a largely untested tool.
Snyder, who studies the ethical implications of technology and surveillance, first learned of PSS’s work from a podcast. He reached out to the president and CEO, Ross McNutt, to learn more. To Snyder’s surprise, McNutt welcomed his request to see the program in action.
“I was fascinated by the question of why we believe so strongly in technology to solve social problems,” Snyder says. “It’s almost as if technology has a sort of religious aura to it. We assume these tools are flawless because they’re built with scientific precision.”
Yet there were many flaws, Snyder says. He observed a case in which the wrong person was surveilled, followed for half a day and nearly arrested before analysts realized the mistake. Snyder found that the analysts had immense discretion, and there was little transparency about—or regulation of—how the information they gathered was being used or shared.
Moreover, police were using the technology to surveil primarily low-income, Black neighborhoods.
“You wouldn’t see detectives running around, knocking on doors in the wealthier, whiter parts of the city,” Snyder says, adding that the entire operation felt like an extension of a larger, troubling trend of over-policing marginalized communities.
As he grappled with these ethical questions, Snyder brought them back to his Williams students. He developed a course called “The Panopticon: Surveillance, Power and Inequality.” First described in the 18th century by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham, a panopticon is a prison that allows one observer to see all inhabitants without their knowledge. Using his research in Baltimore as a case study, Snyder encouraged students to critically analyze the technology and its broader social implications.
“My students were incredible,” Snyder says. “I’d come back from the field and present what I was seeing, and our conversations really helped shape my book.”
In February 2021, the Baltimore Police Department discontinued its aerial surveillance program after public outcry and a lawsuit filed by Black activists and the national and local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). A federal appeals court ruled the program unconstitutional, declaring it a violation of the Fourth Amendment due to its warrantless tracking of individuals’ movements. A February 2022 settlement mandated that the police and PSS expunge from its records all data generated by the program.
Still, the use of technology in policing continues to rise, from facial recognition software to automated license plate readers, according to reports from the ACLU and the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. These surveillance programs are often kept from the public until government agencies, non-governmental organizations, the news media or researchers like Snyder get involved.
“Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet for crime,” Snyder says. “We need to give up on that idea. If anything, the answer lies in building stronger communities—not in relying on technology to fix what are fundamentally social issues.”
Read a Q&A with Ben Snyder on the University of California Press blog.
Snyder is also interviewed on Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse YouTube channel.
