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Police departments across the country—including in Indiana—are acquiring drones for a variety of law-enforcement uses, but is the technology in conflict with privacy rights? McKinney Law Professor Shawn Boyne shed light on Indiana’s law regarding police use of drones in a May 19 story in The Indianapolis Star.

A 2014 Indiana law was designed to protect people from unreasonable searches that might not have been anticipated when the Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect citizens’ privacy, Boyne said. “Without that law, the Fourth Amendment doesn’t protect us as much as one might think it would,” Boyne said. “The major cases coming from the Supreme Court…generally permit aerial surveillance.”

States without a similar law, Boyne said, are forced to grapple with issues involving privacy, and how police exercise their authority to deploy drones. Indiana’s law offers some answers, but parts of the law are still unclear, Boyne said. For example, what would happen if police were to use a drone illegally, without entering the images they capture into evidence in a criminal case? “Really the drone issue comes up mainly if they try to introduce information into a criminal proceeding,” Boyne said. “And then that’s where the whole Fourth Amendment protections are triggered.”

Jim White, co-director of the law school’s Global Crisis Leadership Forum and an IU School of Public and Environmental Affairs clinical lecturer at IUPUI, also contributed to the conversation, calling drones a “life-saving device” in some instances.

Read the article at http://www.indystar.com/story/news/crime/2017/05/19/indiana-police-departments-want-drones-theres-just-one-big-problem/101212218/.

Professor Boyne teaches courses in cybercrime, criminal law, criminal procedure and national security law. She is a Mosaic Faculty Fellow, Co-Director of the J.D. Program Evaluation and Chair of the Global Crisis Leadership Forum. Learn more about the Global Crisis Leadership Forum at https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/global-crisis/.