Spy Plane: Inside Baltimore’s Surveillance Experiment

An exclusive behind-the-scenes look at one of America’s most controversial experiments in police surveillance.

In 2020, the Baltimore Police Department had an aerial surveillance plane that could supposedly photograph and track every person in public view. Spy Plane reveals what happened with this controversial policing experiment. Drawing from incredible access and direct observations inside the for-profit tech startup that ran the program for Baltimore detectives, sociologist Benjamin H. Snyder recounts real criminal cases as they were worked by police using this untested tool.

Deploying aircraft with powerful cameras built by a small company called Persistent Surveillance Systems, the spy plane program promised to help police ＂solve otherwise unsolvable crimes＂ by tracking the whereabouts of suspects in violent crime cases. Created for the battlefields of Iraq, it had never been adapted on so large a scale in a U.S. city. This riveting book gives an unprecedented look inside the shadowy world of for-profit law enforcement technology experiments, explaining why police and community leaders place so much faith in unproven technology to fix the problem of urban violence but continually come up short.

Benjamin H. Snyder is Associate Professor of Sociology at Williams College. He is the author of The Disrupted Workplace: Time and the Moral Order of Flexible Capitalism.