VPD moves fast, breaks their own drone surveillance policy
The “future of policing” arrived in Vancouver this week as six Skydio drones, a set of rooftop landing pads, and a press release. Tap your body camera three times and one lifts off toward you, like an Imperial Probe Droid. What did not arrive: a privacy assessment, a public Board vote, or any sign the city had been asked.
Here is the rule the VPD wrote for itself in 2019, still on the books: police drone flights “will not be conducted for surveillance purposes,” and “will not be conducted for the purpose of recording and/or identifying members of the public involved in peaceful protests or demonstrations.” A standing drone fleet over the city is hard to square with the first line. The second line the department has already crossed. In 2024 the BCCLA and Pivot Legal filed a complaint over its drones at Palestine-solidarity protests, citing community reports of them “flying over demonstrations in support of Palestinian human rights, apparently conducting surveillance in violation of publicly available VPD policy.”
The program arrived the way the rest of the package did, by press release. Nothing the VPD put before the public: no privacy impact assessment, no review by the BC privacy commissioner, no open Board vote, no consultation. The one approval the VPD named was Transport Canada’s, which clears airspace, not surveillance. And the drones are built by Skydio, an American company whose own documentation says its cloud stores customer data on servers in the United States, even as the VPD assures us the data meets “British Columbia privacy standards”.
When the body-worn camera program went in, the VPD ran a real process: a public tender, a privacy assessment the commissioner signed off, votes at the Board and Council, seventeen consultations. They know how to do it. For the drones, they decided the city didn’t need to be asked.
Move fast, break things: the VPD has the first half down. What it’s breaking is its own drone policy and the BC privacy law that’s supposed to govern it. The city wasn’t asked about any of it.