RAND Corporation Can’t Tell if Spy Planes Solve Crimes

A long awaited independent analysis of the effectiveness of spy planes for criminal investigations has now been made public by the RAND corporation. The study was likely constricted by a tenuous relationship between the vendor, Persistent Surveillance Systems and the Baltimore Police Department. The findings, however, do not indicate a wide degree of success in using images captured by the spy planes in solving crimes.

Read the report for yourself (it’s not very long).

According to RAND, “This preliminary report does not draw conclusions about the effectiveness of the AIR pilot; an outcome evaluation will be included in a final report.” That larger report is expected to be published sometime in Spring of 2022.

A substantial amount of the preliminary report is filled with various forms of hedging such as, “some of these outcomes will change as BPD investigations continue… Despite the higher proportion of positive out-comes for AIR cases, this crude comparison of rates is misleading because there are systematic differences between the types of cases for which AIR evidence is available and those for which it is not… ”

The biggest explanation for why their own study might not answer the question it was set out to answer comes from the following passage. “AIR evidence is typically only available for cases that occur during daylight hours. Historically, cases that occur during daylight hours in Baltimore are cleared at higher rates than those…