The Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department operates nine drones that fly to accident and crime scenes at any time, transmitting images to the station.
The program has been running for more than a year, but until recently it was unable to identify or track drones other than its own. An $11.4 million grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency allowed the city, which hosts several World Cup matches, to purchase sensors and radar to detect and identify private and commercial drones throughout the city during matches.
Previous global sporting events left behind stadiums that were later reused or torn down. This year’s World Cup could leave something more useful: equipment that can detect, track and, if necessary, neutralize hostile drones in the sky.
“It’s going to be huge,” said Maj. Gregory Williams, who oversees the Kansas City Police Department’s operational support division. “Having this capability will really provide us with a level of security.”
Just as cheap drones have changed the calculus of war, they have also changed the way national law enforcement agencies protect against threats in densely populated places.
Fears that armed drones could be used to attack crowds or critical infrastructure played a major role in preparations for the World Cup matches in the United States.
FEMA, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, announced a total of $250 million in grants to states hosting the games in December, triggering a wave of spending on anti-drone technology.
The Los Angeles Police Department has been authorized to spend nearly $10 million in radars, sensors and mobile tracking units, according to public records. Dallas added $10.4 million in anti-drone technology to an existing 10-year contract with Dedrone, a company owned by Axon Enterprise, which makes Tasers and body cameras.
More than half of host locations have purchased a system that allows law enforcement to hack into an enemy drone’s radio controls, allowing them to control and fly it safely away from crowds, according to Eric Brock, founder and CEO of Ondas Holdings, a West Palm Beach, Fla., company that owns the technology.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation has also begun training local authorities in drone mitigation tactics at an anti-drone center in Huntsville, Alabama. Police departments across the country want the authority to remove suspicious drones from the sky, an action that previously only certain federal agencies were authorized to take.
Congress passed a law in December that delegated to local police departments the task of shooting down enemy drones, as long as the departments were trained and certified by the federal government. But the Justice Department has not yet released rules for how the certification will work. As a result, police in host cities must be under the supervision of the FBI or another federal agency to use much of the anti-drone equipment they purchased with their FEMA grants.
New York City purchased $6.5 million worth of drone mitigation equipment with its FEMA grant, and its Police Department is assisting the FBI at FIFA-related events in the city.
“If there’s one threat that keeps me up at night, it’s drones,” Jessica Tisch, commissioner of the New York Police Department, said last month. “Technology has changed and our capabilities have to change with it.”
Eight games will be played at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, including the final on July 19, while watch parties and other related events will be held throughout New York.
Commissioner Tisch called the new authority “a major operational breakthrough” and said she looked forward to the Justice Department releasing new rules that would allow the city to implement the technology on its own.
However, in the days before the first games, many host cities were still struggling to install equipment and train staff due to a delay in processing their grant applications, in part due to a 76-day DHS shutdown.
“Everyone is a little behind,” Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin said at a congressional hearing this month.
Mullin said the United States had spent a lot of resources developing the capability to use drones for military purposes, but much less money on technology that could defend national infrastructure. against drone attacks, which he described as “one of the areas we struggle with every day.”
So far, however, authorities have seized more than 300 drones across the country, a sign that delays have not impeded protection efforts.
“All systems are working as expected,” a DHS spokesperson said.
In Kansas City, authorities have confiscated at least 16 drones, according to the FBI. The Police Department was able to detect them using software from Airspace Link, a company that gives subscribers access to a digital map showing all the drones flying in the area. The system also provides the unique identification numbers transmitted by the drones (digital license plates known as Remote ID) and the location of their pilots.
“This gives us the ability now to not only see the drone, but also locate where it came from,” Major Williams said.
Airspace Link CEO Michael Healander sent staff to Kansas City last week to support police during the Argentina-Algeria game. The system showed blue dots scattered across a digital map of the city: a flock of police drones sent to check on various disturbances, including a fan who had passed out in the crowd. It also showed off Amazon Prime delivery drones across the state line in Kansas.
“It’s a great moment for our company,” Mr. Healander said.
Fortem Technologies, a Utah-based company that makes a drone that captures other drones with a net, won a multimillion-dollar contract from DHS for a dozen systems, one for each U.S. World Cup stadium, with one spare.
Next year, FEMA will expand the drone mitigation program to other cities and states, donating another $250 million, according to a FEMA spokeswoman.
A new DHS office plans to spend $115 million purchasing anti-drone technology, in addition to the previously announced grant program. Federal agencies are using equipment funded by the new office to help protect the World Cup games as well as the festivities surrounding America250, the national commemoration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
However, the International Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems, a trade group, is calling for Congress to review how the first tranche of funding was spent before the second round goes out.
“We would hope that oversight would focus on the effectiveness of the grant for improvement in the future,” said Michael Robbins, the group’s executive director, adding that lawmakers should investigate whether the equipment was actually used and whether it matched the host city’s threat profile.
Not everyone is excited about the prospect of the counter-drone team still existing after the games. Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for free speech, worries about what this will mean for citizens’ privacy.
“Our primary concern, as always, is the potential for this technology to reduce people’s civil liberties and the fact that surveillance infrastructure is just that: infrastructure,” he said in an email. “It will last longer than the current World Cup and will leave cities with much greater surveillance for day-to-day use.”
