Incredible article....if used properly, this can definitely solve a lot of crime. Depends on the controller of the technology
The good:
One afternoon in February, every analyst in the office had pitched in when the police responded to the shooting of a 90-year-old woman and her 82-year-old brother, who’d been hit while walking in front of a bus stop on Clifton Avenue in the Western District. In a city where gun violence had lost much of its power to shock, the crime struck a local nerve. TV crews descended on the scene, sensing a big story.
McNutt’s analysts called up the aerial images and began tracking vehicles leaving a busy shopping center across the street from the bus stop, where witnesses had placed the shooter. For about two hours, they mapped the routes of several cars leaving the parking lot, until a detective informed McNutt that the shooter probably had left the area on foot. Rewinding to the moment of the shooting, they quickly pinpointed a person who appeared to scramble away from the scene just after the gunshots.
He was little more than a faint, grainy dot with no identifying characteristics. After he crossed the parking lot, he walked past a Subway sandwich shop and proceeded down a hill behind the shopping center. He cut a corner to cross a vacant lot and ducked between two houses on a quiet residential street. Then he approached what seemed to be a stationary object sitting in the backyard of one of the houses. The analysts toggled their screens to pull up Google Earth’s Street View, and the image—taken months earlier—revealed that the object in the backyard was a car, abandoned on the grass. The suspect stopped briefly at the car before walking a few doors down and into a house.
While he was inside, a vehicle pulled up to the front of the house; a person exited the house, got in the car, and traveled about three miles to Bons Secours Hospital. The analysts tracked him into the emergency room entrance.
Because the analysts had lost so much time while tracking the cars leaving the parking lot, all of the movements they were watching were a few hours old. When the police went to the emergency room, the hospital wouldn’t release any patient information. With no identifying information at hand, the trail seemed cold.
It wasn’t. The police later that day determined that the house the suspect may have entered before he went to the hospital belonged to the girlfriend of Carl Anthony Cooper, a man with a long criminal record. Additionally, they discovered that when the suspect walked away from the shopping center, he’d passed in front of a ground-based security camera. Accessing that footage and reviewing Cooper’s mug shots on file, they found a possible match. The police couldn’t immediately figure out why he went to the hospital; some speculated that his gun might have accidentally gone off when he tucked it into his pants and the bullet grazed his leg.
Two days after the shooting, the Baltimore Police Department posted an archived picture of Cooper on its Facebook page, labeling him the city’s “
Public Enemy #1.” It also posted the footage captured by the ground-based security camera, which showed him calmly carrying what appeared to be a bag of food in one hand and his cell phone in the other.
The footage baffled Facebook users, who couldn’t figure out how it implicated Cooper. In the comments section, one wrote that if the man on camera really was the shooter, he surely would have dropped his food and run. Another commenter typed: “Not saying this isn’t the suspect but what is being seen that we, the public, isn’t seeing???” Finally someone posted, “Can a detective chime in and let us know what additional information leads you to believe that he is the suspect?”
No one from the department responded. But Cooper was eventually apprehended by federal marshals in North Carolina and sent to Baltimore, where he remains in custody. The police held a press conference to announce Cooper’s capture, saying he’d face charges for the shootings, including attempted murder and assault. Nothing was said about the surveillance plane.
The bad:
Even six months after the flights began, some Baltimore police officers still didn’t know exactly how the surveillance program worked. But word was spreading.
One morning in June, three plainclothes officers showed up to see McNutt. They were members of a special unit charged with investigating dirt bike crews—groups of primarily young men who recklessly drive illegal off-road motorcycles through the city. In Baltimore the crews are infamous for aggressively disrupting traffic, ignoring stoplights, and occasionally injuring and killing bystanders. Should a car accidentally collide with group members, other riders have been known to assault the driver before speeding away. City policy prevents police from chasing the bikers, because high-speed pursuits are deemed too risky.
The officers wanted to learn more about the surveillance system, and McNutt led them to a conference room to give them a demonstration. Using two large projection screens, he delivered the sales pitch he’d honed for trade shows. He called up old images from a murder in Juárez and walked the detectives through the tracking process that had led him to a cartel safe house. The spiel lasted about 20 minutes. When it was over, the sergeant in charge of the unit sat in silence for a moment, his arms crossed on his chest.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But oh my God—this is just overwhelming right here. This is amazing.”
One of the other officers slapped the tabletop. “Let’s go get some dirt bikes, Sarge!” 
The sergeant said he expected the dirt bikes to be out in force that Sunday, and some might be entering the city from out of town on Saturday. When one of the officers asked if the plane might be flying that weekend over the west side of the city, where police suspected several of the bikes would be stored, McNutt said he would make sure of it.
In the end, if you aren't committing any crimes do you really have anything to worry about? We area already being tracked one way or another
