Nothin' to see here folks.

The militarization of our police forces, funded by wealthy citizens. Who of course receive tax breaks because they don't want to support government spending.

The "wealthy donor" is?

Use of local foundation allowed Baltimore police surveillance project to remain secret

The Baltimore Police Department was able to keep secret the funding for a surveillance plane that monitored wide swaths of the city by routing project funds through a private foundation — whose director says he was not aware of the purpose of the spending.

A Texas-based private donor supplied $120,000 intended for the city surveillance project but delivered to the nonprofit Baltimore Community Foundation, which manages at least two charitable funds for police.


Thomas E. Wilcox, president of the Baltimore Community Foundation, said in an interview Wednesday that foundation officials did not know what the money was for.

"We did not know anything about a surveillance program," Wilcox said. "We do 3,000 grants a year. Someone asks us to give a grant to an organization, whether it's Wounded Warrior or the YMCA, we make the grant."
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-community-foundation-20160824-story.html

That money could have done for troubled areas of the city.

Disgraceful.

officers on the ground pursuing fleeing suspects and or for providing quick transportation for emergency personal to a remote area?

The advantage of police helicopters are they can stay over one area, and if you are tracking a specific suspect, you can stay over him.

If you are taking photographs, a plane will scan an area faster, and be a lot cheaper to buy, and cheaper to fly per hour.

Either way, Baltimore does own police helicopters.

They could surely have provided just as much coverage for an even lower cost couldnt they?

Flying planes and helicopters is much less restricted and allows much more flexibility as well as quicker response times.

The regulatory scheme is not yet in place to allow police to fly drones just like they fly helicopters and planes.

They use a small plane instead of a helicopter because they aren't in the hot-pursuit business. They also don't have advanced tech like UAVs. Some of their best successes have been in support of going after those who are engaged in illegal dumping.

They fly high enough to get a view of a wide area and they record it. Then, if police say there was an armed robbery at the corner of Main & First at 12:15 pm - and they drove away in a white SUV, they go to the time and place on their video. If they identify the vehicle, running it forward tells you where the suspects went and running it in reverse tells you where it was before before the robbery. If they can say it went to a gas station 10 minutes before the robbery, police can check to see if the station has cameras or credit card information on someone buying gas at that time.

They can't look through walls, pat you down for weapons or see the contents of your smart phone. Anything they can see could be captured by a store's street-level camera (remember the Boston Marathon bombers) but without the higher resolution that let's you identify an individual.

to do their job LOL
Mind you I do draw the line on some things like using infrared to spy on peoples homes to locate alleged marijuana farms as that goes beyond visual and I also dont approve of them using phony aerial cell tower to track cell phones without a warrant to track a specific phone and or phones but taking visual footage isnt anymore invasive than what a bank, grocery store or gas station do today with cameras.

Source: The Guardian