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A single, long-term contract with an American police department would be worth about $2 million a year, he says. By 2012, McNutt was approaching the police departments of the 20 most crime-ridden jurisdictions in the country, marketing his services. He floated several of them an offer: Let us fly over your city to show you what we can do, and then you can decide if you want to hire us.<\/p>\n
The Los Angeles County Sheriff\u2019s Department quietly took him up on the offer, allowing him to conduct a nine-day trial run over Compton, a largely minority city south of L.A., in 2012. According to Patrick Bearse, operations lieutenant for the Aero Bureau of the sheriff\u2019s department, the county recognized the potential of Persistent Surveillance\u2019s service, but it didn\u2019t sign a contract with the company because the technology, particularly the quality of the images, didn\u2019t meet the department\u2019s expectations. The city\u2019s residents didn\u2019t find out about the flights until a year later. Angry protesters demanded a new \u201ccitizen privacy protection policy\u201d from local leaders, but even those leaders\u2014from the mayor on down\u2014hadn\u2019t been told about the test program. \u201cThere is nothing worse than believing you are being observed by a third party unnecessarily,\u201d Compton Mayor Aja Brown told the Los Angeles Times<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n
The next city to try McNutt\u2019s technology was his home base of Dayton. After the L.A. County trial, he improved the system by more than doubling the resolution, to 192 megapixels, increased the archive\u2019s storage capacity, and sped up the image processing to allow analysts to conduct multiple investigations simultaneously. The Dayton police department and the city council were sold on it, and they aired the idea for a contract at a series of public hearings. Joel Pruce, who teaches human rights studies at the University of Dayton, helped organize the opposition. To the objecting residents, it seemed as if it hadn\u2019t occurred to city leaders that the surveillance program might be interpreted as a violation of some vital, unspoken trust. \u201cAt the hearings, nobody spoke in favor of it except for the people working for the city,\u201d Pruce recalls. \u201cThe black community, in particular, said, \u2018We\u2019ve seen this type of thing before. This will target us, and you didn\u2019t even come to us beforehand to see how we\u2019d feel about it.\u2019\u2009\u201d Dayton\u2019s city leaders dropped their attempts to hire the company after those hearings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n