Baltimore City Police sharing few details about surveillance plane's success so far

BALTIMORE (WBFF) -- Baltimore Police and Mayor Jack Young had hoped a controversial aerial surveillance plane pilot program would help curb crime and violence in the city this summer, but four months in and few details about its success have been shared.

The pilot program was launched on May 1st. The controversial privately funded plane is operating on a trial basis for six months. The program focuses on shootings, homicides, robberies, and carjackings.

Commissioner Michael Harrison has remained cautiously optimistic about the program and its benefits, but as violence continues in the city he says the plane has been providing police with useful data but has declined to share specifics.

At a recent police oversight hearing, Harrison was questions by City Councilors about the programs success so far. While Harrison said his detectives have been reviewing nearly 100 packets of data from the plane, he only knows of a few possible crimes that have been solved.

"There were two [arrests] that I knew of when I spoke at a press conference a month or a few weeks ago," Harrison said. "But there have been more but it's un-vetted. We have not had our research partners vet that yet."

The research partner in charge of vetting the data from the pilot program is the RAND Corporation.

FOX45 News reached out to RAND Friday to ask when we could see more information about how many crimes the plane has helped solved but were told in a statement: "There is no update at this point"

Law enforcement experts believe BPD likely doesn't want to jump the gun on touting any results because of how controversial the program is.

"The question is, did the information from the aerial surveillance assist in closing a case or was it a case that would have closed without it," former Baltimore Police Deputy Commissioner Jason Johnson told FOX45 News.

Johnson also highlights the fact that it takes time for detectives to sift through the data the plane collects and find possible leads from it.

"They're going to send over some information that requires detectives to do some pretty significant follow up in order to still develop a suspect," Johnson said.

A spokesperson for Baltimore Police told FOX45 News Friday that they hope to provide an update to the public about the plane "in the near future" but did not provide a specific date.

Since the pilot began, BPD has also received 43 complaints related to excessive noise from the plane.