If you’ve seen a drone zip over your yard in Las Vegas recently, there’s a good chance it’s the police.
While there is a Nevada law against law enforcement flying drones over private property, a loophole has allowed the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department (LVMPD) to massively increase its drone deployments to nation-leading numbers during the past year.
The exception permits law enforcement to fly over residents’ property without a warrant in “exigent circumstances,” essentially emergencies. And Metro, through a new first responder program that dispatches camera-equipped drones to scope out the scene of a 911 call and transmit footage to a central command station even before human officers arrive, is considering its thousands of flights per year as exempt from the privacy rule…