More than 20 community members, both in-person and online, asked questions about the drones during the meeting. Many voiced concerns and opposition to the purchase.
The program is estimated to have a start up cost of $100,000 which includes the purchase of six drones.
Some of the top concerns included, accountability, privacy, potential racial profiling, and whether funds would be better spent on crime prevention or other community resources.
"I just think that we need to straighten out some other things, maybe increasing the trust, relationships in the community, maybe talk about some accountability in the community," one commenter said.
GRPD Chief Eric Winstrom responded to a majority of the questions and maintained that the drones would only be used during specific missions and not for surveillance, weapon deployment, or facial recognition. He said the drones would make policing more efficient in certain cases.
"We would not use them for every crime, we would use them for those specific circumstances of a lost individual, a fleeing felon, accident reconstruction and then the large groups where the drone could be used for traffic, for crowd safety, for things like that," Winstrom said in response to a question about how the drones would be used.
However, some attendees still questioned whether the department could be trusted with the equipment given the department's civil rights lawsuits and the fatal shooting of Patrick Lyoya by former Grand Rapids Police Officer Christopher Shurr last year.
"Every program that an awful lot of you [GRPD] implement, end up criminalizing the Black and Brown melanated people of the community, and we're not going to have it," one attendee said, "We've dealt with the situation with Patrick Lyoya getting shot, and we want to see that resolved, okay, we want to see other situations resolved too and for you guys to throw this in our lap is just plain disrespectful."
The director of the city's Office of Oversight and Public Accountability was also on site at Tuesday's meeting. He said the office would handle any concerns or complaints about surveillance equipment in the city.
Tuesday night’s comments will be documented and will be reported back to the City of Grand Rapids.