The surveillance plane created evidence defendants could not request because they did not know it existed—and the imagery was retained longer than the public-facing policy suggested.

The secrecy of Baltimore's original aerial-surveillance pilot created a downstream criminal-procedure problem: defense attorneys did not know the imagery existed while representing clients whose movements, police encounters or alleged offenses may have been captured from the air.

The Baltimore Office of the Public Defender asked police about retention and preservation after the program became public. Police Commissioner Kevin Davis responded that Persistent Surveillance Systems had verified that all images captured during the pilot had been saved and archived, regardless of whether the images had been provided to police for an investigation. That conflicted with a public-facing description that imagery would ordinarily be erased after 45 days.

Public defenders argued that secrecy had deprived innocent clients of opportunities to subpoena potentially exonerating footage and had prevented defendants who disputed officers' accounts from attempting to corroborate their version with the aerial record.

Sources: ACLU — retention documents and public-defender correspondence · Bloomberg — oversight and defense-access reporting