Not only are some communities OK with doing police work with electronic devices like unmanned cameras and license plate readers, but now some also are answering 9-1-1 calls for help with — wait for it — drones.

An informed and attentive reader last week emailed me a Feb. 27 story from the MIT Technology Review about a California town where police drones respond to 911 calls. According to the story, the “true debate on privacy and policies is lagging behind.”

Sounds familiar.

Last Sunday, this newspaper’s editorial board (of which I am a member) took issue with the fact that many Ohio cities, including Niles and Canfield, operate license plate readers without any state regulations on use.

In his MIT article, writer Patrick Sisson said this:

“In the skies above Chula Vista, California … it’s not uncommon to see an unmanned aerial vehicle darting across the sky. … When the department needs to be slow and methodical, there’s almost always a drone involved, flying between 200 and 400 feet above the action. Most people wouldn’t realize it’s there.”

Chula Vista uses these drones to extend its workforce. If only one officer is available when two calls come in, the officer can respond to one call and a drone can go to the other — perhaps to trail a suspected shoplifter.

Chula Vista is not alone in drone patrols. More than 1,500 departments nationwide use them for things like search and rescue, to document crime scenes or chase suspects.

Chula Vista received a waiver from the Federal Aviation Administration that previously had required that any police work via drone needed to be done in line of sight from the ground. Now drones there are being dispatched as “first responders” to some emergency calls.

As those types of waivers are extended, increasingly more police departments will adopt drone use. Some even plan to pre-position them around cities enabling more rapid response when needed.

Now, let me be clear. As a journalist, I’d argue drones have every right to exist and photograph anything they choose, as long as it’s visible from public space. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled there should be “no reasonable expectation of privacy” in a public place. Journalists generally apply that rule when, for instance, we are shooting photos.

The problem is that as more and more police agencies adopt use of electronic devices like license plate readers or drones, guidelines regulating their use, storage of the millions of images they capture and transparency are conveniently absent.

State legislators have declined to act on calls to create laws that set parameters.

While it’s not wrong to take pictures or capture video in public, it could be wrong for our government to surveil what we do, capture images in extremely high quantities, process those photos through things like searchable databases and then keep that information indefinitely, possibly for later use or to share with other police agencies nationwide, without any need for probable cause or transparency. And let’s not forget these images are being captured and shared while most people are completely oblivious.

Welcome to the future.

As we noted in last week’s editorial and in a recent news article about use of license plate readers, civil-liberty groups are raising privacy questions.

They’re also asking what happens when drones are combined with license plate readers, networks of fixed cameras and new real-time command centers that digest and sort through video evidence. This digital dragnet could dramatically expand surveillance capabilities and lead to even more police interactions with demographics that historically are overpoliced.

Some cities now are using technologically sophisticated systems including drones to oversee public events, including closely monitoring protesters who are using their constitutional right to assemble peacefully.

The publisher of a San Diego-based publication quoted in the MIT article calls the whole scenario a “slippery slope.” Like me, his concern isn’t so much with using the technology, but that they’ve deployed it with no policies and procedures in place.

That should concern you, too.

And it also should concern our lawmakers who should be stepping up to create public policy spelling out regulations on use, storage and sharing.