Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by davidu | Hacker News Reader

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Drone as first responder makes a tremendous amount of sense -- Police already use helicopters, which are exceptionally expensive, limited in coverage capability, and have disastrous consequences when they crash.

But there are huge benefits of 'eyes in the sky' during a crisis. Car chases in LA are often eliminated when there's a police helicopter because they can simply follow the vehicle safely from a distance as the chopper tracks the car.

Providing overhead visibility support in advance of police arrival is a huge benefit to citizens during 911 calls. If a drone can respond in two minutes, and police are 7-10 minutes away, that's a massive situational awareness benefit that will save lives.

When someone calls for a house fire, having a drone arrive in minutes, potentially with a fire retardant payload, while ground-based fire vehicles arrive 5-10 minutes later, can mean the difference between life and death. At the very least, it provides tremendous information to the fire fighters on the way as to what to expect. They can see the fire before they arrive.

Two major life saving improvements for emergency rooms in the last 50 years were radios in the ambulances so that the ER knew what was coming in, and electronic EKG / vitals relay so that doctors had more precise telemetry of patient status. Drone first responder will have many similar benefits.

A couple of years ago, I probably would have argued with you but now I'm 100% on board with the approach described in this article.

> Unlike Baltimore’s aircraft, Brookhaven’s machines won’t fly unless an emergency is reported. Their cameras won’t film, or even point down, until they are at the scene. All footage is destroyed after 30 days unless it is being used in a criminal investigation or for training purposes, and all the flight logs are public.

IMO, this is a completely reasonable approach that provides a pathway for better engagement, less ambiguity and a more authoritative perspective than bystander recordings that may be selectively edited for clicks. Body cameras are great, but they miss perspective of watching the officers.

So they say. As we've learnt over the years, what can we truly trust? How can we verify that these promises are kept? I read a good HN comment before, which could be inspiration for a comic or TV series: "Who watches the watchers?"

Go watch Cuffani's testimony today. The IG is who watches the watchers. He admits he routinely just deleted the text messages on his government phone despite record keeping requirements because 'he didn't do government business on his government phone'. It is also pointed out to him that half of his staff feel it would be unsafe to be whistleblowers. He and his staff are the people that whistleblowers report to. But sure, let's trust them this time. The constitution is the highest law in the land. Government officials regularly break the law and violate our constitutional rights, and all that happens is a 'we'll try better next time'. Routinely break the highest law in the land and nothing happens. Try that with driving with expired tags, try habitually driving with that and respond 'my bad, I didn't realize'. Or try the 'I didn't know it was illegal' defense they use, or the 'good faith' defense they get. All to protect them from any consequence when they break THE HIGHEST LAWS OF THE LAND within the Constitution that all our other laws stem from.

Activity that falls outside of the specified parameters needs to be deemed as illegal. The ultimate way of getting there is people need to vote on sensible privacy laws on what can or can’t be used for prosecution.

If a prosecutor tries to use footage that falls outside of those parameters then it can’t be used as evidence.

It needs to be stronger than that. There ought to be penalties for activities outside the specified scope (preferably criminal in cases that exceed some minimal threshold of severity). Just stopping it at the trial level is inadequate if we want the policy-sketched privacy to be meaningful.

Letting the police install video cameras and microphones inside your home would also have many benefits. They could catch burglars, or call an ambulance if you have a heart attack. What could go wrong?

Getting a camera 400 feet in the air after a call to 911 dispatch gave a location sounds like a perfectly-balanced fulfillment of the social contract.

While there is an abundance of creeping excesses with tech and policing, the slippery slope argument got completely lost here.

It’s a slippery slope though, one doesn’t even need to be hyperbolic, like why not just have the drones always flying around instead of only as a responder?

From a technical standpoint it doesn't make a lot of sense.

CCTVs in cities are a big political topic. For corridors that people walk through often, this is much more effective for facial recognition and you don't have to power propellers or deal with crashes. The camera will operate for a decade without incident.

For overhead algorithmic surveillance, just use satellite photos. I fully expect that sat swarms in LEO surveillance will become a thing in my lifetime. Sure there are clouds, but the whole thing is imperfect, the goal isn't to track you 100% of the time and they don't need to anyway.

For persistent surveillance, drones are good for what exactly? Periodically peeking in windows? How many windows would a drone need to look in on a patrol? Can you fly them low enough to actually do this? On a regular route at that, my god.

I'm very worried about tracking with facial recognition and systematic location collecting based on cell signals and satellite car tracking. But this article was about a drone catching people smoking weed after a busybody called 911. The tech is a very marginal sideshow in that story.

why not just have the drones always flying around instead of only as a responder?

In large American cities, this has been the case for decades. Except with helicopters instead of drones.

In the 90's, Houston had two helicopters on patrol 24/7 (one HPD, one HCSO).

Sure but I would feel weird with a camera up in the air unless I totally trust that it is up because of an ongoing crime. Can you trust that? What if the camera hangs around "just in case"? How can you check? Will be police department obligated to disclose this or will they have a legal excuse to neither confirm nor deny?

Maybe one approach would be to make it illegal for the police to deploy them without a warrant, require the warrants to be public, and to stream the drone's location.

The idea being to allow independent observers to check that the police are following the rules.

And just like all of the current 'independent review' bodies for police, they will be run by the police department.

And what about getting a camera in the air outside your upstairs bedroom window to peek inside?

Based on recent history it would be deeply naive to think that they won't do that and worse with the technology once it's in their hands.

That would constitute an illegal search and you could sue the police department for it. The judicial system, despite all of its flaws, has already solved this particular scenario.

But this doesn’t actually address the point of the comment you’re replying to. What’s the argument against replacing helicopters with drones?

The expense of helicopters acts as a natural limit to the amount of abuse that cops can engage in with the helicopter. Drones are a lot cheaper, and essentially lifts a restraint.

I'm not necessarily opposed to the use of drones, but I think their use needs appropriate restrictions and oversight. Given how little effective oversight cops have in general, and especially in the use of powerful tech, I am very skeptical that we'll see that with the use of drones.

In-home surveillance would be slightly less invasive than sharing all browsing history without a warrant, IMO.

And yes, everything can go wrong.

We can talk about everything that can go wrong, but as it is a cop can kill you if he decides to. It comes down to whether or not the forces that be decide to.

Possibly police will be less likely to use lethal force if they avoid taking what they may perceive to be a lethal risk by using drones.

First give police the right to kill with impunity, then introduce pervasive surveillance as a feature that makes them kill less. Nothing can go wrong

I have no good answers.

I'd like a world with as much freedom and as few restrictions as possible; yet I also know that it's increasingly easy for someone working alone to cause enormous damage and loss of life.

I want a legal system simple enough that at least half the population know all their rights and responsibilities without any danger of unwittingly violating the law, because "ignorance of the law must not be a legitimate excuse" but it clearly is an excuse in a world where lawyers laugh in your face if you ask them if anyone knows all the laws.

I want punishments that have no vengeance, punishments which only serve to be deterrence for the sane, and where the insane are humanely kept out of harm's way; for these to be effective, I suspect (but don't know for sure) that the best way is to have near 100% accurate fines almost immediately upon detection, which in turn have to be small — framing example: you drop litter, 30 seconds later a notification of a fine for $1.00 appears on your phone, which you can also make go away by picking up what you dropped.

I don't know how to prevent that from becoming a totalitarian nightmare thanks to the apparent popularity of ever-escalating punishments for all offences.

I don't know how to watch the watchers. "State secrets" may be an excuse for the powerful to hide behind, but it's also, not only.

I don't know how to square that with the embarrassment that people have over so many aspects of themselves, that makes the right to privacy an absolute necessity.

And this kind of privacy issue is "easy mode" compared to what happens if we get mind uploads.

> you drop litter, 30 seconds later a notification of a fine for $1.00 appears on your phone, which you can also make go away by picking up what you dropped

Instead of educating and healing people psych so that they are intrinsically motivated to not do shitty things, you watch them all the time and punish disobedience. Definitely not like any totalitarian state.

(Also there are many people for whom $1 is not worth a second's thought, and many people who have zero or negative amount of $ and will never pay it. If you really make it about that $1 instead of values, streets will drown in garbage.)

> Definitely not like any totalitarian state.

Oh it might be totalitarian, but to the extent that it is, it's anarcho-totalitarian, despite that sounding like a tautological impossibly at first glance.

Going from the opening paragraph on Wikipedia:

> Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life. It is regarded as the most extreme and complete form of authoritarianism.

It's absolutely the "complete degree of control and regulation over public and private life" — at least, for whatever matters, which I want be the smallest possible set of things (see point about law simple enough most actually know what it is); I don't know if that can be done without devolving into also the "prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state", but preventing that is also my position.

That's why I listed conjugate pairs of contrasting positions.

> Also there are many people for whom $1 is not worth a second's thought, and many people who have zero or negative amount of $ and will never pay it

Indeed, that's why I prefaced it with "framing example": I'm not going to go into the weeds with an entire novel social system for the sake of a comment.

It makes sense to consider those two proposals as the unrelated technologies they are.

We can in fact choose which technological rollouts are beneficial and which are harmful. I'm not sure what point you're making by trying to link the two.

Oh! I'm so sorry I was not clear enough! I was not trying to link the two. So to borrow a framework from another field, medicine, every medication (solution to a problem) must clear thresholds for both efficacy (benefits) and safety (downsides/drawbacks). The parent comment's analysis of police drones considers only one of the two, efficacy/benefits, and ignores the problems it could or would cause. As a counterexample, I provided one other - unrelated! - example of where looking only at efficacy does not yield the correct answer. Thanks for asking, I'm sure it was very unclear!

Can you be sure in advance which ones are good ideas and which ones are going to have unfortunate consequences?

Yeah obviously there are safety benefits. There are also safety benefits to having surveillance cameras on every street corner. And think of the lives we could save if everybody was implanted with a tracking chip at birth so we could instantly know if they're in distress. Sometimes the juice ain't worth the squeeze.

Surveillance cameras on the right corners are a really good idea. Excellent way to make policing more objective. I wrote about that here: https://a16z.com/2021/07/13/investing-in-flock-safety/

Turns out, marginalized and minority communities, counter-intuitively, tend to prefer it the most.

As for tracking chip -- we don't do it at birth, because we don't need to. Most people over the age of 15 keep a cell phone on them which provides tracking capability / cellular triangulation. It's used to save lives and apprehend criminals constantly. The privacy issues are actually more marketing based and have nothing to do with the GPS / triangulation issues, and people don't want to solve those, unfortunately.

Shameful copaganda from a16z. I can see some optimism for crypto but cop tech is just sad to see.

The material effect of this is dramatically extending cop surveillance capability, regardless of the intent. That’s not a non-controversial thing to post neutrally and expect to be celebrated without criticism. Less polite society has a word that describes that called bootlicking.

The “let’s be practical here” attitude of “well we just gotta give the cops more to see them do better” is an endless cycle.

Note that davidu is in his bio anti-anarchist (libertarian), meaning he fights the enemies of the law and the state and the enemies of capital. Common enough around here but want to point out he proclaims a mission of supporting the state and law enforcement. lol. Just want to give Disclaimer to the political mission.

The article is mostly about these trends coming to small-town America, not crime-ridden inner cities. If crime rises to the level where these measures become a necessity in certain areas I can understand that. But normalizing these policies as typical day-to-day operations of officers nationwide regardless of local circumstances is unhealthy, they've been needlessly militarized too much already.

Why would that be counter-intuitive?

Poor, marginalized communities suffer disproportionately from crime — and accordingly tend to promote pro-police policies.

The only people who don’t recognize that are bourgeoisie who associate those communities with crime — and due to their own biases, assume they don’t want more police from a place of (near) total ignorance. Or who have their privileged sensibilities offended by the fact communities which suffer disproportionate crime also have disproportionate criminals — so try to sweep it under the rug with biased enforcement.

But those are luxury beliefs, reinforced with manufactured consent by bourgeois institutions: people actually suffering from crime tend to have considerably more practical beliefs.

I don't have the numbers, but nothing you've said here correlates with my own observations and experiences. And yes, I spent a large portion of my life poor, living in poor and marginalized communities.

Perhaps there are regional differences in play here.

If everyone had a collar that could taser them on command. We could stop lot of violent crime. Some is holding a gun, just taser them and retrieve body.

Please stop speaking in rhetoric.

no, helicopters in LA (and "eyes in the sky" in general) don't contribute at all to effective policing or safety. they actually entice showboats to create a spectacle so they get on tv. this creates more public danger. and there have been a number of chases where the suspect was lost even so.

but all you need in these instances is an incontrovertible photo of the suspect and the car/license plate, witnesses of the crime, and effective investigation, just like any other criminal case. the helicopter is there for cops to show off and waste disproportional money better spend on investigation.

first responders are trained to assess situations quickly, so "situational awareness" has very marginal benefit (not zero, but also not much) in all of the use cases you cite. the extra overhead is simply not worth it in most cases. like legged robots, drones are a technology looking for a market, but there really isn't much market out there.

we don't need more surveillance tech. we need more dogged and trustworthy investigators and first responders.

You shouldn't be down voted. While using drones for spraying fire retardant in urban areas is rather fanciful with current technology, the drone as first responder concept makes total sense for observation. The drone operator can brief the human responders while they're en route so that they arrive fully prepared to deal with the situation. The Campbell, CA police department recently started such a program.

And no one is seriously proposing mounting weapons on civilian drones. That is essentially already banned by ATF and FAA rules.

Why not just give them brutally omniscient unlimited power over us, by your logic that would be radically beneficial to our health and safety. You’re starting from the misguided idea that police actively save people from crime’s dangers, and speak nothing to concern for giving power to armed thugs over us besides cheering it on. Just baseless copaganda and shameful to see celebrated.

How does the logic work that giving more tech and power and resources somehow reduces power

Those who rush to analyze objective stats on this fail to recognize how little oversight and accountability there is for police, numbers often don’t meaningfully exist. Like asking for numbers from China, it’s just a bow to authority. The critical analysis and objectivity of that is performative.

There is always a line somewhere that divides a topic. When safety and security are worth it vs. when privacy and safety from authority is more worth it.

You seem to think that line should constrain authorities' permission to send up eyes in the sky for little to no cost. I think it could actually reduce government spying if it substituted for camera on every corner.

a good place to start would be statistics on how often cops abuse their power, and how often and to what degree they are held accountable to it

with that information, we can make an informed decision on whether they can be trusted with more power

if they can be trusted with it, we can discuss the benefits and drawbacks of entrusting them with it

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