The Age of the Drone Police Is Here
wired.com
wired.com
"The Age of Drone Police" is not acceptable, at all. Red line, for complete destabilization. The fact people on this forum seem to be nonchalant over this only shows how detached from reality everyone is becoming, mostly due to massive waves of propaganda and political bullshit creating a never ending stream of "us versus them".
When clearly the US are those subject to drone police actions, while the THEM are foreigners and the 1% who somehow get to dictate the lives we all live without physical consequence or fear.
Anyone who thinks this is just "business as usual" or the never ending procession of progress is truly lost to the world of safety and possessions.
I very much understand and share the fears of a surveillance state. I would also throw those fears out the window if it meant a drone could find or track someone who kidnapped my child or loved one (and I can think of many even more horrifying examples).
I think the reality is far from the dystopic panopticon people imagine and also won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement that will likely be mitigated by citizen pushback and regulation. I think people who talk about it the way you do are being quite hyperbolic and don't actually do a good job of swaying people to their argument.
Another way of saying this is that unacceptable tyranny will roll in on a tread of acceptable compromises.
> I very much understand and share the fears of a surveillance state.
I'm not convinced you do, as "over-enforcement" is a totally inadequate term for the extant systemic oppression even organic policing imposes. Have you read The End of Policing, yet, or The New Jim Crow, or even watched the documentary 13th?
> the technology in question can save something
Maybe it can, but maybe so can something else. Something less costly, less constricting. You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence. Well, that's one set of social relations, but can you think of any others?
That's a very black and white way of looking at things. We have vastly more surveillance today by businesses, governments, AND private individuals on each other. There have been abuses that have been exposed and fought against, there have been exposes due to this surveillance of powerful people who otherwise would not have been discovered in their corruptions or misdeeds. Surveillance is a tool, not just something used by the powerful against the weak. It can and will be used for good and bad.
I am familiar with the arguments made against policing, and agree it needs significant reforms, but don't agree with the approach the defund the police, abolish prisons, and ACAB groups take even if I understand where they are coming from. They are very effective however at making the average person dismiss progressive thinking instead of actually consider their otherwise valid points.
> You seem to be under the misapprehension that only surveillance can reduce violence.
It's not just about violence, and surveillance is only one of many tools a society uses to regulate itself. Can you suggest to me what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper faster than having a few more available cameras would? Nothing after the fact is going to be more effective than knowing where the person was when it happened and where they went.
We can discuss and likely agree on all sorts of policies that can help mitigate violence and social problems BEFORE they happen, but that won't make you feel better when your kid is gone already. What if drones ARE the safe way to improve policing? You get eyes on the scene without a fallible and scared human trained to shoot before thinking.
I remain unconvinced.
> It's not just about violence... to track down a kidnapper
I hate to be pedantic, but I don't understand by what definition kidnapping is not violence.
> what tool, process, or policy would be able to track down a kidnapper[?]
How about some preventative measures? For context, I believe the gross bulk of kidnappings are by family members, especially estranged parents. This could be remedied by addressing the irrational fears, anxieties, insecurities, and resentments that lead to acts of domestic violence. Such remedies might take the form of mental health courses in schools, or themese incorporated into media. Imagine if, instead of quoting dumb jokes from The Office, we quoted CBT-informed triggers for coping mechanisms that could de-escalate our central nervous arousal and re-target our attention to more productive efforts such as applying for the job which might win us back legal custody.
Edit: I checked. The Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention estimates that approximately 203,000 children a year are abducted by a family member, which accounts for 78% of all child kidnappings in the U.S.
Has any of this law enforcement and surveillance significantly disrupted the rise of mass/school shootings? If technology is fixing the problem, why are Unsolved Murders at record highs [0]?
> I would also throw those fears out the window if it meant a drone could find or track someone who kidnapped my child or loved one
Won't save them from a school shooter when the cops stand outside for an hour. What's ironic is how many times these mass shooters were "on our radar" before the event, indicating the existing surveillance system worked well enough already. How is more surveillance going to fix this problem, when we already are the most surveilled people in the history of this planet? A better question: Would you even bother to check?
> I think the reality is far from the dystopic panopticon people imagine and also won't be free of occasional abuse or over-enforcement that will likely be mitigated by citizen pushback and regulation.
At the very least, you implicitly assume every person, institution, and all technology behind those efforts work as advertised every time. Even your cop-out disclaimer assumes the natural state is perfection, and anything wrong will eventually balanced back to perfection. Specifically, you assume its brought back into balance by somebody else. Your whole argument is based on this premise. I wonder what regulation came up after Edward Snowden's relevations? Again, better question: Have you checked?
Why yes, your kidnapped loved one will be located when all these stars align! Hopefully they won't shoot the victim (and bystanders) along with the kidnapper [1].
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/29/1172775448/people-murder-unso...
from the article
I'm unsure where the confusion lies - the entire point of the original post is about the intent of the technology not aligning with its usage. Clearly the intent is clearly stated and aligns with what the original comment said. That's just one example as well? I'm not really sure what your point is here.
My original comment was saying it seems it's not used for it's intended purpose based on contact still being made. Then you replied with an article quote from the police about their stated intention. Why, I'm not sure.
It seems we're in agreement that the actual usage and intended usage differ.
Wired has a problem with that?
EDIT: Now quickly scrolled down and it seems residences see a drone in the sky and think it's spying on them.
It's not but Wired wants to make a big deal of it.
When most of these drones are owned and operated by private corporations and the government, is it really safe to say they're not? It's been well established they're performing mass-surveillance on every other aspect of our lives, why wouldn't they do it here?
You have a credible source for that? I have never noticed a drone fly anywhere near me in my lifetime except one by a television news crew several years ago.
If anything, if I lived in a crime-ridden area, I would appreciate surveillance by the police.
Add; no room for abuse there.
Being in the EU at least i will be able to GDPR any footage - and it will have to be provided. Your FOIA may vary.
I guess that ship sailed a long time ago given that NYC is still doing stop and frisk, even after it was deemed unconstitutional
Where would that be? Most states allow personal safety searches during investigations of other infractions. For example, police can ask you to step out of your car and search you for weapons if you're pulled over for a traffic infraction. They tend not to do it often, but they have the power to and the courts consistently support that (I most states).
Not that's it's right, but street people are targets of the cops. The involvement of the drone likely didn't have anything to do with it.
I might not like two people screaming at each other in public, but me calling the police says a lot more about my over sensitivity and lack of understanding / exposure to life, than whether there is something needing police intervention in public.
I could write a very long blog post showing how over sensitivity in society has become toxic to well being and trust.
Same as it ever was. Wealthy suburban voters imposing a police state on the poorer disenfranchised half of their city.
Mistaking a flashlight for a gun is almost a given.
https://www.webuyanycar.com/guides/car-ownership/average-spe...
So, we have these in Baltimore, where I live. And, for the most part, Baltimoreans would not agree that the "police force is actually allowed to seriously, non-pretend-like enforce the speed limits and improve road safety".
The reason for this is that a large fraction of Baltimore drivers are not driving legally-registered vehicles with authentic tags, and another subset of the fraction that is installs devices to obfuscate their plates from the speed cameras.
This enforcement strategy does have the upside of being somewhat progressive, in that I assume speeding fines are disproportionately collected from the well-off residents most likely to opt into the (regressive) legal requirements of registration, insurance, etc, and thereby subsidize through their premiums the city's many uninsured low-income drivers.
The downside, of course, is that the illegal vehicles are already "in for a pound" and so generally attempt to drive like bats out of hell at all times it is plausibly physically possible (BPD is prohibited from pursuing for sensible safety reasons, but there's no effective system for later impounding the vehicle).
Data from our city department of transportation suggest that speed cameras on the highway have been effective at reducing crashes - apparently there a critical mass of law-abiding drivers slows everyone to reasonable speeds. On surface streets, they, and red-light cameras, seem less effective, with traffic calming really the only successful intervention.
While encouraging pro-social behaviour, of course.
I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place.
Yes, there are some incidents related to these. Keep in mind maintenance requirements, training, and restrictions are much stricter for real aircraft and thus should have a much lower mishap rate.
"and most people are not listening for tire or engine sounds to prepare them to dodge an out of control car."
This is simply untrue. The nature of the loud and unusual sound causes most people to look even if they weren't intentionally looking for it.
"I am in WAY more danger from a police car currently than from a drone mitigating the need for the police to send a car in the first place."
This is only true because the adoption of the drones are so low. If we had similar deployment rates it's likely we would see similar risk levels.
Of course you could mitigate a lot of this by having other restrictions similar to other aircraft, automated parachute and strobe/alarm for failures, designated low risk/disruption flight paths, etc.
Which leads to this situation where the state is mainly applying flying drones against it's own civilians, as a means of mass surveillance of innocents.
In Ukraine, you can actually see drones trying to knock each other off kinetically. There is even a video of a Russian drone dropping a net over another one.
The war against the Karabach-Armenians was truly multi-national project, with numerous co-belligerents, Turkey, Georgia, Russia (possibly in the later stages), even the US. Israel is not a co-belligerent since they didn't give any weapons, but sold them, but the weapons they sold were as far as I understand quite important. Georgia was a co-belligerent because of the Hamza division crossing through it. Russia was not a co-belligerent in the 2020 war, but I believe they might have been during the actual expulsion-- it's possible they just gave their approval, and then it'd be Turkey, Georgia and the US, but even if the Russians didn't do more than give that assent that assent still had worse consequences than the formal co-belligerency of the US, so one would still want to include them somehow.
I think the US tried to avoid being a formal co-belligerent by giving some military aid to Armenia, but the NKAO successor state was not Armenia, but separate, so that doesn't actually change anything with regard to co-belligerency.
Edit: to the repliers-I am merely pointing out that there other possibilities than the dystopian doomer vision. I’m not speculating on probabilities. But, if I lived on the South side of Chicago, I would welcome this.
These sorts of measures are deployed against mostly law abiding citizens. They do not successfully combat lawlessness.