San Jose Police Have a Drone | Hacker News Reader

San Jose Police Have a Drone

motherboard.vice.com

38 pointsjamesbritt12 comments

The use of these unmanned drones should be done more frequently. Not only do they protect officers from dangerous, unknown situations, but in man chases or car chases they would be much cheaper to operate than a helicopter.

Yeah what the police really need is a relatively cheap and scalable way to see into my property for no reason. At least conventional fly overs have a cost that prohibits constant sky surveillance

This is why drones should bother people. There is nothing wrong with drones themselves, but they make an inappropriate (but legal) degree of surveillance practical.

What's the story here? Other than Vice's typical tabloid journalism? SJPD has a drone (it' cost them $7k and is something you or I could order online). Furthermore, they have said they have a drone. Thus, completely negating the headline. How is this getting up votes? Certainly not by anyone that read the article. WTF.

I agree that the title was link-baity but the timeline seems to make it pretty clear how SJPD incorrectly stated that they didn't have any documents/information related to UAVs when the timeline for the grant seems to say otherwise. The issue is with SJPD saying they don't have any documents when they must have had something completed to submit the grant. If I'm wrong, let me know and I'll correct it.

* 11/30/2012 - final deadline for SJPD to submit its drone proposal for fiscal year 2013. At this point they had already done enough work internally to submit a proposal for the grant. [0]

* 12/5/2012 - First request for records related to current/future drone use [1]

* 12/17/2012 - An analyst within the SJPD Research and Development Unit specifically responded that the department had no records regarding research into drones or plans to use unmanned aerial vehicles. [1]

* 10/15/2013 - Second request for records related to current/future drone use [2]

* 10/16/2013 - Response stating the the fiscal unit does not have any records related to these items [2]

[0] http://www.bayareauasi.org/sites/default/files/resources/Sou... (Page 4)

[1] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/san-jose-336/san-jose-ca-police...

[2] https://www.muckrock.com/foi/san-jose-336/drone-documents-sa...

Thanks. We edited the title to make it less linkbaity.

They have said repeatedly they didn't have a drone? Did you read the article?

Right... and then they said they did.

Which is, of course, pointless. This is after all one of the most critical points of FOIA: you can not know what you can't know.

So there is no way for someone to refute the assertion that "nothing is here". The fact that there were indeed responsive documents at SJPD was only uncovered through third-party sources.

The assumption has to be that whoever responded to the (repeated) FOIA requests has concealed this information intentionally. Anything else would reduce the FOIA process to a laughing stock.

It does seem rather shocking, given that the city budgetary woes have led to pension cuts and many, many police officers leaving the SJPD, that this would still be a resource to be invested by the department.

Eh, I know next to nothing about the budgetary structure of the SJPD, so I cannot find the fact that they spent $7k on a drone shocking. The article mentions allocated homeland security dollars. It wouldn't surprise me if this was earmarked for specific things, like equipment vs. salary etc. I'm not being an apologist for the SJPD, I don't know/care about them. It just seems like a non-story to me. Obviously some contingent of HN think s otherwise, which is fine.

It would seem to me rather shocking that they wouldn't be ordering more drones given that they can be tactically more useful in situations that require being able monitor a large area or crowd. For example, a drone in the air would be able to monitor a parade crowd more effectively than an officer on the ground and save the city money by not needing as many police patrolling.

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