If you read the article it seems like they’re basically sending drones to deal with neighbor complaints about parties rather than having human cops do it. Which is… still dystopian, but they’re not just flying drones around randomly to spy on everyone, they’re doing it in cases where somebody has actually asked them to send a cop over (presumably to weed out the high % of those cases that are just some random old person complaining about a dozen people having a barbecue in their backyard).
The article actually says they send drones first to determine how many police officers they need to send. So they’re essentially doing illegal drone recon without a warrant before dispatching their goons.
OK, but isn’t this also going to mean fewer officers actually visiting places, and hence less risk of them showing up at a random doorstep and "he’s got a gun"ing their way to shooting an innocent person?
(the overriding desire of every cop is to get away with doing less work; it’s hard for me to imagine they won’t take advantage of this to extend their donut-eating hours by deciding that the vast majority of cases do not require a follow-up)
Possibly. We’ll have to wait and see what the empirical evidence shows some time down the line.
Regardless, this is setting an unnerving precedent, in my opinion. It further erodes the expectation of privacy when cops can just deploy drones that give a high degree of visibility from the sky (i.e. yards with privacy fences or private rooftops with privacy fences now no longer discourage police spying). I’m not sure the argument you’re presenting will justify the cost to privacy in the long term.
My family lives in a small town of like 10k and my mom knows the police chief. This tiny ass police department apparently has a drone with a telescope lens capable of just looking into people’s homes from far away
If you read the article it seems like they’re basically sending drones to deal with neighbor complaints about parties rather than having human cops do it. Which is… still dystopian, but they’re not just flying drones around randomly to spy on everyone, they’re doing it in cases where somebody has actually asked them to send a cop over (presumably to weed out the high % of those cases that are just some random old person complaining about a dozen people having a barbecue in their backyard).
The article actually says they send drones first to determine how many police officers they need to send. So they’re essentially doing illegal drone recon without a warrant before dispatching their goons.
OK, but isn’t this also going to mean fewer officers actually visiting places, and hence less risk of them showing up at a random doorstep and "he’s got a gun"ing their way to shooting an innocent person?
(the overriding desire of every cop is to get away with doing less work; it’s hard for me to imagine they won’t take advantage of this to extend their donut-eating hours by deciding that the vast majority of cases do not require a follow-up)
Possibly. We’ll have to wait and see what the empirical evidence shows some time down the line.
Regardless, this is setting an unnerving precedent, in my opinion. It further erodes the expectation of privacy when cops can just deploy drones that give a high degree of visibility from the sky (i.e. yards with privacy fences or private rooftops with privacy fences now no longer discourage police spying). I’m not sure the argument you’re presenting will justify the cost to privacy in the long term.
My family lives in a small town of like 10k and my mom knows the police chief. This tiny ass police department apparently has a drone with a telescope lens capable of just looking into people’s homes from far away