There’s a hot new phrase bouncing around police departments across the United States: “drone-as-first-responder.”
From small-town Indiana to New York City, cops around the country are embracing autonomous surveillance drones as the latest innovation in policing. While you might hear about the occasional puppy found in the woods with a police drone, those feel-good stories provide excellent cover for their true purposes: gathering intelligence on peaceful protests, surveilling minority communities, and intimidating activists.
Though drone-as-first-responder initiatives may not yet inspire the same knee-jerk opposition as Flock surveillance towers and data centers, fury is clearly growing as a more and more Americans are taking a stand against police drones.
In Minneapolis, residents are speaking out against the city police department’s plan to partner with Skydio, a private defense contractor that primarily manufactures drones for military forces. Concerned citizens packed a City Council meeting to discuss the initiative on Wednesday, filling both the main council hall and a back-up overflow room, CBS reported.
At the meeting, over 40 residents took the mic to explain that they don’t want Skydio drones — or any drones for that matter — in the Twin Cities.
“The deployment of autonomous surveillance drones rests on the presumption that the regular people unto themselves are existential threats,” one speaker exclaimed according to local station Fox9. “But if you accept and normalize that idea that every single person could be an existential threat, then you have already stripped your own residents of any inkling of humanity.”
The speaker continued, highlighting the fact that Minneapolis has a particularly grim history of police violence against Black people. “We need respect for our individuals and shared humanity,” they told city council members, “more relational work on the ground, not remote drones in the air.”
That movement in Minneapolis seems to be growing following weeks of organizing by local activists. Though Minneapolis appears to the be the main battleground for anti-police drone sentiment at the moment, similar concerns have been raised in Syracuse, Detroit, and Los Vegas. At Wednesday’s council meeting, some Twin Cities residents cast local opposition to police drones as one front in the national struggle over civil liberties.
One resident, for example, observed that “every” innovation in police technology is ripe for abuse, a conclusion shared by groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union.
“We watched [federal immigration officers] come in here with drones, we watched ICE come here and violate our constitutional rights,” the resident said. “Every technology given to state and federal law enforcement has been abused.”
More on drones: Wild Video Shows Quadcopter Drone Plucking Man From Raging Floodwaters, Whisking Him to Safety
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