Comment by jonas21
8 hours ago
This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
8 hours ago
This is much less concerning to me than mass surveillance. If someone calls 911 and you need to send a first responder, why not send a drone to get there faster while a person is on their way?
Because today it will be used as a first responder.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
Hi, I'm in Denver. They're already doing this over on Colfax. It's a significant change vs the existing halo cameras, because they use the drones to follow people.
Hello, James Cameron and his Dark Angel series:
https://www.google.com/search?q=dark+angel+hoverdrone
[flagged]
...and now you have actual domestic surveillance bots, instead of the silent CIA Blackhawks we used to joke about.
As a concept, first responder drones are a good idea. But I wouldn't want public services having anything to do with that company.
If the drones are "providing information" to the police, it's only a matter of time before their AI hallucinates something that gets someone killed. We've already seen AI gun detection services that report things like Doritos bags as guns.
OTOH it will provide more surveillance of the police themselves. Humans are also bad at gun detection (sometimes willfully so) and this provides another check.
How exactly does this provide more surveillance of the police themselves? I've done about ten FOIA lawsuits against police departments and it's laughable to think that they won't just lock footage away and exempt it from the public's eyes. Probably through a trade secret exemption because private companies are involved.
Watch for Flock footage to be "unavailable"/"deleted"/"corrupt" just as often as bodycam footage is.
2 replies →
It's a very bleak (and awfully sus) outlook if you think providing more information to people who need to make decisions that could save or end lives is a bad thing.
I don't trust the authorities to use information just for public safety and against legitimate criminal activity (in part because legitimate crime needs to be decided legally in court not just because of police suspicion).
There's too many examples where they've abused information for harassment, dubious arrests and prosecutions. And this can be systematic not just a few bad apples here and there.
We've already seen this with how ICE has conducted itself with more funding and surveillance.
Those people have proven very untrustworthy and are structurally unaccountable.
You are giving those people the benefit of the doubt. It's been proven many many times that police will use "more information" to excuse their own decision to use violence. A decision that they already made well before the incident.
If you give me long enough, I can find something to charge anyone with.
It's more "sus" that you blindly trust the police, politicians, and billionaires that have a history of discrimination, violence, and oppression and attempt to slander those who don't. Not to mention blindly trusting AI systems with someone's life - the only reason one would do that is because they either stand to profit from it or don't understand how they work. Are you really willing and eager to put your life in the hands of a piece of software that can't distinguish a gun and a Doritos bag?
Remember, oppression and invasion of privacy is still bad even if it isn't currently happening to you. If you think you can't be a target, you're sorely mistaken.
At least their current cameras are fixed to a single point.
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
I'm sorry but, in what way is a swarm of surveillance drones NOT a mass surveillance system?
What's the drone gonna do?
Likely: Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera. Or scan all of the license plates and faces of people along the way.
Possible: Perhaps crash into someone? Or worse.
> Scan everyone's home while en-route to the 911 call with an infrared camera.
That's unconstitutional. Use a regular camera and it's fine for some reason.
Yeah this doesn't bother me in any way, shape, or form. We already have manned aircraft that respond to such things, unmanned aircraft are a strictly better solution. It makes sense for police and it makes even more sense for fire. An aircraft can arrive at the site of a reported fire while firemen are still buckling their pants.
You get manned aircraft to come and check in before the police when you call 911?
In high school in the mid 2000s in Denver, they had a chopper in the air on weekend nights from 8 until 2:30 am or so.
When our parties got called in, the spotlight would be the warning that the cops were a few minutes away and it was time to run.
Lots of cities have manned aircraft loitering during busy times that will respond to a call before ground units
Yes, often the first response to some calls is a CHP aircraft that continuously loiters in the area.
There is an endless list of infractions to civil liberties that would "Make sense for police".
And then what? Hover over me as I'm dying?
Yes. If you called from your cell phone while on foot or in your car, the drone can find your exact location and hover over you until help arrives, quicker than if EMS has to search you out themselves.
How so? I ask as a paramedic of 14 years, now retired.
If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).
FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
3 replies →
Ok. I live in a small, flat city with few trees. So why did my police department buy these?
8 replies →