- Police departments across the United States are increasingly using autonomous surveillance drones for intelligence gathering and intimidation purposes.
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…