Is this a new restriction on existing practices, or legislation that enables more functionality with police drones as long as it doesn't include weapons or facial recognition? I get an entirely different vibe from every other discussion on this legislation than from the headline of this post.
As you can see from the text (signed by the governor today; effective immediately), this is a new restriction. All underlined text is newly added to the law. Text with a strikethrough is removed from the law.
The law also adds many new data reporting obligations, and empowers the Attorney General to investigate (with teeth) violations.
Police departments in the US basically don’t require legislation to add new functionality to their policing mechanisms, they require laws to tell them what they cannot do. So more the former than the latter. But it doesn’t really matter with this for the average citizen, most likely. They’ll only ever use the drones for big busts. Most cops just sit in traffic until they get bored and chase down random beater cars that were going 5 over the speed limit, or pulled slightly too far forward at a stop sign that had shrubs blocking the left and right view.
> Most cops just sit in traffic until they get bored and chase down random beater cars that were going 5 over the speed limit, or pulled slightly too far forward at a stop sign that had shrubs blocking the left and right view.
As a Brit, watching the militarisation of the US police force is kinda scary. Hearing about successful push back and positive legislation is good.
A quick bit of Googling, I can't find any evidence of weapons a being placed on police drones in Illinois, so this seems preemptive, which is good to see!
(Our own police force has many of its own problems)
I knew it was an issue when a rural town of at best 2000 people adjacent to where my wife grew up successfully purchased multiple Humvees for "riot control" through 1033 (a program instituted by a president from the equivalent of a blairite-ish labour party in our country, no less).
“It’s a transfer, so that means that the agencies don’t have to pay for this equipment. So because the government has already possessed it, paid for it, it’s the Department of Defense’s property.”
It seems technically it is still DoD property?
But alltogether it is indeed worrysome. Here in germany we have the same trend, even though quite light in comparison.
It is rare nowdays, that I see police without bulletproof wests and machine pistols are more and more common. It creates a very different impression ...
Speaking of it: my car broke down once and I parked it on the side of a rural road (not in the way). It was weekend and I put a big note in it, saying it will be towed away very soon.
Monday morning my wife with the baby were suprised by police on the door. And the first thing they see is the machine pistol and fighting gear.
Surely totally necessary to get the same information, they could have gotten from the note in the car (that this very day it will be moved away). I seriously don't know what they were thinking. Probably nothing at all and war gear becomes just standard for engaging with potentially dangerous civilians, who park their car next to the road.
Sort of like how Naperville has APC's, but also somehow is "The Safest Place in America". (That title is a fraud, btw, and the result of systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes. But they indeed don't have much of a gang violence problem - just major drug problems which go unaddressed.)
systemic non-prosecution, non-reporting, and reduction of felonies to lesser crimes.
This has been going on ever since the F.B.I. started requiring police departments to report their crime statistics in a uniform way.
I remember one PD took advantage of a flaw in the forms that only allowed one category per crime. So if someone got robbed and killed, they'd mark it down as a robbery, not a homicide.
It happens at multiple levels in this case, in order to keep the area's super-low crime stats.
I heard from a relative who's on a neighboring town's police force that the DA busts down first time felony offenders to misdemeanors nearly every time (this is at the county level). Except for the really bad stuff like murder, or selling drugs on a playground.
I've heard anecdotally from friends that police just refuse to take reports of assault. This is domestic assault, or more "stranger danger" types of assaults (like late at night on the riverwalk). Both physical and sexual types of assault. This apparently doesn't count as "the really bad stuff" I described before.
My sister knew a gal who got hit by a van while crossing the street, where there's a crosswalk and a yellow flashing light and a sign. Her leg was broken in a few places. When the police arrived, she received a ticket for jaywalking because she wasn't in the crosswalk. (A funny thing happens when you get hit by a van - you tend to move far away from where you were standing) That jaywalking ticket did not raise the crime stats like ticketing the driver would have. Bonus: It was potentially racially motivated, because the victim was black, and the cops have a reputation for harassing black people in town.
Naperville is a fine place to raise your children if you're wealthy and white and your husband is not abusive.
After law enforcement successfully jury-rigged a bomb defusal robot with explosives to kill a cornered suspect in Dallas in 2016 [0][1] (with little to no pushback at the time) vendors and departments around the country have been pushing to formally adopt the tactic ever since. The first article noted (according to national head of their union) that SWAT teams around the country considered it prior to that incident. SFPD initially getting approval to do it brought national attention [2] to the practice, but unfortunately we're going to need a federal bill to stop its spread.
How do you balance this concern with the level of crime? Wouldn't be more excusable for a Johannesburg PD to be better equipped than Brighton?
With that in mind, it doesn't seem right to paint the US with one brush when Chicago's murder rate is more than 5x higher than New York City's. For the case of small PDs having big budgets I agree it's wasted money, and maybe even damaging to the town.
But in urban areas like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, it seems tone-deaf to focus on police violence when so many people are victimised by people the police could have locked up if they were better equipped. (Ignoring of course the weakness of courts to imprison violent offenders, which is also a huge issue in London.)
Illinois has very strong anti facial recognition / biometric law. Theres been a lot of class action lawsuits recently. I got like $300 from the facebook settlement alone.
This is true, but that law (BIPA) applies to private entities. i.e., government orgs and contractors are exempt. Regardless, this new legislation is good. I would like to see the complete inclusion of government organizations into needing to acquire consent.
The law covers both scenarios, as shown in the linked text:
> A law enforcement agency operating a drone under this Act is prohibited from using, during a flight, onboard facial recognition software that works in conjunction with the drone. A law enforcement agency operating a drone under this Act is prohibited from using any information gathered by a drone with any facial recognition software
Grouped as (prohibited from using any information gathered by a drone) (with any facial recognition software), you might be right.
Grouped as (prohibited from using any information gathered by a (drone with any facial recognition software)), I don't think you're right. Personally, I would naturally group the clauses in this way and conclude that off-drone facial recognition was not effectively barred by this statute but onboard facial recognition was.
I got a $400 settlement from Facebook when they did facial recognition in violation of a similar law. IANAL but if / when they try it I will probably get another settlement.
"weapons" should be missing the "s" to reduce ambiguity in that case. Right now it reads like (weapons) and (facial recognition). "weapons recognition" doesn't quite sound right to me.
> Right now it reads like (weapons) and (facial recognition).
That's because that is what it says. The parent comment's confusion was due to both parsing the comma as a list separator instead of a conjunction as well as not recognizing the implication of the "s" at the end of "weapons".
If they did, then you could successfully sue them for an injunction. Further use would then be contempt of court, a separate crime. Further, any evidence derived from that would be inadmissible in any proceedings.
As an Illinois resident, voter, and taxpayer, I'm pleased by this. I don't think I've never been _happy_ with Illinois politicians, but this current set is meaningfully productive enough for me to consider plausible the idea of being happy with my government.
The Illinois education board always had a soft spot for banned books. I was legally required to read two of them for my schools to retain accreditation. But we actually read 3 1/2.
But our federal senators are pretty awful tankies. (Durban and Duckworth.. they'll full on send you a tone death letter about why encryption is awful after you send them your concerns)
I mentioned in another comment, I think I may have been incorrect in the usage of tankie. I meant authoritarian.
I've been active in contacting my senators for the bills that came up that were a threat to privacy and destroying encryption for the last few years. KOSA, BAN TICKTOCK, EARN IT, etc. Addition to the encoarching collection of biometric data of citizens by the federal government and private entities.
I've got nothing but form letters quickly responded that "it's for the kids" in those cases. No acceptance that they'll collect and consider the feedback, just tone death emails saying "well EARN IT is going to protect the kids [ignore that lindsay graham wants to wack it to your personal photos and call it scanning]".
I've had a friend with an issue getting her husband getting an ESTA for family travel to the US and had some concerning interviewing agents. I tried reaching out for her... nothing.
Duckworth and Durbin are good D politicans, as in they tow the party line. As far as representation of IL needs and supporting rights ... they don't care.
The term originally arose to refer to Communist party members of Western countries who supported the suppression of the Hungarian Uprising, and later the Prague Spring and Tienanmen square, through tanks and military force.
Today it refers to Western communists who are not only marxists, but who defend/deny/celebrate atrocities committed by communist states, particularly the use of the military (incl. tanks) to slaughter protestors.
Generally people who support those states and leaders but conveniently gloss over the crimes against humanity are also referred to as tankies, even if they don't explicitly support the acts. In a more modern context, it includes lefties who support Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
So, while all tankies are authoritarians, not all authoritarians are tankies. And while all tankies are authoritarian communists, not all authoritarian communists are tankies - though I'd argue that supporting that kind of system while simultaneously recognising that all the times it's happened before it went awfully is not a particularly coherent worldview either.
i am anti the current chicago status quo and agree the policies are dumb. but all this does is prohibit surveillance and weapons via drone. which i both support.
the answer is some amount of improved traditional policing (necessary evil) and arming all the non-gang people to the teeth bc the gang ones are already armed
" Sec. 18. Use of weapons. A law enforcement agency operating a drone under this Act is prohibited from equipping or using on a drone any firearm, weaponized laser, kinetic impact projectile, chemical agent or irritant, or any other lethal or non-lethal weapon."
You should go look at the ratio between administrative costs and actual beat cop salaries. The rising cost of college and the rising cost of law enforcement/defense suffers from a similar decay of middle men leaches just creating fees.
Also as a note, theres not a lot of correlation between an increase and violence and reduced weapons policy, its almost driven by some secondary macro trend.
While bringing attention to the challenges of policing may be important armed drones are not the hill to die on. Cops may need support from prosecutors and they may need better equipment to deal with gangs, but they never need armed drones.
I don't understand the issue with facial recognition if it is only used as a lead, and isn't considered evidence in and of itself, and a person's rights are respected even if they are flagged by the facial recognition software. If the issue is disparate success rates between races or other demographics, then let's just fuzz the incoming data until it's all equal. Facial recognition still sounds like an incredibly useful tool.
Banning facial recognition sounds to me like the legislature knows that the police force abuses people and will abuse people even more with facial recognition. Instead of banning tools that can increase the scope for abuse, why not try rooting out the people and culture perpetrating abuse in the first place?
If I am flagged by facial recognition software my rights have already been violated.
This is a bad idea even before we consider that LEO is composed of fallible human beings with an established history of abusing the information systems they already possess.
in the United States, there is a history of limitation of occupying armies, and to some extent police. It comes from a time when you, citizen, had to stop what you are doing and become under questioning or controlled without any checks and balances. A group of men in uniform could stop and hold any number of people for "suspicion" .. that is illegal here. So in reverse, if you are going to be stopped, questioned, and your actions controlled, there must be sufficient reason, and that authority has limitations. Cars have changed that calculus a lot, laws are being updated. Murky legal waters for "searching" crowds.. one factor is that information systems hold data for days and years, millions of records can be searched instantly on a regular basis. so the practical reach of technology has changed. IANAL
agree. the technology is exceptionally useful and banning it doesn't stop already corrupt LEO from fudging evidence. they should be removed entirely. individually, many forms of evidence in forensic science are complete BS but as part of a whole they add value. its the same with facial recognition. this is just a kneejerk reaction that sounds good on headlines and for politics but doesn't actually help anyone.
Drone means flying drones here. What about land based robots? Can they still put a shotgun on one of those to blow away a suspicious package? Can they still use a robot to breach a door? Can they use facial recognition software on footage recovered from a land based drone?
It's a good point. I would hope there's an exemption for bomb disposal robots, because functionally there's not that much difference between these and (basically) Killbotz:
Bomb robots seem fine to me in an appropriate context. An alternative is a high power rifle at range, although that does seem a lot more dangerous.
I’m more concerned about militarized pizza delivery robots. If they can’t have flying drones will they have rolling ones instead? Seems odd to carve this out for only flying drones.
There shouldn't be an exemption on the equipment, but prohibition of using anything as a killbot. Dallas police used a bomb-disposal robot to remotely deliver a bomb to kill a suspect some years back.
"Hourslong negotiations with the man broke down into an exchange of gunfire, Dallas Police Chief David Brown said at a news conference Friday morning. At that point, the officers deployed a robot armed with an explosive."
That's hardly the stuff of Robocop dystopia. That seems a reasonable and proportionate response to a long siege and multiple instances of gunfire exchange in which 5 policemen had lost their lives engaging the suspect.
Does it have to be dystopian before one disagrees on principle? I don't want killerbots normalized - the same justifications on this precedent will be applicable to a "Robocop dystopia", such as police departments buying and operating (or contracting) used MQ-9 Reapers or whatever drone Axon is cooking up
What does normalized mean here? Do I accept a future in which all people actively engaging police in gunfire over multiple hours are subject to killing by a remote-controlled machine? I do.
Do I accept roving bands of killer drones flying overhead programmed to autonomously kill? I do not.
It seems like we’re basically in the first circumstance since the use of a robot to terminate the firefight in Dallas was literally unprecedented.
I don't want any police departments to have carte blanche on authorizing drone executions by land, sea or air. The Dallas PD didn't see itself as encumbered by any laws - so they could hypothetically use a UAV to drop explosives today. I would like legislation to prevent this from repeating - using a killerbot shouldn't be a field-decision, IMO.
We need clear rules of engagement. At the moment, police forces are adopting military equipment, but not discipline.
I'm not a fan either, but we demand more and more from the police, yet there is a powerful force ( mostly political ) to curb the resources the police can use.
I get both sides, but this road will have bad results. ( making Illinois into a police state is not a solution either )
> This "defund de police" bs has been one of the most damaging rhetoric's in American cities. People are being victimized left and right, robberies, rapes, gang violence, etc because some people know there are little to no consequences.
Police budgets haven't actually been defunded, and yet this still happens.
Yeah, the people saying “defund the police” have generally had near-zero success in affecting policy, with policy makers at all levels rejecting their advocacy and increasing police budgets, often at the expense of other local services and functions.
If bad things are happening in crime, and it is an indictment of current policy, it is more defensibly an indictment of the reaction against “defund the police” than of “defund the police”.
Please understand that "defund the police" is way more than just cutting money to buy things, but also demanding huge amounts for asinine redtape that is mostly impractical in the real World. Also local directives like: "Not permitting a police officer to be at a school or even at the parking lot" ( yes.. really )
To the point most police departments are running at half-capacity and 911 calls remain open for HOURS!
It's all fine, until you are the one calling 911 and feel abandoned, then who are you going to blame? The police of course..
It's terrifying that we live in a world where a legislator saw the need to regulate this while I am not disagreeing with the need for this once brought to my attention.
Can we get a federal bill with the same prohibitions? It would be absurd if the right to be free from fear of automated death from the skies is left to a patchwork of state and local restrictions.
Irresponsible arguments that I would totally not be surprised to hear to push in the opposite direction:
- If law enforcement doesn't have armed drones, we live in a world where only the criminals have armed drones.
- Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?
- Currently, when law enforcement uses deadly force, one of the strongest defenses is that in the moment, an officer felt that their own life was at risk. A drone operator has no such fear and therefore no bias towards using weapons prematurely.
I get the argument for federal laws but honestly I think it is misguided to want state laws promoted to a national level immediately. This is how law in the US evolves. The patchwork is a feature. A federal government with the agility to implement this law at a national level would have far too much power. The system is working.
I agree. It's helpful to remember: for every law you like and want promoted to the federal level, there's another law you probably don't like that someone else thinks would be great to promote to the federal level. Although moving states to flee terrible laws is a burden, it's not as much of a burden as fleeing your entire country. Laws should be as local as practically possible.
> Laws should be as local as practically possible.
You guys are every lawyer's dream. Yes, please, continue believing you're following some great American tradition of strong local government by submitting to the whims of your local Boss Tweed and the five judges in your county, I play golf with them once a month. Oh, you have a legal problem and need to navigate the rats nest of weird local laws? Great, you can choose from one of three tax attorneys that know the local tax regime as it applies to your business. I play golf with them too, and (coincidentally) we all bill $1,100 an hour.
You guys are every esthetician’s dream. Yes, please continue believing you’re following some great skincare tradition by submitting to the whims of your local sephora and the five skincare instagram influencers in your local county, I play volleyball with them once a month. Oh, you want a tattoo and need help to navigate the lawyers nest of weird local tattoo parlors? Great, you can choose from one of three instagram tattoo artists that know the local tattoo regime as it applies to your section of skin. I play volleyball with them too, and (coincidentally) we all bill $110 an hour.
You guys are every fast food worker's dream. Yes, please continue believing you're following some great culinary tradition by submitting to the whims of your local drive-thru and the five foodie Instagram influencers in your local county, I play dodgeball with them once a month. Oh, you want a custom T-shirt and need help to navigate the crafters' maze of local thrift stores? Great, you can choose from one of three Instagram crafters that know the local thrifting scene as it applies to your fashion statement. I play dodgeball with them too, and (coincidentally) we all make $15 an hour.
Yes. And sadly even before the blackout it’s lost a lot of charm from the early days. I see people hating on pun threads and threads like above on Reddit and it makes me nostalgic and sad. Being a geek isn’t cool there anymore.
This is being downvoted I guess for its tone, but I think the point is a good one: Laws that apply over a large jurisdiction are easier and cheaper to comply with. Maybe a good example of this is laws surrounding alcohol; I think it's kind of crazy that a winery in CA trying to ship an order back to a tourist's home has to understand and comply with local and municipal laws on the other side of the country and knowing which counties are dry and where their specific boundaries are ... which creates real cost and complexity that each of those businesses contends with, and higher prices get passed on to all consumers.
When companies decide the complexity is too high, they sometimes just have to target the most stringent law that they can reasonably cover, e.g. car companies meeting CA emission standards can make CA the defacto national standard. A buyer in Texas is presumably paying a higher price for a car designed to meet a law in another state. It would be more democratic if there was just a national standard.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the idea of making laws uniform for the convenience of large companies that operate across many jurisdictions.
Besides the fact that the reduced cost of compliance you mention comes at the expense of the localities freedom to govern themselves, federal laws make it more convenient for these companies to manipulate the system to their advantage. A large company can bribe a couple hundred federal politicians to get their way instead of having to bribe many thousands across so many state legislatures or even more at a municipal level.
and in fact, it's only large companies that can afford to have a person or team to work through the details, keeping smaller companies out of the market and unable to compete.
Isn't this the definition of regulatory capture? Which usually comes first, the large companies or the regulations that only large companies could keep up with?
The idea of the feds choosing poorly, or being corrupted, and deciding on one set of regulations for everyone scares me sometimes. Health care didn't turn out so great, the ACA put a stop to several states that had interesting plans and implementations of their own, and is basically a subsidy for the health care industry as it currently exists, whose lobbyists apparently crafted the text of that bill. Another example is privacy rights - the feds aren't doing much, and I'm glad that some states are.
Why should I care that companies get uniform laws more than I care about these issues that matter to me?
I'm not saying that we can't have federal regulations, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having local regulations even if companies are inconvenienced, especially for evolving industries.
Smaller businesses, and even many large corporations, consider the fines and penalties of violating local laws as a cost of doing business.
That is to say: Conduct business, if you get fined or penalized for it then note it down for future reference. It's cheaper than hiring an entire legal department to trove through cryptic manuscripts only relevant to regions measured in tens of square miles. Usually.
Point taken. I can't edit my original post, but I'd be happy to apply this logic to any company, large or small. Company profits are not more important that voters.
We can imagine situations where voters place more importance on things other than money, right?
Like maybe the voters would prefer human police officers as opposed to armed drones, even if the drones were cheaper. Or maybe the voters don't want to be tracked by cameras everywhere they go, given how this data can be abused, even if it costs them $x more per year to shop.
But couldn't it also go the other way, where small local companies who don't need a legion of lawyers would have a competitive advantage over larger companies trying to operate across many jurisdictions? I assume this depends on the regulations being imposed.
We already have large companies with legions of lawyers who have the resources to manipulate federal and state politicians in their favor, using regulatory capture and other means to avoid competition. There's a cost associated with that, too.
I love how costs are immediately passed on to consumers and employees, but profits remain and should never be allowed to decrease ever for shareholders
In the video at 1:10 there are a lot of glass shards in the passenger seat. I'll call bullshit until it's tested in Mythbusters with Buster as the passenger.
As someone who owns the model of truck pictured in the video, there is no possible way that you could kill the driver without risking death to the passenger. Those trucks are TINY.
That video is pure propaganda, but I would support the CEO if he wanted to sit in the passenger seat and try and take out a dummy next to him.
This is an argument of process over substance. Good laws should be applied as widely as possible. Bad laws should be as local as possible, preferably applied nowhere at all.
>Good laws should be applied as widely as possible.
Literally nobody except criminals would disagree with this. That's what makes is of limited value in a discussion like this. It's like saying "Good speech should be disseminated everywhere." Yes. We already agree, to the point where the argument is that protections for good speech aren't really needed.
The difficulty is getting a handle on what is a "good law". This is difficult, in part, because we can't always understand the effects down the causal chain. We also can't always get people to agree on the definition. Is a "good law" one that prioritizes safety over personal freedom or is it the other way around? I dunno, but this is even harder in a democracy, where everyone (theoretically, at least) has a voice.
You're back into process again. Laws do not have metadata attached to them, their goodness is a function of the observer.
You think a law is good if you think it's good. You preference is then for it to be applied as widely as possible. Maybe other people disagree, and so should want it applied nowhere. Now you get to fight with them, using whatever power you have and are willing to use. Whoever has the most power to bring to the fight will win it.
In general, I understand and am sympathetic to the idea of the states as being laboratories for democracy, etc.
However, in this case:
- The US federal government already has and has used drones as weapons overseas, including to kill US citizens. This now includes smaller/cheaper drones.
- The US federal government has materially supported the militarization of police forces, including by giving them military equipment.
- Federal law enforcement agencies operate everywhere in the country, and IIUC their behavior isn't limited by those state laws (e.g. the state of CA can't pass a law that removes the CBP "100-mile border zone" and restricts them to only operating at borders and ports), and IIUC the FBI already flies surveillance flights (though the facial recognition prohibition likely doesn't apply here).
the militarization of the police force is the issue here, isn't it?
at a most fundamental level what's debated is if civilians and police should be demilitarized as much as possible or not. Who benefits and who doesn't if all legislation strives for a civic society without deadly force? that's the "Elefant in the room".
The counter-argument to a demilitarized civic society usually is that you couldn't possibly control the bad guys. The empirically sound ground truth is that it takes 1-2 generations to get there, and that you will get there if only you want to get there, as a nation, as evidenced by a number of countries who wanted to essentially get rid of everyday knives and nunchucks and tonfas, let alone firearms, and who in fact essentially did get rid of them.
The US, as a civic society, needs to discuss which kind of a civic society they want to be.
the answer to "shall police have gun drones" flows from that. just like the answer to "shall school students need gun drills".
Doesn't this kind of depend on the law? Do you really think "guns and and facial recognition on drones" is the kind of thing we have to do experiments on? I kind of get where you're coming from in the sense that it is scary for so much power over so many people to be concentrated in such a small place, but, on the other hand, when the case is simple or the moral calculus is clear enough, I think we ought not feel a strong compunction against action at a federal level.
No, it doesn't depend on the law. I think all laws need experimentation regardless of the subject matter because no law is perfect. I also think a federal government that can quickly enact laws is far too powerful an entity to exist in a country of 330,000,000 people. While some "good" laws might get enacted sooner "bad" laws will as well. Remember we are a country guilty of genocide.
As an exercise try writing down the name of all the politicians you can off the top of your head. Then consider if you like and agree with them or not. Then ask yourself if you really want an agile federal government.
Thinking only the laws you like will make it to a federal law free of unintended side effect is naive fantasy at best. The laboratory of democracy is working. Please, lobby your representatives, get involved, but don't confuse lack of federal law for malfunction.
I don't think anyone would accuse our federal government of being "agile" or able to "quickly enact laws". And I agree that in almost all things getting the right law is more important than getting a law quickly.
However, your insistence that "it doesn't depend on the law" makes me view your whole stance more critically; the answer in complex areas is very rarely "it doesn't depend". There's a bunch of domains where stuff just happens across state lines so frequently that a patchwork would only create confusion. It would be really disruptive if NY made it illegal to drive on gas you bought in NJ b/c NY officials hadn't specifically tested it to confirm that all additives were acceptable; it's easier if we just have federal standards.
Applying a consistent process is what gives the population continuing faith in the system. Laws that are universally supported will sail through the process with ease, so what's the rush? Laws that prove to be more contentious, regardless of reason, will be negotiated and refined across small regions--either indefinitely or until common ground can be found.
To be clear, I _also_ would strongly prefer the facial recognition prohibition be national (and also apply to non-drone-based cameras that police have access to). But clearly literal killer drones are worse than mere spy drones.
Mostly it comes down to the companies that make these things have to "maximize shareholder value." Who cares if people get killed?
It's good to see Illinois get ahead of this, considering that politicians in Illinois keep getting caught taking bribes from these policing equipment companies that peddle gadgets like red light cameras.
Just yesterday it was revealed that the newly elected mayor of Chicago authorized the extension of the ShotSpotter contract another ten years: One of the very things he promised to kill when he was campaigning.
It's all been "Oops! Is that my signature!? I didn't know that other people have the ability to click a button and sign my name to multi-million dollar contracts. Oh, well, maybe next decade!"
The response to "then only criminals will have armed drones" is:
Ok, let's give all the cops a lot of drugs and child porn, because it would be bad if only criminals had that stuff, and maybe we can give them anthrax and components for a dirty bomb, because it would be bad if only terrorists had those. Or maybe, that's a broken line of reasoning and law enforcement isn't a war in which enemies must be met with equal means.
The answer to "sometimes police have to use deadly force; isn't it better if their lives aren't at stake is":
We live in a world where kids having fun on the internet will have other people 'swatted'. This is only possible because police are willing to arm themselves and suddenly and forcefully enter a situation where they have _no credible information_ about any kind of threat. Until they demonstrate some capacity to consistently identify whether a situation requires deadly force, it's irresponsible to give them more of it.
The response to the "police who use deadly force inappropriately may have felt their life was at risk" is ... all the videos of police killings where an unarmed person is running away, an unarmed person is already effectively restrained, etc etc. Police use deadly force even when there is clearly no threat. Making police safer isn't the solution; the rest of us need to be safe from the police.
I think the third one is that police will have no defense if they try to claim they feared for their life, not that they'll stop killing people in clearly not life threatening situations.
> If law enforcement doesn't have armed drones, we live in a world where only the criminals have armed drones.
If criminals have guns, police should have body armor and maybe also guns. If criminals have automatic guns, police should not have automatic guns because 99% of their job has no connection to those encounters and they are a huge force that interacts with the public constantly, so treating it at an occupying force is a terrible idea. Armed drones don’t fight each other. Having armed drones doesn’t protect police, or anyone, from armed drones that criminals may or may not have.
> Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?
Taking the life of a fellow citizen is a huge amount of power given by the government. If the government can take citizen’s lives with no risk and no locality, there can be no accountability. Real people going out and enforcing the law is a check, as imperfect as it is, on what laws and how far the government can go. If a warehouse of drone operators outside of DC can open fire on protestors in Albuquerque, there is no accountability.
> Currently, when law enforcement uses deadly force, one of the strongest defenses is that in the moment, an officer felt that their own life was at risk. A drone operator has no such fear and therefore no bias towards using weapons prematurely.
DOJ investigations show again and again that shootings are the result of systemic issues within the police force. Just as one example, the Clevand PD was investigated after the Tamir Rice murder and found a pattern of excessive force, substandard training, and unconstitutional practices. From the report. "The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk…We found that CDP officers too often use unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution. Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it. Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs." The DOJ specifically states that Cleveland PD use excessive force, including deadly force, at a "significant rate" and that excessive and deadly force was a pattern, and not isolated incidences. [1]
Making it that much easier for police to use “unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution” is not going to make things safer for anyone.
To that end, its not that, in a perfect world, law enforcement shouldn't ever have any of these tools, just that our entire justice system is not set up to adequately police the police.
I'd be in favor of immediately banning armed drones, and immediately banning facial recognition from drone surveillance. At a national level. Don't even give it to federal police forces. Then let the congress come up with a sensible path for qualifying their use. Drones over a sporting event, looking for faces of any known terrorists is a non-starter. Drones over a specific sporting event, looking for a particular suspect, because the officers were able to get a warrant for their use during that event? Ok, sure, if we could find a constitutional path to get there.
Likewise, I have no particular objection to e.g. armed robots, if the police who use it can show that there was no other way to resolve that situation. But there can be no qualified immunity if you lose that case. Whoever signs off on the robot goes to jail for murder if a jury can be convinced there were other realistic options.
Basically, a lot of issues with police abuse of power, to my mind, come down to a total absence of accountability. The tools are not, of themselves, dangerous. Its just that we keep putting them in the hands of people who will never use them responsibly. To be clear, it may well be the case that no people exist who can use them responsibly, but the narrative around removing the tools needs to center on the accountability question, not the "tools are scary" angle.
A federal law can only apply to FBI, National Guard, Coast Guard and other federally managed law enforcement bodies. It cannot apply to the various state and county police authorities. Governance of those is a right explicitly granted to each state and county, and the states/counties will fight tooth and nail to retain it.
They'd just use federal funding as leverage. "If you want these federal dollars, you'll abide by the following..." If the 10th amendment went to war with the Spending Power clause, I know who I'd put money on!
That doesn't quite make sense to me. A federal policy or a federal executive order only applying to federally-managed bodies, I could understand. But federal laws outweigh state and local laws.
This power stems from the Tenth Amendment, which states that any power not delegated to the Federal government becomes the purview of the State.
Given that the state has a number of laws, it must operate its own police force to enforce those laws. Therefore, since a state is required to operate said police force, governance of that force falls under the purview of the state and cannot be delegated to an external authority. If that were possible, the federal government could take control of a state police force to enforce laws contrary to the state's own laws.
It sounds circuitous, but the meaning is clear: The state has to be able to govern and control its own police force if it wants to enforce its own laws.
You have the causality wrong. The state and local police forces are necessary to enforce local laws because there are many things are are not illegal at the federal level. They simply aren't addressed at all.
There also may be consistency in the legality but not the punishment. As an example, when I was in college the max penalty for getting caught with a single marijuana joint ranged anywhere from a $5 fine to a year in prison depending on whether you were caught by a city cop, campus police, county sheriff, or state police officer. I suppose it would have been possible to end up in federal prison if you somehow pissed off the wrong FBI agent.
65% of the US population is within the 100-mile border zone in which CBP operates -- I think they shouldn't have drones with facial recognition abilities.
In 2015 there was a bunch of press around the FBI running surveillance flights recording cities in the US. Recent reporting suggests that the program has continued (using the same shell companies and names). This would be even harder for citizens to find out about if they were using smaller drones).
If federal agencies were prohibited from using drones to surveil citizens en masse, and prohibited from arming drones, I think we'd all benefit. If we also had a federal prohibiting 1033 transfers of military drones with arms or facial recognition, I would also consider that to be a win.
Federal laws absolutely apply to local government and their agencies.
The death penalty was banned in 1972 on a federal ruling of a local law (Georgia), as a consequence, all death sentences, federal and state, were commuted to life.
There are a TON of federal laws that apply to local law enforcement. At this moment there are several local police departments that are being actively monitored and controlled by the DOJ due to unconstitutional activity.
Ironically, they didn’t commute those sentences as a result of the death penalty but due to the (lack of) sentencing guidelines being against the 8th amendment.
The states rewrote their laws and went right back to sentencing people to death.
This is an oversimplification. Certain federal laws are limited to federal law enforcement, where there is exclusive federal jurisdiction, because these powers are reserved for the states. Other federal laws apply to everyone, to every state. Because it effects interstate commerce or it is related to a constitutional right, like the fifth amendment right to due process
The argument against it being federal is that such a bill would likely be the result of a lot more compromises, chipped away at by a lot more parties. Which makes sense, as it would have a lot more stakeholders, and a lot more at stake.
The feds also have a stronger tendency to make bigger, dumber, more invasive enforcement mechanisms that end up creating new and unforeseen problems.
There is no way this would ever even pass initial consideration at the Federal level, in that there is no incentive for the Federal government to limit the weaponry available to it's law enforcement apparatus. They would see such a law as containing no upside for the government itself, and therefore it will be, at best, laughed out of committee and more likely any Congressman or Senator who proposes it will mysteriously find that a lot of his or her donors are suddenly turning on him.
>> Can we get a federal bill with the same prohibitions? It would be absurd if the right to be free from fear of automated death from the skies is left to a patchwork of state and local restrictions.
>> - Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?
What about drones that can be used to deploy non-lethal weapons?
Nope, "violent mobs" are something that if it exists and rich enough modern democratic societies (and others) that is effect of some cause that needs immediate fixing, even beating them just down is maybe too much - I know I'm a bit too idealistic and romantic (:
But no, please let us not starts with robots/machines fighting our own society but fix it, drones in warfare are already enough of an ethical problem..
I think for the vast majority of cases I agree. If there are public riots, the system fucked up. This doesn't mean that the public riots are directed at the appropriate solution or have correctly identified the underlying issue, it just means that something broke and that thing is serious. Almost nothing is going to lead to a public riot overnight. It is because the problem was left unsolved and the pressure built.
I'm perfectly okay if there are severe consequences for authorities who do not attempt to solve problems that cause pressure to build. If you play with a pipe bomb, you gotta be careful and attentive.
>> Nope, "violent mobs" are something that if it exists and rich enough modern democratic societies (and others) that is effect of some cause that needs immediate fixing, even beating them just down is maybe too much - I know I'm a bit too idealistic and romantic (:
So a devil's advocate question then:
If a riot control gas-equipped drone was available at Washington DC on Jan. 6, 2021, should it have been used?
By what criteria do you define "some cause that needs immediate fixing"?
Where does one draw the line between "valid civil unrest" / "protest" and "a violent mob"?
>> let us not starts with robots/machines fighting our own society
Should human police officers be used then?
Or should the "protesters" / mob be allowed to roam freely?
We already have a federal bill that prohibits dangerous weapons on drones. It is the FAA Reauthorization Act of 2018. As far as I can tell the law doesn't have any exceptions for civilian law enforcement.
Not a US resident and certainly not a lawyer, but are armed vehicles legal in the first place? I thought weapon mounts on airplanes and drones are forbidden by FAA regulations, and BATFE rules on ground vehicles. Weapons that fire more than once per one depression of a fire button are also defined machine guns and are regulated.
Military branches including national guards are exempted from all above, but it’s generally illegal in a modern nation, even some dictatorships, for a military branch to be both an external facing defense force and an internal facing police organization at the same time by mission, as allowing it leads to unrests and coups. So handling of such vehicles and devices can’t be normally outsourced to military.
I think this is just another case of honest but uninformed people adding more and more ad-hoc and redundant laws without enforcement. Not that I oppose the spirit of this particular law though.
You have to think about the incentives at play. Imagine you're a police chief or some kind of similar decision maker in a government organization. You have certain metrics you need to hit as dictated by elected politicians and non-elected supervisors, etc. You have a "job to do" and you're being measured by the outcomes you produce. Your career and wellbeing depends on this.
So what do you expect them to do? They absolutely need a law that says they can't use a certain technique/technology/etc because they'd be deemed incompetent for not using them if they were missing their metrics. So you use them unless you have a law that says you can't. Then you have an out.
It's not like these are evil people. They want the same things you do in the end. But they have a specific job to do with goals to pursue and what do you expect them to do?
> This Act does not prohibit the use of a drone by a law enforcement agency [...] to forestall [...] the destruction of evidence
So, essentially nothing is prohibited. "Destruction of evidence" can be flushing drugs down the toilet or throwing them out a car window. The war on drugs greatly increases how many "crimes" are being committed at any given time and what is considered evidence of those crimes.
Is anything ever really prohibited (for US law enforcement)? Better yet, what are the real consequences for violation? All I ever hear is, "Okay, fine. We won't do this illegal thing anymore - you know, the thing we've been doing for years, knowing it's totally illegal. Sorry, not sorry." Without consequences for violation, there is no prohibition.
Slightly OT: I noticed Colorado, Connecticut, New Mexico, and New York City either ended or limited qualified immunity in recent years. (In other states similar efforts faltered, apparently thanks to police unions and politicians in their pocket [0])
Via the article:
> Fifteen months after the Colorado bill was signed into law, there is so far little evidence to support any widespread negative effects on police retention or recruitment.
Now that it's been more time I've been curious to measure how curtailing QI has affected 1) police misconduct 2) police hiring and 3) insurance rates (e.g. indemnity) municipalities/townships/states pay.
If anyone has insight on ways to measure, places to find data, etc would be appreciated.
Meanwhile for those curious about Chicago police misconduct, TIL about [1]
I’m not at “defund police” levels of dissatisfaction but I do believe they have fundamentally lost the moral authority to self govern. I think internal affairs should be disbanded and we go straight to the FBI without passing IA.
It's a matter of incentive. Sure, the Alphabet Agencies aren't intrinsically good, but they have little motive to protect the misconduct within local police precincts.
"but they have little motive to protect the misconduct within local police precincts"
Maybe. The way I see it, all of law enforcement has an "US vs Them (criminals, etc)" attitude, and are very hesitant to throw each other under the bus, or even openly criticize eachother unless it is 100% necessary...
I used to be a "back the blue" guy, but that's because I'm a pretty boring person who hasn't needed to deal with confronting the police before. After watching channels like Audit the Audit and LackLuster on YouTube (excellent channels btw), I have a newfound respect for the handful of cops that actually stick within the limits of their authority and remain respectful. I also have a newfound disdain for the other 90% of officers. Of course, since the channels focus mainly on police misconduct, it's easy to get a skewed perspective that almost all police are like that, which may also not be true. The fact that so many video examples of tyranny exist is frightening regardless, however.
One of the new "metas" in policing is getting people to open their front door to talk, and then putting their foot in the doorway to prevent it from being closed without being considered "assault on a peace officer." How that shit isn't struck down immediately by SCOTUS baffles me. It violates the 4th and 5th amendments simultaneously.
And also the incessent use of the "I smell marijuana" excuse to be able to freely search peoples' vehicles and persons. There's just so many shady tactics the police use to intentionally skirt the spirit of the law and our rights, while still passing the letter of the law.
> And also the incessent use of the "I smell marijuana"
I have a family member on parole who had this happen on a traffic stop the other day. Being on parole, there's no right to decline being searched prior to arrest*, so all it takes for a cop to derail your day is for them to say "I smell marijuana" - no additional hoops.
Not only did he not have marijuana, he was pulled over for expired registration, which he was in transit to resolve. They saw an expired registration, and decided to search him, even though he was able to present his completed paperwork that he was en route to drop off. They were very obviously fishing for anything to arrest someone over.
[*] I should add that even when you can decline the search, they search you anyways
We just need to separate IA from the agency it is investigating.
Up here in BC, Canada, the office of the Police Complaint Commissioner is responsible for investigating policing complaints. They aren't associated with any agency, and have broad investigative authorities.
It isn't a perfect system, but it is far better than police investigating their own agency, or even police investigating other nearby agencies.
I also think that police unions need to go. They should be lumped in with other public employee unions, or just accept that a job that powerful does not need a traditional union.
The FBI groomed a mentally disabled kid into what they define as a terrorist. If you think the FBI isn't filled with bad actors, then you haven't been paying attention.
I would love to see an equivalent to cpdp.co for every city. The notion of publicly humiliating authoritarian thugs masquerading as civil servants offers a glimmer of hope for the atrocious state of policing in the US.
If there is a bomb that can be dismantled by a remote operated drone with a "weapon" on it, or an armed perpetrator situation, it is kind of sadistic to make an officer go in in person instead. I can see limiting autonomous ones though.
This law only applies to flying drones. The law doesn’t require an officer to do anything in person. It’s not sadistic. Let’s tone down the rhetoric.
Bomb disposal is fine by me, there’s plenty of time to get that right. Armed perpetrators should be dealt with by actual human officers, hopefully specialty trained SWAT. I don’t trust a webcam to differentiate between a hostage and a bad guy.
Am I the only one that is OK with CCTV + facial recognition? Seems like a great way to tackle crime without having to involve potentially deadly encounters with police. Ya there are ways it could be abused, but I assume I have no privacy (as does the law) when I am in a public space. A lot cheaper than cops too. Put laws and systems in place to keep the data secure and require warrants to access the data.
(No lethal weapons on drones please though, although I could see a case for riot control drones, not sure where you would draw the line on what is a weapon.)
It's not something you get instead of cops, when technology is developed for policing it's always always in addition. So it's not cops vs facial rec it's cops with facial rec.
American police have never been given a power that they have not chosen to abuse for personal or political reasons, and used against dissidents and the dispossessed. The abuses aren't theoretical they are inevitable and at huge scale.
> Put laws and systems in place to keep the data secure and require warrants to access the data.
When? Who writes warrants? Who enforces these rules and punishes transgressions of them? None of these would be actual practical restrictions, and they don't exist anyway. If you give them access to it they have access to it your only chance to influence that was before you gave it to them.
I agree with the idea that American police abuse their resources, and would abuse this resource if given the chance, and I think you mentioning it here is a great lesson for me and everyone else to remind us of the current situation for police.
Where I fall short however is the resignation that this is how things must be, or that we'll forever be unable to change these things. If we can get this police abuse under control, then the idea of using technology to help discover bad actors seems like a sound one to me.
The punishments we dole out for committing crimes are disproportionately large at least in part to improve their deterrent effect given that many people who commit crimes may get away with them. If we can suddenly catch every single person who commits a crime, then the punishments should become less severe.
> but I assume I have no privacy (as does the law) when I am in a public space.
I think we may need to slightly retweak our concept of public and private. There are very few truly private spaces, from the perspective of an entity that can see every public space simultaneously.
We have nest cams and doorbell cams. We get very clear pictures of the person stealing packages off of our porch, but local rules (where I live) don’t allow us to apply facial recognition to those pictures to stop the madness.
Try a bomb package. I forget what it’s called, but the moment they lift it a loud-ass alarm goes off and freaks them out. We had the same problem in Seattle and then my wife took care of it with one of those. They never came back.
There’s one guy in particular that does a tremendous job making them. I can ask her for details if you’re interested.
> We had the same problem in Seattle and then my wife took care of it with one of those.
Ya, I'm in Ballard and I've thought about decoys and other sort of proactive ways of discouraging this. I wish we could wire up some action when cameras detect someone scoping out our house at 1AM in the morning (we live at the end of a long driveway so it is always someone checking our car door or something).
But with all the data, well, it is the same people who are doing this (it only changes every few months or so), so it seems relatively straight forward for the police to do something about it. But there is no way to aggregate the data from all the cameras everyone has set up to do something about this.
Yeah! Why would we be frightened of constant surveillance if we have nothing to hide?
It's not as if states are writing any laws that criminalize women's healthcare, gender identity, or sexuality. And it's not as if law enforcement would ever misuse access to carry out personal vendetta. And it's not as if laws are only being enforced and prosecuted depending on who you are or what you believe.
So let's get going and put all criminals in jail and a bunch of protesters as well.
But if you decide to take packages off my porch, don’t you obviously have something to hide. Ya, my doorbell camera has a clear picture of you taking the package, but no, the police can’t do anything about it because it isn’t a priority for them and technology can’t be used to make matching a picture to a name due to law. So you get to pirate as many packages as you want.
Facial identification is not what's preventing them from catching your package thief. If that were the obstacle it would be about two court cases before all thieves are wearing a bandanna in front of your ring camera.
You've chosen to constantly surveil yourself and, without their consent, your visitors, sending all of that to Amazon. Now you want to force a similar apparatus to constantly watch all of us everywhere, so you can buy things more conveniently. No thanks.
It sounds completely surreal to have cameras and face id everywhere, but this is already done by our phones (face recognition) and GPS tracking, full surveillance of any messaging activity (with rare exceptions) for no good reason other than selling ads. Having less gun violence and deadly police interactions can actually use this technology for something better than just ads served by corporations (and also sell this data to anyone who pays). We should be careful about who can access these systems though.
People need to be able to operate outside the constant surveillance of the state. Our society is not built for 100% compliance, and that's where we go if we have constant tracking.
For one, many laws are enforced with discretion and rightly so. Second, people need to coordinate action against their government from time to time.
No, phone data and localized CCTV are not equivalent.
Not just crime. It's a good way to tackle whistleblowers and investigative reporters. It's a good way to tackle peaceful protesters. It's even a good way to tackle undesirables and fugitives.
Superhuman police powers (which is what pervasive surveillance is), sound great when the cops are worried about retrieving your stolen car or bicycle. But they become nightmares quickly when the police are more concerned with crimes the public doesn't care about or think are crimes.
And the cops have been like that for decades. We should be downgrading their abilities, not upgrading them. I don't think it's completely out of the question that they only be allowed single-shot handguns where they must pull the brass with their own fingernails and reload before firing again. Honestly, there shouldn't be any cameras other than those on their bodies and in their cars used to collect evidence for trial. I'm on the fence on whether they should be allowed much electronic technology beyond that (and maybe radios).
Not really. A lot of us are ok with it, especially if we live in high property crime areas. Something had to be done, and it doesn’t seem like policing is working very well, so why not try technology instead?
Additionally, traffic cameras should replace most traffic cops. Cameras don’t shoot people, cops do at routine traffic stops. It is also safer for police as well, since they will be in fewer dangerous roadside situations.
Most high speed chases can be replaced by cameras too. You don’t need to pursue the suspect. There is nowhere for them to hide. Arrest them once they’re stopped.
If you think it’s dystopian to have traffic cameras sending speeding tickets then 1) maybe the actual speed limit should be higher, but enforced and 2) getting a fine is better than getting shot.
Instead of fixing issues like bias with facial recognition, they prefer to ban it instead. And Illinois of all places, where the crime is out of control. Who will suffer the most? you guess it right, those who they are trying to protect... Go figure.
I don't think bias is the main problem with FR. I think the problem is more of the police performing mass FR. Although perfect FR by a (fictional) benevolent police force could allow much easier capture of all criminals, I think most Americans are more afraid of an all-powerful police force made possible by FR than they are of the status quo that many criminals go uncaught for a long time (and possibly forever). And I think that the militaristic behavior of cops and police departments have earned that.
The (hopefully) hyperbolic version of this fear is: Say you were wanted for a crime, and nobody believed you (or perhaps you're guilty but it's a BS law). If it's perfectly legal for them to do so, maybe the cops will just fly a killdrone over places you're known to frequent and shoot you on sight, and say 'Gee, sorry if you were offended, but (Name) was a dangerous criminal, wanted for terrorism and refused to turn himself in, we had no choice.'
It's sad that the advent of new technology is never viewed as an opportunity to reduce violence.
If the police can put themselves out of harms way using a drone, doesn't that help with peaceful de-escalation? A drone opens up options like tasers and pepper spray, that would have otherwise been impossible for police to deploy at a distance. If facial recognition can be done with near 100% accuracy, then what's wrong with it being used to identify the location of someone who has committed a life sentence worthy crime ?
I agree that drones and facial recognition should never be fully automated as a robotic civilian disposal system. But when used responsibly, the tools are much better options than what we have today : Guns. a GTA car chase can be swiftly stopped using drones. Don't need an expensive helicopter and a rampaging maniac to kill someone at 150 mph.
We are teaching kids what to do in the case of a school shooter, and arming school guards to the teeth. Schools have the hardware for facial recognition cameras. A manual "choose target -> hone in -> shoot pepper spray" mechanism is less dangerous and immediately neutralizes a threat. Yes, the rest of the kids are likely to get very painful chillies in their eyes, but you saved their lives. (I'll admit this one is stretch)
Yes, it seems dystopian because movies portray it as dystopian. But in the modern world, the state has total monopoly over violence. We already live in a surveillance state, and the worst case outcome is already as bad as it can get (death). Using tech to sustain the same state with less resources and better outcome (physical pain) is not as bad as it sounds.
By far, the biggest danger to people are tyrannies and wars they wage on their neighbors and their own people. Communusm, nazism, maoism have killed so many that only diseases can rival them. Unjust deaths caused by civilian firearms don't even register in the long list of real dangers. The media turns it upside down, of course.
The many eyed monstrosity that sees everyone and can be seen by no one - the AI powered tyranny - will ride the wave of fear and anxiety to kill the few freedoms we have.
To me, it is completely obvious that constant drone surveillance of the whole population is a dystopian nightmare, just like implanting brain chips or constant untargeted cell phone surveillance would be. All of these measures need to be commensurate. Reducing violence may be a noble goal but it needs to be weighed against other values such as individual freedom, privacy, and protection from constant government interference.
Your examples are all rare edge cases, when the day to day is police using unconstitutional excessive force, including deadly force, with little to no accountability.
The idea that being a police officer is an incredibly dangerous job is just false, and in many cases, the violence is caused by police escalation. Police already have guns, tasers, pepper space, body armor, other police, etc. You are just as likely to be murdered on the job as a convenience store clerk as a cop. Over 600 convenience store workers are murdered on the job per year [1] compared to about 60 per year for police [2], about 5-7 of which are during serving warrants. Convenience store workers are murdered at about 7 per 100k, while police are about 7-8 per 100k [3].
As for giving police access to sweeping facial ID. Whenever the new thing that whittles down the 4th amendment is talked about, it is almost always with a slam dunk case that is also an incredibly serious case. But the average investigation rarely ends in a slam dunk. Allowing police to bypass protections of privacy and checks and balances to their scope of investigation also destroys lives. Semen found inside a person is pretty obvious, but what about just DNA found at a crime scene. If someone is stabbed in a back alley and police just sweep up DNA and run a massive database and tie it to a homeless person without an alibi. It might not matter that the homeless person slept there a week before, in the absence of a better lead, they might push for a conviction. Or just sweeping up all phone pings in the area during the crime. Maybe someone was in the neighborhood but was completely unrelated. In the absence of a better lead, an innocent person could be targeted. Police being able to fish for facial recognition hits is no different.
School shooters? Adding police to patrol schools already has led to police attacking and arresting more students for smaller offenses and ruining more children’s lives, all while failing to stop any school shootings, and it should surprise no one that black and brown kids are the overwhelming victims. “Black students were subjected to more than 80% of the incidents of police violence accounted for in the survey, which analyzed more than 285 incidents over a decade. At least 60% of police assaults on students resulted in serious injury to the students, including broken bones, concussions and hospitalizations. The report also cited 24 cases of sexual assault on students and five student deaths as a result of police force in schools.” Pepper spray drones patrolling schools will be used to target black kids, and when they fail to stop the next 7 school shootings, people will say they really need to be armed with guns to really be able to stop the next school shooting.
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 252 ms ] threadThe law also adds many new data reporting obligations, and empowers the Attorney General to investigate (with teeth) violations.
That's also problematic!
You're almost right. In the post I was replying to is a description on who typically gets those laws enforced against them.
A quick bit of Googling, I can't find any evidence of weapons a being placed on police drones in Illinois, so this seems preemptive, which is good to see!
(Our own police force has many of its own problems)
More about that here: https://www.marketplace.org/2020/06/12/police-departments-10...
“It’s a transfer, so that means that the agencies don’t have to pay for this equipment. So because the government has already possessed it, paid for it, it’s the Department of Defense’s property.”
It seems technically it is still DoD property?
But alltogether it is indeed worrysome. Here in germany we have the same trend, even though quite light in comparison.
It is rare nowdays, that I see police without bulletproof wests and machine pistols are more and more common. It creates a very different impression ...
Speaking of it: my car broke down once and I parked it on the side of a rural road (not in the way). It was weekend and I put a big note in it, saying it will be towed away very soon.
Monday morning my wife with the baby were suprised by police on the door. And the first thing they see is the machine pistol and fighting gear.
Surely totally necessary to get the same information, they could have gotten from the note in the car (that this very day it will be moved away). I seriously don't know what they were thinking. Probably nothing at all and war gear becomes just standard for engaging with potentially dangerous civilians, who park their car next to the road.
That story is horrifying.. it creates a scenario where the slightest misunderstand could escalate things to a point of no return.
This has been going on ever since the F.B.I. started requiring police departments to report their crime statistics in a uniform way.
I remember one PD took advantage of a flaw in the forms that only allowed one category per crime. So if someone got robbed and killed, they'd mark it down as a robbery, not a homicide.
I heard from a relative who's on a neighboring town's police force that the DA busts down first time felony offenders to misdemeanors nearly every time (this is at the county level). Except for the really bad stuff like murder, or selling drugs on a playground.
I've heard anecdotally from friends that police just refuse to take reports of assault. This is domestic assault, or more "stranger danger" types of assaults (like late at night on the riverwalk). Both physical and sexual types of assault. This apparently doesn't count as "the really bad stuff" I described before.
My sister knew a gal who got hit by a van while crossing the street, where there's a crosswalk and a yellow flashing light and a sign. Her leg was broken in a few places. When the police arrived, she received a ticket for jaywalking because she wasn't in the crosswalk. (A funny thing happens when you get hit by a van - you tend to move far away from where you were standing) That jaywalking ticket did not raise the crime stats like ticketing the driver would have. Bonus: It was potentially racially motivated, because the victim was black, and the cops have a reputation for harassing black people in town.
Naperville is a fine place to raise your children if you're wealthy and white and your husband is not abusive.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/07/08/485262777... [1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jul/08/police-bo... [2] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/12/san-francisco-decide...
You should watch it from this side.
Even people who aren't minorities and have never done anything wrong in their lives are starting to distrust and shy away from the police.
It's one reason that so many (most?) police departments are understaffed.
With that in mind, it doesn't seem right to paint the US with one brush when Chicago's murder rate is more than 5x higher than New York City's. For the case of small PDs having big budgets I agree it's wasted money, and maybe even damaging to the town.
But in urban areas like Detroit, Baltimore, and Chicago, it seems tone-deaf to focus on police violence when so many people are victimised by people the police could have locked up if they were better equipped. (Ignoring of course the weakness of courts to imprison violent offenders, which is also a huge issue in London.)
So this loophole wouldn't work either fortunately
https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/ilcs/ilcs3.asp?ActID=3004&C...
> A law enforcement agency operating a drone under this Act is prohibited from using, during a flight, onboard facial recognition software that works in conjunction with the drone. A law enforcement agency operating a drone under this Act is prohibited from using any information gathered by a drone with any facial recognition software
Grouped as (prohibited from using any information gathered by a drone) (with any facial recognition software), you might be right.
Grouped as (prohibited from using any information gathered by a (drone with any facial recognition software)), I don't think you're right. Personally, I would naturally group the clauses in this way and conclude that off-drone facial recognition was not effectively barred by this statute but onboard facial recognition was.
Instant downvote. I guess someone wants to see that on YouTube.
Also, the act doesn't appear to have any legal consequences, so I wonder if it actually holds any teeth.
This is normal title style for a news headline and has been for a very long time; the comma here is short for "and".
That's because that is what it says. The parent comment's confusion was due to both parsing the comma as a list separator instead of a conjunction as well as not recognizing the implication of the "s" at the end of "weapons".
Occasionally, I'm happy with the amount of jail time they get.
But our federal senators are pretty awful tankies. (Durban and Duckworth.. they'll full on send you a tone death letter about why encryption is awful after you send them your concerns)
I've been active in contacting my senators for the bills that came up that were a threat to privacy and destroying encryption for the last few years. KOSA, BAN TICKTOCK, EARN IT, etc. Addition to the encoarching collection of biometric data of citizens by the federal government and private entities.
I've got nothing but form letters quickly responded that "it's for the kids" in those cases. No acceptance that they'll collect and consider the feedback, just tone death emails saying "well EARN IT is going to protect the kids [ignore that lindsay graham wants to wack it to your personal photos and call it scanning]".
I've had a friend with an issue getting her husband getting an ESTA for family travel to the US and had some concerning interviewing agents. I tried reaching out for her... nothing.
Duckworth and Durbin are good D politicans, as in they tow the party line. As far as representation of IL needs and supporting rights ... they don't care.
Today it refers to Western communists who are not only marxists, but who defend/deny/celebrate atrocities committed by communist states, particularly the use of the military (incl. tanks) to slaughter protestors.
Generally people who support those states and leaders but conveniently gloss over the crimes against humanity are also referred to as tankies, even if they don't explicitly support the acts. In a more modern context, it includes lefties who support Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
So, while all tankies are authoritarians, not all authoritarians are tankies. And while all tankies are authoritarian communists, not all authoritarian communists are tankies - though I'd argue that supporting that kind of system while simultaneously recognising that all the times it's happened before it went awfully is not a particularly coherent worldview either.
the answer is some amount of improved traditional policing (necessary evil) and arming all the non-gang people to the teeth bc the gang ones are already armed
Is this accurate? I haven’t read the full text of the law but I thought it meant no weaponized drones.
That is correct. It says this:
" Sec. 18. Use of weapons. A law enforcement agency operating a drone under this Act is prohibited from equipping or using on a drone any firearm, weaponized laser, kinetic impact projectile, chemical agent or irritant, or any other lethal or non-lethal weapon."
Also as a note, theres not a lot of correlation between an increase and violence and reduced weapons policy, its almost driven by some secondary macro trend.
Banning facial recognition sounds to me like the legislature knows that the police force abuses people and will abuse people even more with facial recognition. Instead of banning tools that can increase the scope for abuse, why not try rooting out the people and culture perpetrating abuse in the first place?
This is a bad idea even before we consider that LEO is composed of fallible human beings with an established history of abusing the information systems they already possess.
1.) Progressive voters get good feelings as they think they are helping 'minorities' and advancing social justice.
2.) Politicians please a large segment of voters.
3.) People who benefit from corruption are not threatened as the status quo is maintained.
4.) Politicians's in power is not threatened by the system as the status quo is maintained.
The corrupt system only negatively impacts people who can't afford a good private lawyer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jSkYxW5Ii28
I’m more concerned about militarized pizza delivery robots. If they can’t have flying drones will they have rolling ones instead? Seems odd to carve this out for only flying drones.
https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/08/use-robot-kill-dalla...
That's hardly the stuff of Robocop dystopia. That seems a reasonable and proportionate response to a long siege and multiple instances of gunfire exchange in which 5 policemen had lost their lives engaging the suspect.
Does it have to be dystopian before one disagrees on principle? I don't want killerbots normalized - the same justifications on this precedent will be applicable to a "Robocop dystopia", such as police departments buying and operating (or contracting) used MQ-9 Reapers or whatever drone Axon is cooking up
Do I accept roving bands of killer drones flying overhead programmed to autonomously kill? I do not.
It seems like we’re basically in the first circumstance since the use of a robot to terminate the firefight in Dallas was literally unprecedented.
I don't want any police departments to have carte blanche on authorizing drone executions by land, sea or air. The Dallas PD didn't see itself as encumbered by any laws - so they could hypothetically use a UAV to drop explosives today. I would like legislation to prevent this from repeating - using a killerbot shouldn't be a field-decision, IMO.
We need clear rules of engagement. At the moment, police forces are adopting military equipment, but not discipline.
You’ve made a bizarre slippery slope scenario here with much bigger ethical implications than the one you’re focused on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_shooting_of_Dallas_police...
If this is what “defund the police” means then sign me up. Defund all their armed face scanning drones.
I get both sides, but this road will have bad results. ( making Illinois into a police state is not a solution either )
Police budgets haven't actually been defunded, and yet this still happens.
If bad things are happening in crime, and it is an indictment of current policy, it is more defensibly an indictment of the reaction against “defund the police” than of “defund the police”.
To the point most police departments are running at half-capacity and 911 calls remain open for HOURS!
It's all fine, until you are the one calling 911 and feel abandoned, then who are you going to blame? The police of course..
Irresponsible arguments that I would totally not be surprised to hear to push in the opposite direction:
- If law enforcement doesn't have armed drones, we live in a world where only the criminals have armed drones.
- Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?
- Currently, when law enforcement uses deadly force, one of the strongest defenses is that in the moment, an officer felt that their own life was at risk. A drone operator has no such fear and therefore no bias towards using weapons prematurely.
You guys are every lawyer's dream. Yes, please, continue believing you're following some great American tradition of strong local government by submitting to the whims of your local Boss Tweed and the five judges in your county, I play golf with them once a month. Oh, you have a legal problem and need to navigate the rats nest of weird local laws? Great, you can choose from one of three tax attorneys that know the local tax regime as it applies to your business. I play golf with them too, and (coincidentally) we all bill $1,100 an hour.
When companies decide the complexity is too high, they sometimes just have to target the most stringent law that they can reasonably cover, e.g. car companies meeting CA emission standards can make CA the defacto national standard. A buyer in Texas is presumably paying a higher price for a car designed to meet a law in another state. It would be more democratic if there was just a national standard.
Besides the fact that the reduced cost of compliance you mention comes at the expense of the localities freedom to govern themselves, federal laws make it more convenient for these companies to manipulate the system to their advantage. A large company can bribe a couple hundred federal politicians to get their way instead of having to bribe many thousands across so many state legislatures or even more at a municipal level.
What makes you think that only large companies operate across many jurisdictions?
The idea of the feds choosing poorly, or being corrupted, and deciding on one set of regulations for everyone scares me sometimes. Health care didn't turn out so great, the ACA put a stop to several states that had interesting plans and implementations of their own, and is basically a subsidy for the health care industry as it currently exists, whose lobbyists apparently crafted the text of that bill. Another example is privacy rights - the feds aren't doing much, and I'm glad that some states are.
Why should I care that companies get uniform laws more than I care about these issues that matter to me?
I'm not saying that we can't have federal regulations, but I don't think there's anything wrong with having local regulations even if companies are inconvenienced, especially for evolving industries.
That is to say: Conduct business, if you get fined or penalized for it then note it down for future reference. It's cheaper than hiring an entire legal department to trove through cryptic manuscripts only relevant to regions measured in tens of square miles. Usually.
Obligatory IANAL.
Like maybe the voters would prefer human police officers as opposed to armed drones, even if the drones were cheaper. Or maybe the voters don't want to be tracked by cameras everywhere they go, given how this data can be abused, even if it costs them $x more per year to shop.
We already have large companies with legions of lawyers who have the resources to manipulate federal and state politicians in their favor, using regulatory capture and other means to avoid competition. There's a cost associated with that, too.
Universal laws with no nuance or adjustments for local conditions are just so awesome I am trembling in anticipation.
If we're lucky, they might even outlaw these evil lawyers that you lampoon so effortlessly.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/military/kamikaze-drones-new-we...
That video is pure propaganda, but I would support the CEO if he wanted to sit in the passenger seat and try and take out a dummy next to him.
Literally nobody except criminals would disagree with this. That's what makes is of limited value in a discussion like this. It's like saying "Good speech should be disseminated everywhere." Yes. We already agree, to the point where the argument is that protections for good speech aren't really needed.
The difficulty is getting a handle on what is a "good law". This is difficult, in part, because we can't always understand the effects down the causal chain. We also can't always get people to agree on the definition. Is a "good law" one that prioritizes safety over personal freedom or is it the other way around? I dunno, but this is even harder in a democracy, where everyone (theoretically, at least) has a voice.
Good for whom? Supermajority, sure. Anything less should be at the state and local level.
You think a law is good if you think it's good. You preference is then for it to be applied as widely as possible. Maybe other people disagree, and so should want it applied nowhere. Now you get to fight with them, using whatever power you have and are willing to use. Whoever has the most power to bring to the fight will win it.
However, in this case:
- The US federal government already has and has used drones as weapons overseas, including to kill US citizens. This now includes smaller/cheaper drones.
- The US federal government has materially supported the militarization of police forces, including by giving them military equipment.
- Federal law enforcement agencies operate everywhere in the country, and IIUC their behavior isn't limited by those state laws (e.g. the state of CA can't pass a law that removes the CBP "100-mile border zone" and restricts them to only operating at borders and ports), and IIUC the FBI already flies surveillance flights (though the facial recognition prohibition likely doesn't apply here).
at a most fundamental level what's debated is if civilians and police should be demilitarized as much as possible or not. Who benefits and who doesn't if all legislation strives for a civic society without deadly force? that's the "Elefant in the room".
The counter-argument to a demilitarized civic society usually is that you couldn't possibly control the bad guys. The empirically sound ground truth is that it takes 1-2 generations to get there, and that you will get there if only you want to get there, as a nation, as evidenced by a number of countries who wanted to essentially get rid of everyday knives and nunchucks and tonfas, let alone firearms, and who in fact essentially did get rid of them.
The US, as a civic society, needs to discuss which kind of a civic society they want to be.
the answer to "shall police have gun drones" flows from that. just like the answer to "shall school students need gun drills".
As an exercise try writing down the name of all the politicians you can off the top of your head. Then consider if you like and agree with them or not. Then ask yourself if you really want an agile federal government.
Thinking only the laws you like will make it to a federal law free of unintended side effect is naive fantasy at best. The laboratory of democracy is working. Please, lobby your representatives, get involved, but don't confuse lack of federal law for malfunction.
However, your insistence that "it doesn't depend on the law" makes me view your whole stance more critically; the answer in complex areas is very rarely "it doesn't depend". There's a bunch of domains where stuff just happens across state lines so frequently that a patchwork would only create confusion. It would be really disruptive if NY made it illegal to drive on gas you bought in NJ b/c NY officials hadn't specifically tested it to confirm that all additives were acceptable; it's easier if we just have federal standards.
Applying a consistent process is what gives the population continuing faith in the system. Laws that are universally supported will sail through the process with ease, so what's the rush? Laws that prove to be more contentious, regardless of reason, will be negotiated and refined across small regions--either indefinitely or until common ground can be found.
Mostly it comes down to the companies that make these things have to "maximize shareholder value." Who cares if people get killed?
It's good to see Illinois get ahead of this, considering that politicians in Illinois keep getting caught taking bribes from these policing equipment companies that peddle gadgets like red light cameras.
Just yesterday it was revealed that the newly elected mayor of Chicago authorized the extension of the ShotSpotter contract another ten years: One of the very things he promised to kill when he was campaigning.
It's all been "Oops! Is that my signature!? I didn't know that other people have the ability to click a button and sign my name to multi-million dollar contracts. Oh, well, maybe next decade!"
The response to "then only criminals will have armed drones" is: Ok, let's give all the cops a lot of drugs and child porn, because it would be bad if only criminals had that stuff, and maybe we can give them anthrax and components for a dirty bomb, because it would be bad if only terrorists had those. Or maybe, that's a broken line of reasoning and law enforcement isn't a war in which enemies must be met with equal means.
The answer to "sometimes police have to use deadly force; isn't it better if their lives aren't at stake is": We live in a world where kids having fun on the internet will have other people 'swatted'. This is only possible because police are willing to arm themselves and suddenly and forcefully enter a situation where they have _no credible information_ about any kind of threat. Until they demonstrate some capacity to consistently identify whether a situation requires deadly force, it's irresponsible to give them more of it.
The response to the "police who use deadly force inappropriately may have felt their life was at risk" is ... all the videos of police killings where an unarmed person is running away, an unarmed person is already effectively restrained, etc etc. Police use deadly force even when there is clearly no threat. Making police safer isn't the solution; the rest of us need to be safe from the police.
> If law enforcement doesn't have armed drones, we live in a world where only the criminals have armed drones.
If criminals have guns, police should have body armor and maybe also guns. If criminals have automatic guns, police should not have automatic guns because 99% of their job has no connection to those encounters and they are a huge force that interacts with the public constantly, so treating it at an occupying force is a terrible idea. Armed drones don’t fight each other. Having armed drones doesn’t protect police, or anyone, from armed drones that criminals may or may not have.
> Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?
Taking the life of a fellow citizen is a huge amount of power given by the government. If the government can take citizen’s lives with no risk and no locality, there can be no accountability. Real people going out and enforcing the law is a check, as imperfect as it is, on what laws and how far the government can go. If a warehouse of drone operators outside of DC can open fire on protestors in Albuquerque, there is no accountability.
> Currently, when law enforcement uses deadly force, one of the strongest defenses is that in the moment, an officer felt that their own life was at risk. A drone operator has no such fear and therefore no bias towards using weapons prematurely.
DOJ investigations show again and again that shootings are the result of systemic issues within the police force. Just as one example, the Clevand PD was investigated after the Tamir Rice murder and found a pattern of excessive force, substandard training, and unconstitutional practices. From the report. "The employment of poor and dangerous tactics that place officers in situations where avoidable force becomes inevitable and places officers and civilians at unnecessary risk…We found that CDP officers too often use unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution. Supervisors tolerate this behavior and, in some cases, endorse it. Officers report that they receive little supervision, guidance, and support from the Division, essentially leaving them to determine for themselves how to perform their difficult and dangerous jobs." The DOJ specifically states that Cleveland PD use excessive force, including deadly force, at a "significant rate" and that excessive and deadly force was a pattern, and not isolated incidences. [1]
Making it that much easier for police to use “unnecessary and unreasonable force in violation of the Constitution” is not going to make things safer for anyone.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/opa/press-releas...
I'd be in favor of immediately banning armed drones, and immediately banning facial recognition from drone surveillance. At a national level. Don't even give it to federal police forces. Then let the congress come up with a sensible path for qualifying their use. Drones over a sporting event, looking for faces of any known terrorists is a non-starter. Drones over a specific sporting event, looking for a particular suspect, because the officers were able to get a warrant for their use during that event? Ok, sure, if we could find a constitutional path to get there.
Likewise, I have no particular objection to e.g. armed robots, if the police who use it can show that there was no other way to resolve that situation. But there can be no qualified immunity if you lose that case. Whoever signs off on the robot goes to jail for murder if a jury can be convinced there were other realistic options.
Basically, a lot of issues with police abuse of power, to my mind, come down to a total absence of accountability. The tools are not, of themselves, dangerous. Its just that we keep putting them in the hands of people who will never use them responsibly. To be clear, it may well be the case that no people exist who can use them responsibly, but the narrative around removing the tools needs to center on the accountability question, not the "tools are scary" angle.
Given that the state has a number of laws, it must operate its own police force to enforce those laws. Therefore, since a state is required to operate said police force, governance of that force falls under the purview of the state and cannot be delegated to an external authority. If that were possible, the federal government could take control of a state police force to enforce laws contrary to the state's own laws.
It sounds circuitous, but the meaning is clear: The state has to be able to govern and control its own police force if it wants to enforce its own laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_power_(United_States_co...
There also may be consistency in the legality but not the punishment. As an example, when I was in college the max penalty for getting caught with a single marijuana joint ranged anywhere from a $5 fine to a year in prison depending on whether you were caught by a city cop, campus police, county sheriff, or state police officer. I suppose it would have been possible to end up in federal prison if you somehow pissed off the wrong FBI agent.
In 2015 there was a bunch of press around the FBI running surveillance flights recording cities in the US. Recent reporting suggests that the program has continued (using the same shell companies and names). This would be even harder for citizens to find out about if they were using smaller drones).
If federal agencies were prohibited from using drones to surveil citizens en masse, and prohibited from arming drones, I think we'd all benefit. If we also had a federal prohibiting 1033 transfers of military drones with arms or facial recognition, I would also consider that to be a win.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-14/mapping-w...
https://www.thebaltimorebanner.com/community/criminal-justic...
The death penalty was banned in 1972 on a federal ruling of a local law (Georgia), as a consequence, all death sentences, federal and state, were commuted to life.
There are a TON of federal laws that apply to local law enforcement. At this moment there are several local police departments that are being actively monitored and controlled by the DOJ due to unconstitutional activity.
The states rewrote their laws and went right back to sentencing people to death.
The feds also have a stronger tendency to make bigger, dumber, more invasive enforcement mechanisms that end up creating new and unforeseen problems.
>> - Sometimes law enforcement must be able to use deadly force. Isn't it better if in those situations, officers aren't also putting their lives at risk?
What about drones that can be used to deploy non-lethal weapons?
For example, if police need to employ riot control gas (https://emergency.cdc.gov/agent/riotcontrol/factsheet.asp) to disperse a violent mob, a drone could fly over the mob and drop the gas.
Should that be permitted?
But no, please let us not starts with robots/machines fighting our own society but fix it, drones in warfare are already enough of an ethical problem..
I'm perfectly okay if there are severe consequences for authorities who do not attempt to solve problems that cause pressure to build. If you play with a pipe bomb, you gotta be careful and attentive.
So a devil's advocate question then:
If a riot control gas-equipped drone was available at Washington DC on Jan. 6, 2021, should it have been used?
By what criteria do you define "some cause that needs immediate fixing"?
Where does one draw the line between "valid civil unrest" / "protest" and "a violent mob"?
>> let us not starts with robots/machines fighting our own society
Should human police officers be used then?
Or should the "protesters" / mob be allowed to roam freely?
https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/drones-and-weapons-dangerous-mi...
Military branches including national guards are exempted from all above, but it’s generally illegal in a modern nation, even some dictatorships, for a military branch to be both an external facing defense force and an internal facing police organization at the same time by mission, as allowing it leads to unrests and coups. So handling of such vehicles and devices can’t be normally outsourced to military.
I think this is just another case of honest but uninformed people adding more and more ad-hoc and redundant laws without enforcement. Not that I oppose the spirit of this particular law though.
I don’t disagree with some of your statements, but why are you trying to preemptively shut the conversation down?
So what do you expect them to do? They absolutely need a law that says they can't use a certain technique/technology/etc because they'd be deemed incompetent for not using them if they were missing their metrics. So you use them unless you have a law that says you can't. Then you have an out.
It's not like these are evil people. They want the same things you do in the end. But they have a specific job to do with goals to pursue and what do you expect them to do?
Incentives drive behavior.
So, essentially nothing is prohibited. "Destruction of evidence" can be flushing drugs down the toilet or throwing them out a car window. The war on drugs greatly increases how many "crimes" are being committed at any given time and what is considered evidence of those crimes.
Expect heads to roll at the Minneapolis PD. Just kidding. Nothing will happen. Not even a slap on the wrist.
Via the article:
> Fifteen months after the Colorado bill was signed into law, there is so far little evidence to support any widespread negative effects on police retention or recruitment.
Now that it's been more time I've been curious to measure how curtailing QI has affected 1) police misconduct 2) police hiring and 3) insurance rates (e.g. indemnity) municipalities/townships/states pay.
If anyone has insight on ways to measure, places to find data, etc would be appreciated.
Meanwhile for those curious about Chicago police misconduct, TIL about [1]
[0] https://archive.ph/evcEG
[1] https://cpdp.co
Because they are so much better, right?
Maybe. The way I see it, all of law enforcement has an "US vs Them (criminals, etc)" attitude, and are very hesitant to throw each other under the bus, or even openly criticize eachother unless it is 100% necessary...
One of the new "metas" in policing is getting people to open their front door to talk, and then putting their foot in the doorway to prevent it from being closed without being considered "assault on a peace officer." How that shit isn't struck down immediately by SCOTUS baffles me. It violates the 4th and 5th amendments simultaneously.
And also the incessent use of the "I smell marijuana" excuse to be able to freely search peoples' vehicles and persons. There's just so many shady tactics the police use to intentionally skirt the spirit of the law and our rights, while still passing the letter of the law.
I have a family member on parole who had this happen on a traffic stop the other day. Being on parole, there's no right to decline being searched prior to arrest*, so all it takes for a cop to derail your day is for them to say "I smell marijuana" - no additional hoops.
Not only did he not have marijuana, he was pulled over for expired registration, which he was in transit to resolve. They saw an expired registration, and decided to search him, even though he was able to present his completed paperwork that he was en route to drop off. They were very obviously fishing for anything to arrest someone over.
[*] I should add that even when you can decline the search, they search you anyways
Up here in BC, Canada, the office of the Police Complaint Commissioner is responsible for investigating policing complaints. They aren't associated with any agency, and have broad investigative authorities.
It isn't a perfect system, but it is far better than police investigating their own agency, or even police investigating other nearby agencies.
I also think that police unions need to go. They should be lumped in with other public employee unions, or just accept that a job that powerful does not need a traditional union.
What’s goin on there?
Bomb disposal is fine by me, there’s plenty of time to get that right. Armed perpetrators should be dealt with by actual human officers, hopefully specialty trained SWAT. I don’t trust a webcam to differentiate between a hostage and a bad guy.
(No lethal weapons on drones please though, although I could see a case for riot control drones, not sure where you would draw the line on what is a weapon.)
American police have never been given a power that they have not chosen to abuse for personal or political reasons, and used against dissidents and the dispossessed. The abuses aren't theoretical they are inevitable and at huge scale.
> Put laws and systems in place to keep the data secure and require warrants to access the data.
When? Who writes warrants? Who enforces these rules and punishes transgressions of them? None of these would be actual practical restrictions, and they don't exist anyway. If you give them access to it they have access to it your only chance to influence that was before you gave it to them.
Where I fall short however is the resignation that this is how things must be, or that we'll forever be unable to change these things. If we can get this police abuse under control, then the idea of using technology to help discover bad actors seems like a sound one to me.
I think we may need to slightly retweak our concept of public and private. There are very few truly private spaces, from the perspective of an entity that can see every public space simultaneously.
There’s one guy in particular that does a tremendous job making them. I can ask her for details if you’re interested.
Ya, I'm in Ballard and I've thought about decoys and other sort of proactive ways of discouraging this. I wish we could wire up some action when cameras detect someone scoping out our house at 1AM in the morning (we live at the end of a long driveway so it is always someone checking our car door or something).
But with all the data, well, it is the same people who are doing this (it only changes every few months or so), so it seems relatively straight forward for the police to do something about it. But there is no way to aggregate the data from all the cameras everyone has set up to do something about this.
Most cases of "stealing packages" won't be investigated at all by the police. But insurance companies prefer that you report them to the police.
And facial recognition isn't good enough for use in our legal system:
https://www.popsci.com/story/technology/facial-recognition-n...
It's not as if states are writing any laws that criminalize women's healthcare, gender identity, or sexuality. And it's not as if law enforcement would ever misuse access to carry out personal vendetta. And it's not as if laws are only being enforced and prosecuted depending on who you are or what you believe.
So let's get going and put all criminals in jail and a bunch of protesters as well.
You've chosen to constantly surveil yourself and, without their consent, your visitors, sending all of that to Amazon. Now you want to force a similar apparatus to constantly watch all of us everywhere, so you can buy things more conveniently. No thanks.
For one, many laws are enforced with discretion and rightly so. Second, people need to coordinate action against their government from time to time.
No, phone data and localized CCTV are not equivalent.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/technology/facial-recogni...
Superhuman police powers (which is what pervasive surveillance is), sound great when the cops are worried about retrieving your stolen car or bicycle. But they become nightmares quickly when the police are more concerned with crimes the public doesn't care about or think are crimes.
And the cops have been like that for decades. We should be downgrading their abilities, not upgrading them. I don't think it's completely out of the question that they only be allowed single-shot handguns where they must pull the brass with their own fingernails and reload before firing again. Honestly, there shouldn't be any cameras other than those on their bodies and in their cars used to collect evidence for trial. I'm on the fence on whether they should be allowed much electronic technology beyond that (and maybe radios).
Most high speed chases can be replaced by cameras too. You don’t need to pursue the suspect. There is nowhere for them to hide. Arrest them once they’re stopped.
If you think it’s dystopian to have traffic cameras sending speeding tickets then 1) maybe the actual speed limit should be higher, but enforced and 2) getting a fine is better than getting shot.
The (hopefully) hyperbolic version of this fear is: Say you were wanted for a crime, and nobody believed you (or perhaps you're guilty but it's a BS law). If it's perfectly legal for them to do so, maybe the cops will just fly a killdrone over places you're known to frequent and shoot you on sight, and say 'Gee, sorry if you were offended, but (Name) was a dangerous criminal, wanted for terrorism and refused to turn himself in, we had no choice.'
Is it? From what I've found Illinois is fairly middle of the pack vs other states.
If the police can put themselves out of harms way using a drone, doesn't that help with peaceful de-escalation? A drone opens up options like tasers and pepper spray, that would have otherwise been impossible for police to deploy at a distance. If facial recognition can be done with near 100% accuracy, then what's wrong with it being used to identify the location of someone who has committed a life sentence worthy crime ?
I agree that drones and facial recognition should never be fully automated as a robotic civilian disposal system. But when used responsibly, the tools are much better options than what we have today : Guns. a GTA car chase can be swiftly stopped using drones. Don't need an expensive helicopter and a rampaging maniac to kill someone at 150 mph.
We are teaching kids what to do in the case of a school shooter, and arming school guards to the teeth. Schools have the hardware for facial recognition cameras. A manual "choose target -> hone in -> shoot pepper spray" mechanism is less dangerous and immediately neutralizes a threat. Yes, the rest of the kids are likely to get very painful chillies in their eyes, but you saved their lives. (I'll admit this one is stretch)
Yes, it seems dystopian because movies portray it as dystopian. But in the modern world, the state has total monopoly over violence. We already live in a surveillance state, and the worst case outcome is already as bad as it can get (death). Using tech to sustain the same state with less resources and better outcome (physical pain) is not as bad as it sounds.
Gun death stats disagree with you on that one.
David Runciman has an excellent explanation of this in the "Talking Politics" podcast which I recommend unreservedly: <https://play.acast.com/s/history-of-ideas/weberonleadership>
(Specific segment occurs ~15 minutes in.)
The many eyed monstrosity that sees everyone and can be seen by no one - the AI powered tyranny - will ride the wave of fear and anxiety to kill the few freedoms we have.
"And that makes it so much better?"
"Yeah, that's why they made up a whole new word for it."
The idea that being a police officer is an incredibly dangerous job is just false, and in many cases, the violence is caused by police escalation. Police already have guns, tasers, pepper space, body armor, other police, etc. You are just as likely to be murdered on the job as a convenience store clerk as a cop. Over 600 convenience store workers are murdered on the job per year [1] compared to about 60 per year for police [2], about 5-7 of which are during serving warrants. Convenience store workers are murdered at about 7 per 100k, while police are about 7-8 per 100k [3].
As for giving police access to sweeping facial ID. Whenever the new thing that whittles down the 4th amendment is talked about, it is almost always with a slam dunk case that is also an incredibly serious case. But the average investigation rarely ends in a slam dunk. Allowing police to bypass protections of privacy and checks and balances to their scope of investigation also destroys lives. Semen found inside a person is pretty obvious, but what about just DNA found at a crime scene. If someone is stabbed in a back alley and police just sweep up DNA and run a massive database and tie it to a homeless person without an alibi. It might not matter that the homeless person slept there a week before, in the absence of a better lead, they might push for a conviction. Or just sweeping up all phone pings in the area during the crime. Maybe someone was in the neighborhood but was completely unrelated. In the absence of a better lead, an innocent person could be targeted. Police being able to fish for facial recognition hits is no different.
School shooters? Adding police to patrol schools already has led to police attacking and arresting more students for smaller offenses and ruining more children’s lives, all while failing to stop any school shootings, and it should surprise no one that black and brown kids are the overwhelming victims. “Black students were subjected to more than 80% of the incidents of police violence accounted for in the survey, which analyzed more than 285 incidents over a decade. At least 60% of police assaults on students resulted in serious injury to the students, including broken bones, concussions and hospitalizations. The report also cited 24 cases of sexual assault on students and five student deaths as a result of police force in schools.” Pepper spray drones patrolling schools will be used to target black kids, and when they fail to stop the next 7 school shootings, people will say they really need to be armed with guns to really be able to stop the next school shooting.
[1] https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/cwc/assaults-and-violent-acts-i...
[2] https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressrel/press-releases/fbi-release...
[3] https://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/police-2018.htm
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/report-police-schools-ou...