POLICE DRONESLawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones
This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little time.
This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement have been moving. It’s past time concerned people take notice. Cities should not procure weaponized drones or robots, and multi-purpose drones and robots should be restricted from causing harm.
This month, two disturbing developments raised concerns that we might be on the verge of a larger trend of drone militarization. The first is that the CEO of Skydio, one of the most prolific vendors of police drones in the United States, signaled that the company has a more permissive attitude toward arming their drones in some contexts than many people expected. When asked on a podcast about the public perception that the company had restrictions around letting the military arm their drones, CEO Adam Bry said, “This is an area where I’ve gotten some things wrong. We said some things previously that led folks externally and internally to believe that, for example, we would prevent the military from putting weapons on our drones […] It’s very easy to sit back in a Silicon Valley office and think that we’re very smart, that we know the technology, and the idea of using it for X, Y, or Z thing seems evil or bad, so we’re going to write a policy or ban people from doing it. I think that’s ultimately misguided.”
Simply put: he is signaling that Skydio will not implement restrictions on their customers’ use of their devices.
Bry was specifically asked about the military arming drones but the question reveals a disturbing truth: whether police arm drones domestically is currently based more on the internal ethical commitments of companies than it is any laws created by elected officials. Combining Skydio’s huge amount of police contracts, including supplying entire fleets for Drone as First Responders (DFR) programs, and the tendency of military technologies like surveillance aerostats to get redeployed on U.S. soil, creates a real recipe for the emergence of armed police drones.
