Police Drones to be Equipped with Non-Lethal Weapons?

RT

March 15, 2012

Law enforcement near Houston, Texas will soon have a $300,000 robotic
surveillance drone in their arsenal, and if Montgomery County’s chief
deputy has his say, it’s only a matter of time before that aircraft will
be equipped to fire from above.

Discussing a new deal that will give the Montgomery County Sheriff’s
Office near Houston, Texas an unmanned, robotic spy drone, Chief Deputy
Randy McDaniel tells The Daily that he hasn’t rule out adding weaponry
to the lightweight aircraft.

The deputy says that while the department doesn’t have any plans at
the moment to acquire an army of drones equipped with weapons, he opines
that it could be advantageous for some endeavors.

On the topic of tacking a tear gas dispenser or a firearm that shoots
non-lethal rubber bullets, McDaniel says it could eventually be an idea
the department decides to go with.

“Those are things that law enforcement utilizes day
in and day out and in certain situations it might be advantageous to
have this type of system on the UAV,” McDaniel tells The Daily, referring to the unmanned aerial vehicle the agency recently acquired.

While Montgomery County will soon have one new set of eyes in its
skies thanks to acquiring a pricey ShadowHawk drone, it is hardly the
only small-time town that is getting such gizmos.

Surveillance drones are already used across the southern United
States and the US Department of Homeland Security has acknowledged that
it has had a fleet of drones for watching its borders for years.

The Federal Aviation Agency is also readying rules to guide the
crafts once they are more easily obtainable and the Electronic Frontier
Foundation has filed a lawsuit against the FAA’s parent entity, the
Department of Transportation, “Demanding data on certifications and
authorizations the agency has issued for the operation of unmanned
aircraft, also known as drones.”

“This is a tool that many law enforcement agencies never imagined they could have,” Steven Gitlin of AeroVironment Inc. told the Los Angeles Times last year.

His company currently ready to offer thousands of small drones for
sale to small-time agencies like McDaniel’s Montgomery County, but with
the ShadowHawk able to do so much — and maybe even more as the sheriff’s
deputy has in mind — others are worried that this more drones will be
the nail in the coffin of a collapse of the First Amendment already
started by the recent passing of the National Defense Authorization Act
and H.R. 347.

“The biggest fear with domestic drones is the prospect of
surveillance, the idea that Americans will simply be subject to
surveillance by drones outdoors whenever they happen to go outside,” Kirsten Bokenkamp of the Houston American Civil Liberties Union tells The Daily.

For now McDaniels says that the ShadowHawk drone is on par with what any law enforcement agency should have in its arsenal.

“You have news helicopters, military helicopters,
private planes that fly over your house daily that have the same
opportunity to see what you’re doing just as easily as this UAV,” he says. “We’ve never gone into surveillance for sake of surveillance unless there is criminal activity afoot,” he adds. “Just to see what you’re doing in your backyard pool — we don’t care.”

With McDaniels contemplating equipping these crafts with non-lethal
weaponry soon, the people of Montgomery Country — and eventually the
rest of America — could see their concerns only adding up.