Friday, 28 August 2015

Armed Drones coming soon


A North Dakota police lobbyist worked very hard to change some proposed state legislation, to give his state the dubious distinction of being the first in the U.S. to deploy armed drones. Drones, already used for surveillance, will now be allowed to be armed with less-than-lethal weapons like pepper spray, tasers, and rubber bullets. The latter two weapons can be deadly, despite their less-than-lethal classification.
“The bill’s stated intent was to require police to obtain a search warrant from a judge in order to use a drone to search for criminal evidence. In fact, the original draft of [Republican] Representative Rick Becker’s bill would have banned all weapons on police drones,” The Daily Beast reports.
However police union rep and lobbyist Bruce Burkett somehow hijacked the bill, and thus the provision allowing non-lethal weapons was added. Police using drones as weapons is no longer a conspiracy theory for the Infowars crowd.
Still, the new law, House Bill 1328, also does some good. Now, police need to have a warrant in order to deploy drones for surveillance, whereas before they did not. There was also no policy or laws stopping them from equipping drones with lethal weapons, which is relatively easy to do.
Yet, Rep. Becker has not given up. “I expect that I will probably, in 2017, be submitting a bill that will go back and once again prohibit the non-lethal weapons. But [the bill is] very good, it’s much better than what we had prior,” Becker said to WDAY News.


What do you think? Is this a good or bad thing to put in the police department’s toolkit? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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